Roasted Pepper Soup

Here goes cold soup #3.  The farmer's market at work has some nice looking red bell peppers last week (though I didn't realize until I got home that they were from Mexico. Peppers aren't quite growing yet in Georgia so I guess this is to be expected). I thought'd I' try out a simple Roasted Red Pepper Soup.

For this baby, you'll need: 5 red bell peppers, 1 large onion, 2-3 cloves of garlic, 2 hot peppers of your choosing, 1 can of crushed tomatoes, 4 cups of broth of your choosing, 1 ear of corn, 1 bunch of scallions, goat cheese, and other spicy seasoning to taste.

To get started, halve the peppers, removing the seeds. Then char them any way you choose, either on your gas grill top, in a broiler, or on an actual gas grill. It was hot as blazes on my patio when I was making this and the Mexico-Argentina soccer game was on so I opted to char them inside on the cooktop.

Once their skins are delightful shade of burnt and anyone sitting in your house near the kitchen asks if you're burning something, take them off the heat and place in a bowl to cool. 

Meanwhile, prep your other veggies. You'll need to mince the garlic and the hot peppers, and dice the onion.

By now the peppers should be cooled. Remove the charred skin. I find rinsing the peppers under cold water makes this quite easy. I also think you can place them in a paper bag, close the bag and they'll more or less fall out of their charred skins. Once the char is off, coarsely chop the peppers into big chunks.

Now, get to cooking. In a large stock pot over medium-high heat, add a bit of olive oil. Once it's hot, add the garlic, onion and hot peppers and cook for 3-5 minutes until the onion is translucent.

Then add the red peppers again cooking for about 5 minutes. Now is also a good time to add a pinch of salt and a bit of ground black pepper.

Next, add the crushed tomatoes. Side note here - if I were to make this again, I would probably add fewer tomatoes. I wanted the soup to taste like peppers, but it tasted more like peppers and tomatoes and almost like a sauce I would put on pasta. I think fewer tomatoes and more peppers would solve this problem. Also, maybe if I wasn't ridiculously hungover when I made this soup (thank you USA losing to Ghana on the previous day and the hot-mess sleepover that ensued at my house that night) maybe I'd be making more tasty soups and this is just an example of a soup made worse by a hangover. On the plus side, this is a fantastic action shot picture of tomatoes falling into the soup pot. I guess I can still take semi-decent pictures, even when hungover.

Moving on, add the chicken broth or other broth of your choosing. I added 4 cups.

Increase the heat to bring the soup to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, prep your garnishes. I used about 6 scallions, slicing about 2/3 of the scallion stalk (thanks Melissa for my scallion education! Girls who grew up in RI just don't know about these things like you Texans do). I cut the kernels off one ear of grilled corn leftover from said hot-mess sleepover. If you don't have any leftover corn, just grill it up when you're charring the peppers.

By now, your 15 minutes of simmer time should be up. Using your trusty stick blender or other blending device, blend the soup until smooth.  I gave it a taste and thought it need more kick so I also threw in a splash of cholula.

Let this simmer a bit longer, give it another taste and see if it needs anything. If you use the entire can of tomatoes, it's probably going to need some salt, so throw that in too.  Lastly, add the corn and scallions and cook for about 5 minutes.

Let the soup chill for a few hours or overnight, to serve, top with a little crumbled goat cheese and enjoy!

A few final thoughts on this soup - as soups involving hot peppers have a tendency to do, this one got hotter as the week went on. Which I thought was nice, but others may consider that a downfall. Also, I think I'm going to quit on the cold soups for a few weeks. I've confirmed that eating a lunch of a bowl of vegetable soup, an apple and piece of string cheese (my usual week day lunch) is not filling at all. I end up with a terrible case of the hungry-sleepies around 3:00, following by the hungry-grumpies around 4:30, which is no good for anyone. However, three people last week asked me if I lost weight, so I guess this cold soup diet is working. Regardless, this girl needs protein. Hot soups are back on order for at least the next few weeks until my garden makes enough cucumber so make a soup with them.