Tomato Soup

I have been struggling to continue my project to find natural food colouring as in this post. I was probably focused to much in cakes, while food colouring is actually can be used in many type of food, like soups.

Last night was the second time I cooked tomato soup. I found the simplest and easiest recipe here and got idea of how to make the tomato soup looks naturally red. Unfortunately I forgot from which site was the idea came from. I will re-post again if I could find it.
Update: I found the site again! Here it is, give it a visit: homecooksrecipe.com

Wouldn't it wonderful if you can have good RED tomato soup? If we use canned tomato paste or sauce, you might will get that hot red colour. However, I want to cook as close as natural food, and canned tomato could probably has artificial food colouring, right?

So, here is the key; Beet Root. Just a slice of beet root, and everything is good. I used about the size of ice cream's scoop or maybe two tablespoon of beet.

I did used one tablespoon of tomato paste to follow the original recipe. One tablespoon did not really change the colour to red. Beet root does. You can use any tomato soup recipe and put a slice beet root to it make natural red.

By the way, I looooove this soup because it means I could continue the natural colouring project. Beet root officially a natural food colouring! I'll update the natural colouring post right now.

So, here is the recipe that I made.

Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
1kg ripe tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 small carrot
1 celery stick
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tablespoon of tomato purée
a slice of beet root
a good pinch of sugar
2 bay leaves
some ground black pepper (I use black and white pepper)
1.2 litres hot stock (I just made it from water and a piece of chicken :p)

Directions:
- Dice all of the vegetables including the onion.
- Heat up oil on the pan.
- Throw in the diced onion, carrot and celery stick. Stir until soften.
- Put in the tomato purée, stir well.
- Get the diced tomatoes in the pan, stir again.
- Season it with salt, sugar, black pepper and bay leaves.
- Let it cook for a while until the tomatoes a bit shrink.
- Pour in the stock, but save a bit to help blend the beet root in blender.
- Put the lid on and stir occasionally until they are soft and juicy.
- Take the lid off and fish out the bay leaves.
- I waited a little bit more to let the vegetables a bit cooler.
- Meanwhile, blend the beet root and a bit of stock until smooth.
- Pour in cooked tomato into blended beet root and blend altogether until smooth.
- Put it back to the pan and you can taste it and add more seasoning if necessary.

My New-Old Kitchen

Hi there,
sorry for loooooong un-posting this blog. In my Facebook I did mention that my little family and I just moved to our new rental home. I hope it could be a good excuse, ha ha! Okay, that's just one part of the excuses, other part is just lazy, and the other part is just there are other things I prefer to do rather than blogging. Sorry.

We just moved to this very old house, compare to the previous one. But to compare to the previous one again, I love this one better. Why? because we don't live under the landlord's floor anymore, haha! I mean, even though our landlord was nice, freedom is nicer :p

Alhamdulillah we now live in stand alone house with cheaper weekly rent payment. Now, as the first and third reasons I mentioned above, I am quite occupied with setting up our home. This is very old house, which probably fit into retro category. I'm not sure what year is this house was built. I like vintage and retro thing in designs and interior, as long as it's not too overwhelmed. I'm still trying to work things up with the littlest budget.

Most of the rooms are simple and plain, although I'm not so crazy about the doors' panels. Unfortunately, kitchen is the most problem for my eye sight. The cabinets' doors, oh! They might look a bit better in photos, but for me they're too far from pretty (sorry, House!). The material looks cheap (sorry again). I really don't mean to whine, but if I can do something better to fix this, I really would.

I've been thinking of some choices to make. I was thinking about taking off some of the cabinets' doors or attaching the doors with contact paper or wall paper or even fabric. Unfortunately, my husband was not really into these ideas. So, now I'm still thinking. Anyone has any idea? Do help me if you do. Otherwise, I should just live with it.

Look at the pictures, I think it's from the 70s, what do you think? 60s maybe?

I haven't really set up the kitchen actually. I just put everything inside the cabinet to avoid messy look from the outside.

But look at the inside.

Still UN-organized.

Well, at least I still got this $1 2nd metal bookshelf I bought from Trademe.

Trademe.co.nz is an auction website in NZ. Anyone can sell and buy anything with auction system here. I looove Trademe, I found lots of things here, either it's new or 2nd stuffs. We found this house also from Trademe. Car, bike, dining table, sewing machine, and more, and more ^^!

Anyway, still thinking about my kitchen and other rooms. So, sorry for my absence.
I will post a recipe after this one up.

Salaam!