Tomato Soup
I made a lovely tomato soup this week with the last of my tomatoes. There are just a few mini tomatoes left in the fridge for a salad or two. We live mainly seasonally and so it is a sad time as I love tomatoes. However, we have quite a lot of preserved tomato products, including Chilli Jam and passata. We are not great tomato soup fans, but I enjoy a bowl on a cold day. I never buy the tins any more because of the hidden ingredients, including folic acid. Using up what we grown often means that we are getting meals which cost very little.
The soup is easy to make. I am not putting any specific amounts of ingredients as they might be too high and put you off making some soup. You can just adapt it to use what you have and add different veg like butternut squash or carrot if you want.. I made enough for two or three lunches this week. First of all I roasted my tomatoes with some peeled cloves of garlic in my air fryer. I roasted two small trays full using 12 cloves of garlic. If you don’t have a lot of garlic you could cook some onion and add it when you blitz the mixture. The majority of the skins were taken off the large tomatoes but you can leave them on. They do come off easily when they are roasted.
In my lounge I have a basil plant that is still growing and so I took a handful of leaves off that. They were finally chopped and put in a big jug to blitz with the tomatoes and garlic. I use a jug as it stops the mixture splashing every where when I use the hand blitzer. To this I added vegetable stock which measured about a third to half of the amount of tomato mixture I had after blitzing. I had to use a stock cube as I have run out of my own stock and have no room in the freezer to store more. Some white pepper and a pinch of salt were also added. The soup was then cooked on the stove for a few minutes before serving. I didn’t take the seeds out of my soup but some people like to strain it after adding the stock.
Do you know what? I was suprised at how nice it was. I will definitely make more next year, and maybe water bath it. It tasted even better because I made a cheese soda bread loaf in the air fryer to eat with it. I will post the recipe for that this week. The original recipe was posted by some one in my Facebook group but I just altered it slightly to use up what I already had.
Meat Bargains
This is the time of year when we have an abundance of food from what we have harvested over the summer and autumn. Things start getting a bit tighter after February before most crops are ready. One of the perks of November is that there are often joints in the supermarket at half price. We bought 5 yesterday and will be processing them into sausage, mince, chunks and steaks to give us plenty of meat until when they are on offer again in March, for Easter. Buying meat like this saves me a lot of money and allows us to eat meat more often.
I tend to go to Waitrose or Sainsburys as I find that the meat is better quality. Some of the other supermarkets add potato starch to bulk their joints out. They do cost a little bit more in the ‘posh’ supermarkets, but I still got good sized joints for around £6 each. I wish that I could shop from the butcher for meat as I do my chicken breasts, but my budget is too low for me not to take advantage of the half price joints on offer now. As you can see, this joint cost £5.60 when full price would have been £11. 19. We get lard for cooking from the joint as well.
Here are a couple of blogs about what I do with the meat.
Making meals from a half price pork joint
Making quality pork sausage meat at a quarter of the price
Have you been taking advantage of the bargains?
