Spicy Yellow Tomato Soup

This is my favorite Tomato Soup recipe of all time. Count yourself lucky if you've ever had some; few have ever separated me from a whole pint. It's delicious!

In the late 1980s there was a PBS cooking series called Cooking from Quilt Country, about Amish and Mennonite life and food, marketed with a book by Marcia Adams. I found and changed the Homemade Tomato Soup recipe and wrote it down. I make it almost every year, usually with red tomatoes, but I found some organic yellow tomatoes at a Meet the Farmer Dinner at the Summerhouse Grill in Montrose, PA while I was on the road and had to buy 20 lbs from the proprietors of the 4 Seasons Farm Market, Gerald and Tina. Thanks for all your hard work to make the world more beautiful, people!

The recipe makes 12 pints of a rich, versatile concentrate. It can be made with water, milk, and even canned Cream of Mushroom Soup.

1 peck (17 lbs.) of tomatoes (juicier is better; romas make a much smaller batch)
2 medium onions
2 Hungarian wax peppers (the hot, long, light green ones)
2 large bunches celery
1 large bunch parsley
1/4 c. salt
1 c. brown sugar
1 c. all-purpose flour
1 t. ground allspice
1 t. ground cinnamon
1 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. white pepper (if tomatoes are red, black is fine)
1/2 c. butter (1 stick)

Cooking!
Core tomatoes, chop coarsely. Chop onions, peppers, celery, and parsley coarsely.
Divide all the vegetables and the salt equally into two very large, deep kettles. Cover, bring to a boil, then simmer over over medium low heat for an hour, stirring frequently, until all veggies are tender. Put mixture through a sieve or food mill, and transfer to a large kettle.

Combine sugar, flour, and spices. Add gradually to hot puree with a whisk. Add butter, whisk smooth. Bring to a boil, then simmer over medium low heat for 3 minutes.

Canning!
Prepare 12 pint jars and lids. Pour soup into jars, leaving 1/2 inch head space. Wipe jar rims, seal with lids, immerse in hot water bath and process for 15 minutes from the time pot comes to a rolling boil.

Eating!
Add 1-1/2 cups water or milk to a pint of soup, heat, serve, eat. You can also make this with canned Cream of Mushroom soup by adding one can Cream of Mushroom soup with one soup can of water to a pint of tomato soup. Heat, serve, eat!

Francis Henry Turner's Blueberry Conserve

This week's been full of cooking my favorite summer recipes, dreaming up new recipes, and improving old favorites. I love to cook, but only in spurts, so I make big batches and freeze or can when A) I'm in the mood; B) I'm home long enough to enjoy it; 3) the necessary ingredients are so fresh that they leap off the shelf at the market and wrestle me to the ground; Q) I need the practice to keep my skills up; Y) I feel like improvising and there's nobody around to play with; or Z) I need to make room in the freezer. 
This recipe utilizes A-Z. Blueberries were looking particularly fetching (and organic and cheap!) last week, so I bought some to freeze. When I got them home I realized I already had plenty of frozen blueberries, so I thought I should figure out a way to use them. Out with the old, in with the new. Rotate the stock, etc. My dilemma was to figure out a way to use all those blueberries so that I didn't just sit down and eat a whole cobbler, or pie, or too much sugar. Then. It. Hit. Me: the first conserve I ever ate. I've dreamt about that conserve and have never had anything like it since. 
Frank Turner loved to cook. He had about three hundred cook books, and every room in his house had built-in book shelves. He loved to can things. He sang tenor in the choir and acted in the Ithaca Players production of The Nutcracker every year for a million years. When I first met him, he invited me to lunch and served blueberry conserve. I never forgot it. 
Digression: Frank was FUN. One night, a few of us were sprawled around the back parlor watching the movie Halloween. During a break in the action, Frank slipped out of his chair and quietly slipped back with two of the longest carving knives in the house. I saw him, but no one else did, and he had this impish look (his is the picture in the dictionary next to the word "imp"). He sat down in his wing chair and I waited. About ten minutes later, at a very tense point in the movies, I was startled by the sound of knives being sharpened. It took a few seconds for everyone else to notice that the noise was actually in the room WITH US, and the look on Frank's calmly murderous face as he sat in that chair drawing those knives expertly across one another with the most perfect motion, and the people screaming by the glow of the TV light is something else I'll never forget. I will also never forget the look of pure glee and the laughter and yelling that followed. 


Back to the conserve. Once it snuck back into my brain, I couldn't get it out. 


