Tomato soup, twice

This would be my last MoFo post - didn't make it to 15 recipes this time, but at least I dared to try:) This time I've got two tomato soup recipes, one classic and one mine: quick and spicy.

Tomato soup is omnipresent in polish houses: this would be the most popular soup too. Everybody makes it and there are various kinds that people swear to be the only original ones: the basic questions is, do you use pasta or rice? Then: sweet or salty? white (=with sour cream) or not? Parsley on top? 

This is my family recipe, with rice, not sweet (I never really understood how people can add sugar to a soup with a carrot cooked in broth in it!) and without sour cream, with parsley on top. Enjoy!

Classic Tomato soup for 6 people

veggie broth, 2 l

2 medium carrots

a quarter celeriac root

 one parsley root (save the leaves)

 one medium leek

3-4 allspice berries

1-2 bay leaf

5-6 big ripe tomatoes

a big handful of rice

salt

Boil the broth and cook whole carrots, celeriac, parsley and chopped leek in it with allspice and bay leaf. In a separate pan cook peeled tomatoes until they fall apart and blend. Take out of broth all the veggies except a carrot and discard (=eat apart if you like it). Mix in the tomato puree and boil again; when boiling add rice and salt to taste. The soup is ready when the rice is cooked.

Now my fast food version. I especially enjoy making it at eleven PM when you're not supposed to eat anything, but you're hungry anyway and maybe a little cold too. Great to warm up in a snowy day (do you have snow yet? Too much in here)

1 cup tomato puree

1 cup veggie broth

2 spoons olive oil

1 teaspoon powdered garlic

1 teaspoon powdered sweet chili

1 handful of tiny, quick-cooking pasta

salt and pepper to taste (I use cayenne pepper for better kick)

Boil the broth, add tomato puree and olive oil and boil for 5 minutes. Add spices to taste and pasta; the soup is ready when pasta's ready. Simple and so good.

I'm really glad I started this blog again and that I participated in MoFo. I promise to not disappear next month and show you some delicious Christmas recipes.

Who wants some beer cookies?

I found this recipe in my mother's cooking notebook: she never made those but recalls it from her parent's house, which means it comes from PRL (People's Republic of Poland) times = communist times. Some ingredients, also the obvious ones (eggs, butter, sugar) were hard to find so people were preparing dishes from few, sometimes bizarre, ingredients, which helps to veganize them. If a cake recipe calls for only one egg and soda instead of milk it's much easier to adapt it than a classic pie made out of 12 egg yolks, discard the whites. Just like this one: only beer, flour and margarine. And some marmalade.

Beer cookies

2 cups flour
100 g cold shortening (of very firm margarine)
half cup of your favorite beer

a jar of marmalade of your choice. Firm!

The recipe tells to shred the shortening, which is something I find literally impossible, so I cut it in small cubes instead. Then, add the flour and make crumbles. Finally, pour your beer, mix with your hand and knead to form a ball of dough. Let it rest in the fridge for 1,5 do 2 hours.

Divide the dough in half and roll into rectangular shape. Begin to cut it in squares (or rectangles, if impossible). Then pour about 1 teaspoon of marmalade in the middle of each square and fold it in half to create a triangle but DO NOT PRESS THE EDGES TO SEAL IT. The should be open and the marmalade visible after baking. If, like me, you cut out some squares that are rather rectangles, fold them to create squares - the will look like little books when done.

Repeat with the rest of your dough. Bake for 25-30 minutes - until golden - in 175C/300F. There is a big  - huge, actually - possibility that your marmalade will start to leak out and burn in the baking sheet, so don't place the cookies too near each other to prevent them in stick to bitter, caramelized jam. Cool down completely before serving.

These are delicious, but remember that the pastry is completely sugarless = not sweet at all. If you have kids or a sweet tooth you might consider sprinkling them with sugar before baking. I also thing that this recipe makes a great tart crust.

My favorite salad

This recipe is a recreation of a salad I used to have frequently in a place that we call Milk Bar in Poland. These are little bars that you could call a socialist response to fast food: very cheap (they have subventions from the city and a meal can cost even 10 times less than in a regular bar or cheap restaurant), fast and traditional dishes such as pierogi (which is the reason why they are still popular, especially among students: everybody loves pierogi), crepes, pancakes, dumplings, traditional soups and few meat dishes - Milk Bars were for a long time the only place where vegetarians could eat. As the name says, there's an emphasis on dairy-based dishes so I don't go there often now. This salad was my favorite and a part of daily combo: barszcz ukraiński, spinach crepes (with garlic sauce- yess) and salad, all for 6 zł (1,6 euro, 2,2 dollar); that is how much you would pay for one hamburger in a fast food. In addition for being really simple to make at home it has a magic power to amaze your guests; and fill them too!

2 cups cooked rice (originally white rice but it's really good with brown)
1 cup cooked brown lentils
1 small raw onion
a handful of fresh parsley leaves
half small red bell pepper, raw or pickled
some salt and pepper, olive oil

Chop the onion and the parsley leaves. Cut the pepper in short, slim stripes and mix with onion, parsley, rice and lentils. Season with salt and pepper and pour some olive oil on the top, but not too much; it's supposed to mix while eating.

As I mentioned before I'm having trouble with posting photos so I was looking for an old photo from my polish blog, but I only found one bad and small that I took with my old phone and posted years ago; so, in case that you don't know how a rice-lentil salad looks like, here's a peak:

This one has no parsley, I believe:)