Tomato soup

I went out to eat recently, and had a really good soup, which was a simple tomato soup. Normally tomato soup has a vegetable or chicken base, but the soup I had was a dashi base similar to the one I made in a earlier recipe. I want to share a version I've come up with after eating that soup, hope you enjoy it.

You Will Need

• 2L Dashi (or chicken/vegetable stock)
  1lb Mirepoix (2:1:1 ratio of onion, celery, carrot. so 8 oz onion, 4 oz celery and carrot.)
• 1 can tomato paste
• 2 Tablespoon Olive oil
• 2 tablespoon salt
• 1/2 cup shoyu
• pepper (I used about 2 turns of my pepper mill, more or less is up to you!)
• Parsley (if you are going to serve this to family or friends it would make a nice garnish!)

 Instructions

1. Add your olive oil to the pan, and heat the pan up.

2. Sweat the vegetables and stir to help keep the vegetables from burning (onions should turn translucent not brown or black)




3. Once the vegetables have been  sweated, add the can of tomato paste to the vegetables, and cook together until the tomato paste has a sweet aroma.








4. If the tomato paste is burning, and it hasn't achieved a sweet aroma, you can add some of the dashi, or what ever stock you are using to help keep it from drying out.






5. Once the tomato paste has a sweet aroma, slowly add your stock while stirring.






6. Bring the soup to a boil, and lower to a simmer.

7. Let simmer for about 10 minutes, while you add salt, shoyu, and pepper. Be sure to check the taste while you are adding these seasonings, you can put more or less of all of them to your liking.


8. Dish out, and garnish (I forgot to buy parsley so I didn't)

9. Either serve hot, or chill and serve cold, (its delicious both ways!)

Tsunami 2011

Japan had a 8.8 earthquake at around 7:30 pm Hawaii time, and a tsunami is expected in Hawaii at around 3:00 am tonight. Well I live in Hawaii and while I don't live in the low lying coastal areas, I am very worried for the people who do. Well if you live anywhere that was or will be affected, I hope for your safety. Off to go fill buckets with water and do other last minute preparation, only 4 hours till impact.

Onion, peeling and cutting

In culinary school they teach you "the proper way" to do things. For everyday use their way is usually impractical, because it wastes a lot and takes much more time to do. If you are tired and short on money, do you really want to take more time to do something, and also waste a lot of what you are using? Not really. But for onions, I have found that the way they teach you in school is probably the best, fastest, and you can choose to not waste the "imperfect" cuts.

I hope this helps!

Cutting celery into small dice

Being in the culinary industry, and also having taken culinary classes, there is a certain way that school, and some restaurants will teach you to cut small dice celery. It makes the cuts perfect, but there is a lot of wasteful cuts, so I will also show you the way I cut celery at home and for employee meals. If you want to impress your family, friends or loved ones, I would highly recommend cutting it in the culinary school fashion.

Thanks for watching!

Peeling carrots

If you ever have peeled vegetables and made a big mess, or wondered how you can speed up the process then there are two tips that I have for you!

If you couldn't hear me well or don't want to watch the video, the two simple things you can do to make peeling vegetables an easy and quick task are to, keep your vegetable on the cutting board, while you are peeling, which keeps the peelings from flying everywhere. Also most people have seen a peeler, and noticed two blades, but only peel on the down stroke. If you keep the peeler on the vegetable and peel going both ways, you effectively double the speed at which you are peeling! The last thing I have to say about peeling vegetables that I find helps a lot, is to do half at a time, do the top or bottom first and then turn it around, it keeps your fingers safer and lets you speed up peeling.

Sorry for the lack of posts, I'm busy with work, getting ready for my boss's vacation and all, but the good news is I took the time to get material ready for a bunch of new posts. So be ready for an awesome soup recipe coming soon!