Enter self doubt: Could I do it? I haven't canned anything in a couple of years, and I've never made a conserve before. What if I cook it too long? What if I don't cook it long enough? Someone recently pointed out that it's always the same things that trip us up, or send us to the places where we entertain our self-defeating behaviors. We never look at them as the huge clues they are to finding the things we need to work on. We just get anxious. "God, why is it always the same issue? Couldn't we have a little variety?!"  


Enter confidence: I dutifully moved all the equipment and jars with me in the last move, without a second thought. So, If it cooks too long, heat it up and use it as a glaze for meat. If it doesn't cook long enough, it's sauce for ice cream. Time for a list of ingredients: Blueberries, lemons, sugar, raisins, walnuts, cinnamon (I think).
Then I went surfing, to hunt up a recipe that might be adaptable. Got one on the first try on Cooks.com. I tweaked it a little bit and here it is. When I tasted it I was immediately transported to Frank's dining room with the navy blue and white flocked Japanese wallpaper and his three cats. 


1/2 c. water
4 c.    fresh or frozen blueberries
4 c.    sugar
1/2 c. raisins or currants
1        lemon, seeded and cut into paper-thin slices
1/2 c. coarsely broken walnuts
1/2 t.  ground cinnamon


Combine water and blueberries. Cook over low heat until berries are tender. Crush some, but not all. Add remaining ingredients. Cook while stirring until jam is thick. I use the frozen plate test: spoon a little bit of conserve onto a frozen plate, and draw your finger through it. If the two lines don't reconnect, you're ready to can it. Process  the jars for fifteen minutes (from the time the water returns to a boil), and you're done. Makes about 6 half pints. 
If you've never canned anything before, here's a website that can help you figure it out:  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/fresh-strawberry-jam-recipe/index.html

Incredibly Amazing Bran Muffins

These are my favorite muffins. You can refrigerate the batter for a month, which eliminates multiple messes, and makes you look even more magnificent to your people. If you have muffins left over when company leaves, they freeze like a dream. 

Makes 3-4 dozen

3-1/2 c.  all-purpose flour

1 c.        whole wheat flour

1/2 c.     flax meal

5 t.         baking soda
1 t.         salt

2 t.         allspice

1 t.         cinnamon

1            15 ounce box bran flakes w/ raisins

1-1/2 c.  sugar

1-1/2 c.  Splenda

4            eggs

1 c.        canola oil

1 qt.       buttermilk (or buttermilk powder + water, see below)

3 t.         vanilla

Combine the first seven ingredients in the largest bowl you have. Add the bran flakes, sugar, Splenda and mix. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs (by hand is fine). Add oil, buttermilk*, vanilla and blend. Pour wet stuff over dry stuff and mix well.

*If you use powdered buttermilk, add the powder to the dry ingredients, and the water with the wet stuff. 

To bake, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake in paper muffin cups (about 3/4 full) for 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

To store the batter, put it in a container with a tight lid. When you feel the need for magical deliciousness, don't stir the batter, just scoop it out  and drop it into muffin cups. 

I sometimes add 3/4 c. walnuts, or sliced almonds (to surprise myself).
Write the date on the container the day you make them, but don't expect the batter to last a month, even though it can. You'll be taking muffins everywhere...
Enjoy!

Here's one man's idea of how to support your local sacred musician. Thanks to Frank Goodwin, The Boston Globe, and Alex Beam. Enjoy!

VOICES

One top cookie

Frank Goodwin sells macaroons to assist Episcopal choir schools

By Alex Beam

Globe Staff / January 29, 2010
In March , 2008, The New York Times reported on a “crisis’’ at Manhattan’s Century Association, a posh membership club. The venerable Century had lost its 60-year supplier of macaroons, which it serves to all guests at the end of both lunch and dinner. The search for the perfect macaroon had dragged on for six months and threatened to last forever.

That quest eventually led to a ramshackle, three-story building at the corner of Everett and Lamson streets in East Boston, where a remarkable 75-year-old man named Frank Goodwin makes his St. Emilion macaroons. These are not the squishy coconut macaroons favored by some bakeries. They are silver-dollar-size, honey almond macaroons, made according to a recipe popularized by Ursuline sisters in France, later adopted by Melrose caterer Stanley Flagg, and passed on to Goodwin.

It would be interesting enough that a retired engineer, dockmaster, Coast Guard swabbie, and lobsterman - that’s the same person - hand-makes macaroons, alone, laboring in front of a creaky Edison oven while listening to Howie Carr on the radio. “He seems like an irreverent slob,’’ says Goodwin, who clearly has a soft spot for irreverent slobs.

