Homemade tomato soup is good, but roasted tomato soup is even better. With the abundance of tomatoes right now in the markets, this makes great use of all those tomatoes and may be the best tomato soup you will ever have.
This method calls for roasting the tomatoes, along with some whole garlic, before making the soup. Roasting the tomatoes concentrates their flavor and adds a depth to the soup that you would not have otherwise.
I used beautiful San Marzano tomatoes for this soup because a vendor at my farmer's market had them. Use whatever nice, ripe tomatoes you have. Any Roma or plum tomato is a good choice.
The parmesan crisps, sometimes called fricos, are a favorite in our household and we use them to accompany salads sometimes (or a glass of Prosecco). These lacy wafers make the absolute perfect flavor compliment to this soup. They are surprisingly easy to make – they only have one ingredient – and fast, too.
Even before cucumbers are in season, one of the first things I think of making with them is gazpacho. So when they do come in season—and right now my garden is producing some of the best cucumbers—it's only natural that I make one of my favorite cold raw soups. Gazpacho is very popular this summer and it seems to be on many restaurant menus in New York. So why not make your own?
A friend of mine from NYC called the other day to ask which pie bakery I preferred. He had guests from Norway stopping by that afternoon for coffee and wanted to offer them a slice of “American pie”.
Summer time means grilling time. And I have been doing a lot of it lately.
People in Portland, Oregon have salmon on the brain. It is a centuries old, intense love-affair – one that I can easily identify with having grown up in the Bronx where lox was one of the five basic food groups along with pickled herring, pastrami, rye bread and shmalts {or schmaltz} - chicken fat. Everyone from the state’s original people – the Umatilla, Warm Springs, Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes, to the chic tattooed urban dwellers, is salmon obsessed.
