Cold nights and chilly days call for a favorite comfort food: soup. Since so many of us don’t get enough fluids on an average day (drink that water!) soup is an easy way to up the liquid intake while warming the stomach. It’s also one of the easiest methods of crafting a meal that lasts for several days – for dinner or lunch depending on how you want to do it.
At the end of a summer season, we are often left with oodles of green tomatoes that simply wouldn’t make it to red without being zapped by a hard frost, so Andy brought in the whole load and let them ripen for a few days. Most of these turned redder than I thought they would, but for this soup I like the green ones too. They added brightness and a tart accent that made this one a little different. To make the soup, I brought about six cups of water to a boil and reconstituted a dried guajillo chili pepper, which added the heat and earthy flavor to the base. For the tomatoes, I roasted them all with a sliced onion at 425 degrees for about 20 – 30 minutes, until they were just browned and splitting open.
Adding the vegetables to the simmering water, I removed the pepper and used an immersion blender to puree it all into a consistency I liked (a few chunks are nice in a soup). A healthy sprinkling of sea salt and freshly-ground pepper was thrown in, along with some marjoram and oregano, and that was it.
I fried up some corn tortillas (so much better than a bag of Tostitos) and sprinkled them with salt, then dropped a heaping dollop of sour cream into my bowl, christened it with some chopped cilantro, and called it dinner.