Goodwin is quite a character, in the good sense. He tosses off Burma Shave doggerel - e.g., “Hardly a man is now alive/ Who passed on a hill at 75’’ - and manages to weave his former neighbor at Commercial Wharf, the publisher Bernie Goldhirsh, and serial killer Lenny “The Quahog’’ Paradiso into adjacent sentences. Hint: They both liked macaroons.

Goodwin doesn’t drive, and hand-delivers his treats to Locke-Ober, the Somerset Club, the Harvard Club, and elsewhere by riding the subway or cadging a ride from some old salt-water pals. He carries a cellphone but has to phone a friend to ascertain the number. His website, www.mymacaroons.com, is awful, but he has lost track of the webmaster. “I think he’s gone out of business,’’ Goodwin moans. “I really don’t get the Internet.’’

Here is the rub. Goodwin lives like an anchorite in a shared home on Bayswater Street, 2,000 feet northeast of Logan runway 22 left. Much of his personal income, and all of the proceeds from the macaroon business, go to charity. And not just any charity. Goodwin is a firm believer in Anglican musical education, and usually pays for two students to attend the St. Thomas Choir School on Manhattan’s West Side. He also donates to All Saints Parish in Ashmont, which has a famous boys’ choir, and to the Boston City Singers.

How did Melrose-born Frank Goodwin, raised a Roman Catholic and publicly educated, become an angel for Episcopal choir schools? While serving at New Jersey’s Fort Dix in 1957, Goodwin and a few Army buddies asked a New York cab driver to ferry them to a Catholic church on Easter Sunday. By mistake, the cabbie dumped them at St. Mary of the Virgin on West 46th Street. An Episcopalian was born. “I liked the smells, the bells, the music,’’ Goodwin remembers. “And the rector had a wife, which was pretty interesting.’’

Goodwin is not musical himself, although he is convinced that music is the ideal handmaiden for elementary education. He is not obsessively religious. “I go to All Saints a few times a year, and I venture down to St. Thomas’s now and then,’’ he says. He calls Trinity Church in Copley Square “the quintessential expression of Western Christianity,’’ but he’s not a regular there, either. “I am what I am,’’ he told me in the course of several conversations. “I hate to be defined.’’

When we met this week, he lit a couple of gas jets to warm up his Everett Street bakery, and put on a DVD of Simon Chase, then an eighth-grader from Dorchester, playing Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor at the St. Thomas’s graduation four years ago. Goodwin helped pay for Simon and two of his brothers to attend St. Thomas’s. “He also buys a Swiss Army wristwatch for every boy,’’ Simon’s mother told me, “because he noticed that they don’t all get prizes at graduation.’’

“This is as good as it gets,’’ Goodwin mumbled as we watched Chase finish the four-minute piece, to thunderous applause. Yes, I think it is.

The St. Emilion macaroons passed the Globe’s taste test: “Incredible!’’ said my colleague Bella English; “Growrff!’’ said Charlie Pierce. Order them from Woodstock, Vt.-based www.gillinghams.com, and help make the world a more euphonic place.

Alex Beam’s e-dress is beam@globe.com. 

Chai Recipe

I make my own chai at home, and serve it to anyone who wanders by. So many people have asked for the recipe it seems like a good idea to share it. Enjoy!

10 slices fresh ginger root
1 whole nutmeg
12 whole cloves
5-7 cinnamon sticks (3-4 inches long)
12 black peppercorns (more or less to taste)
12 cardamom pods
1 star anise
4-6 teaspoon black tea (with or w/o caffeine, 6 or so bags are okay, too)

Optional: Add 1 teaspoon vanilla extract as chai cools for honey vanilla chai.

Crush nutmeg cloves and cinnamon sticks in a mortar and pestle until about a 1/5th of their size. Place everything except tea into a saucepan with 3 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer on medium/low heat until liquid is reduced to one or 1½ quarts. Enjoy the delicious smell wafting through your home as the chai is cooking. Turn off flame and add tea. Steep 5-10 minutes. Strain and pour into jar with a tight-fitting lid (I use a ½ gallon canning jar), so you can shake before you pour a cup. Chai may cloud up; this is normal.
To prepare, add milk or soy milk, and local honey.
Let your taste buds decide throughout the process. I use less ginger and an extra star anise some days; other days I use more pepper, cloves and cinnamon.
10 minutes to prepare.
An hour or so to cook.

Enjoy.