Cook Share and Feast

When making a soup, I have seen a lot of additional ingredients being added like tomato paste, chopped tomatoes, heavy cream etc.  So I thought to make this very simple soup without any additional stuff.  I love the smell of roasted pepper.  So I thought to omit any tomato paste or tomato puree to make sure the soup definitely has that strong roasted pepper flavor.  Also I used just 2% milk instead of heavy cream.

Ingredients:            

• 2 Bell peppers (1 orange and 1 red)
• 2 teaspoons canola oil
• Few rosemary sprigs (fresh is better, but since I did not have it, I used the dried one)
• ½ cup chopped red onion
• 250 ml Vegetable stock
• ¼ cup 2% milk
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method

• Turn on oven to the broiler setting with temperature 450F.
• Put the peppers in the broiler pan and roast until the skin is blackened and blisters are formed

• Cool for a couple of minutes and peel off the skin (do not wash after washing since this will remove some of the flavorful oils from the pepper)
• Chop the flesh into small pieces.
• Add oil to a deep saucepan and when hot add onion and rosemary and cook on low flame for about 5 minutes.
• Remove the rosemary sprig and discard
• Now add the peppers and vegetable stock to the onion and bring to a boil
• Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes
• Let cool a bit and process the soup in a processor to a smooth puree.
• Add soup back to the saucepan and add milk
• Slowly heat for about 2 minutes
• Season with salt and pepper
• Serve hot (or chilled)
• Yields: 2 servings.