Light Box Pictures

Artichoke

French Toast

Steak with Mushrooms and Brussel Sprouts

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Tomato Soup

We recently came up with a tomato soup recipe that’s really tasty.

This soup has a lot more nuance than tomato soup from a can; the flavor is a lot more acid and fruity than the canned stuff.

Roasted Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

• 2 lb Roma tomatoes, approximately 10
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1/4 cup cream
• salt and olive oil

Steps:

1. Clean and halve the tomatoes. Take care not to lose the “jelly” that surrounds the seeds in each tomato, it’s full of flavor.
   

   Don’t scrape out the jelly in the tomatoes!

2. Place the tomatoes in a heat resistant pan, layered about two tomatoes deep. Pour a small amount of olive oil and salt over the tomatoes.
3. Broil the tomatoes for 10-15 minutes, turning every 5 minutes. When the tomatoes are ready, they will be soft and their skins will be wrinkled.
4. Add just enough broth to cover the tomatoes (this is important, you don’t want the soup to be watery). Blend the soup until it’s smooth, then add the cream.
5. At this point you could serve the soup, but it still contains tomato seeds and skins. To make the texture a little more even, I prefer to strain the soup. Scraping the sides of the strainer helps to speed up the process.

Braised Ribs

Lately we’ve been eating baby back ribs more frequently than usual, owing to some unexpected deals at the grocery store. Since we don’t always have time to attend the barbecue for several hours, we usually braise our ribs. We start with a sugary rub, something like a 8:2:2:1 mixture of sugar, salt, black pepper, and red/cayenne pepper. After browning the meat on all sides in a lightly oiled pan, we add enough liquid (usually apple juice, or possibly beer) to partly cover the meat, and bring it to a boil.

These ribs (and the beer surrounding them) are almost ready to cover.

Once the liquid has warmed up, we simply reduce the heat to its lowest possible setting and wait 2.5-3 hours
(they don’t even need to be flipped during that time). At 1 hour, the ribs are tasty but not as tender as they can possibly be.

These beer braised ribs have now been cooking for about 40 minutes.

The braising liquid that remains in the pot can be reduced to make a pretty good barbecue sauce (which one can thicken with a little flour). Here are some pictures of the final meals:

Here are some ribs cooked for three hours. They tasted a lot better than I lit this picture.