You Say Tomato, I Say Yum!

With the colder weather settling in, we've been making a variety of soups lately.  Since we had some heirloom tomatoes from the share, we decided to make a Fall version of our summer tomato soup and grilled cheese picnic.

We started by sweating out some onions and garlic in butter.  We also threw in a sprig of thyme and a bay leaf.  You can just throw the whole sprig in there.  The herbs will fall off the stem as it cooks, and then you can just pull out stem.

While the garlic and onions were cooking down, I quartered the tomatoes.  It doesn't matter how you cut them, though the smaller you the cut them, the faster they'll cook down.  

We added them to the pot, along with about half a can of San Marzano tomatoes, and some tomato paste.  As the fresh tomatoes start to cook down and soften, you can squish them with your spoon or potato masher.

Be sure to season your soup with salt and pepper.  We also added in some dried parsley and Italian seasoning since we didn't have any other fresh herbs on hand.  Let the flavors cook together for at least 10 minutes.  Then we just used our immersion blender to puree the soup and give us a nice, smooth consistency.

Once it was pureed, we let it simmer on the stove while we assembled our grilled cheeses.  We used a combination of manchego and gouda, along with a few slices of soppressata.  To help melt the cheese, cover your pan with a lid to create some steam.

It's a quick and delicious meal for those cool Fall nights.

And don't forget the best part...dunking your grilled cheese in the tomato soup!

Hey, Ho! Chorizo!

I know we've been a little quiet over here at 2 Hungry Hearts, but we've been trying to unpack and dig ourselves out from underneath all these moving boxes.  We managed to tackle the kitchen first, and make enough space so that we could start cooking again.  Fortunately the timing worked out pretty well since we're in between CSA share seasons, and have another couple weeks before the Fall CSA starts up.

To christen our new kitchen, we decided to whip up a quick and easy frittata.  Frittatas are a great way to clean out the fridge and use up those little bits of veggies that you have left in your fridge.  We went with a Spanish-inspired frittata, filling ours with chorizo, kale and manchego cheese.  To compliment the frittata, we made some purple potato homefries and a simple salad.

We got the potatoes going first, dicing them up along with some onions and garlic.  You can throw them all in the pan together and let them cook up.  It will take a little while for the potatoes to get crisp on the outside, so you'll want to start these first.  We cooked ours in a little olive oil, and added some salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and some smoked paprika, which paired quite nicely with the chorizo.

So while your potatoes are cooking, you can get to work on the frittata.  It's best to use a pan that you can also stick in the oven.  We started by browning up our chorizo.

Once that was cooked, we removed the meat from the pan, poured out some of the excess grease, and then tossed in our kale.

While the kale was sauteing, I whipped up about 7 eggs and grated in some manchego cheese.  As soon as the kale was wilted, we added the chorizo back in, and added the egg mixture.  Once the eggs have set in the bottom of the pan, you'll want to pop the whole pan into the oven.  The twist here was that we added some sliced tomatoes on top and let them roast in the oven, along with some extra cheese!

After about 8 minutes, our frittata was cooked through, and we were ready to eat!

The smokiness of the chorizo was balanced out nicely by the acidity of the roasted tomato.  It was a quick and easy meal that would also make an excellent brunch item.