Roasted Red Pepper and Fontina Grilled Cheese and Tomato-Lentil Soup.

Roasted Red Pepper and Fontina Grilled Cheese and Tomato-Lentil Soup.

A portion of the soup is left over from the Yom Kippur dinner we shared with my folks this weekend. The lentils add a warm, slightly nutty flavor to my basic vegetable soup, and had a texture similar to butternut squash bisque. For dinner tonight, we’re using the lentil soup but adding some tomatoes, to make it more consistent with the tomato soup/grilled cheese comfort food of the Husband’s childhood.

Roasted Red Pepper and Fontina Grilled Cheese

Ingredients

4 slices country bread

2 to 4 slices tomatoes, marinated in olive oil, 2T fresh basil, 2T fresh oregano, and salt and pepper for 30 minutes

Fontina cheese

Roasted red pepper, one whole, sliced in half (Easiest way to roast a red pepper is in the toaster oven. If you don’t have one, or if you are unfortunate and like us, have a nice one that no longer works, the second easiest way is on the grill, if you have a gas grill. Otherwise, stick it in a hot oven. Once the pepper is roasted, seal it in a zip-lock bag until it cools, about 20 minutes. Remove it from the bag and peel the skin. The skin will come off easily at this point. Slice it in half, clean out the seeds, and you’re all set.)

Wilted leaf spinach, enough to cover slice of bread

Dried crushed red pepper flakes

Optional: pancetta, prosciutto, thinly sliced leftover roast beef

Procedure

Marinate tomatoes. Preheat oven to 400°F. Lightly toast bread in pan on one side. Lightly butter untoasted side of each bread slice. Place 2 bread slices, buttered side down, on work surface. Top each with 2 meat slices, if using, then spinach leaves, then red pepper slices, then 4 cheese slices. Sprinkle with salt and crushed red pepper. Top with remaining 2 bread slices, buttered side up. Heat olive oil in heavy large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add sandwiches to skillet and cook until golden on bottom, about 4 minutes. Turn sandwiches over; transfer skillet to oven and bake until golden and cheese melts, about 5 minutes. Remove from oven. Carefully lift off top bread slices from sandwiches and insert tomato slices into each, then cover with bread tops and serve.

Tomato-Lentil Soup

Ingredients

Make Lentil Soup, see recipe below. (If making Tomato-Lentil soup on the first go, add additional tomatoes when adding the first can, then add the cream towards the end of the cooking process.)

2 14 oz cans diced tomatoes

2T cream

Fresh basil, for garnish

Procedure

To turn the leftover lentil soup into tomato-lentil soup, we reheated the leftovers in a pot and added another can of diced tomatoes. We also added cream and used the immersion blender to blend until almost smooth. Serve in warmed bowls with sliced basil on top.

Vegetable Lentil Soup

Ingredients

1 onion, cut into rough ¼” pieces (or whatever size you prefer for soup)

3 or 4 carrots, cut

3 or 4 celery stalks, cut

The leafy inside part of the celery bunch, chopped

1 leek, chopped (we used the lower half of the leek)

1 garlic clove, chopped into very small pieces

2 quarts vegetable broth, and maybe more for thinning as the soup cooks

2 cups red lentils (or lentils of your choosing)

1 14oz can diced tomatoes

Fresh herbs (we used parsley, basil, oregano, tarragon)

Salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

Sautee onion, carrot, celery, celery leaves, and leeks in olive oil until crisp-tender over medium to medium high heat. Add garlic, cook for a few minutes until fragrant. Add broth, bring to a boil and reduce heat, simmering vegetables for 10-15 minutes. Add lentils, tomatoes, and herbs and cook for 30 minutes or until lentils are soft. At this point, you can leave the soup as it is, or you can blend some or all of it. I used the immersion blender until about half of the soup was smooth, with some vegetables remaining in larger pieces. Add broth to thin if needed. Salt and pepper to taste, or allow each diner to salt and pepper individually (whenever we cook and my mother is one of the recipients, we always leave out the salt and pepper and let each person add their own).

Spaghetti and Meatballs (Bacon Paste!)

Or, Spaghetti and Meatballs All'Amitriciana.
We enjoyed this recipe very much.  The bacon adds a richness to the sauce and the roasted red pepper in the meatballs brightens them and provides a distinct taste, since so many of the ingredients are in both the meatballs and the sauce.  However, it took a lot longer to prepare than I had anticipated, so we ate quite late for a Thursday night.  No matter, still very tasty. Next time we make it I know it will be much quicker, in part because we have made it before and also because I know which steps can occur simultaneously.

Step by step:
The husband started this process early in the day when he ground up the chuck roast we would use. He is a big fan of the grinder attachment for the KitchenAid. The meatball ingredients require some chopping and grating. Grating onion is so much more painful than chopping it, and my eyes were a leaky mess after the first two grates. The onion candle we keep in the kitchen helped a little, though I lit it after I had started.

The meatballs themselves were easy enough to make, combine all of the ingredients after pressing the garlic on top of the bacon paste (!) and mix, and then let it sit.

Instead of starting the bacon for the sauce at this point, like we should have, we waited the full 15 minutes to form the balls (probably longer) and passed the time by preparing other ingredients for the sauce.  The tomatoes went in the blender (this may be one of the only places we deviated from the recipe. We did use San Marzano tomatoes in juice, but they were whole tomatoes, not diced.  I figured that since the recipe called for them to be blended until smooth, it didn't matter) and quickly got blended into a lovely thick tomato-y liquid. (Highly recommend this brand of San Marzano tomatoes - whenever we find them in the store, we buy 4 to 6 cans to have on hand. They are by far the best sauce making tomatoes I've used.)

(Have I mentioned how much I love my blender? It is incredibly fast and very powerful. KitchenAid, three speeds and a pulse option. My one requirement when I purchased it was that it could blend ice to a frozen margarita machine consistency, and it hasn't let me down. It can also chop ice to a coarser consistency, and it makes pureeing soups and other jobs a cinch.  I LOVE my blender.)

After the waiting period for the meatballs, the husband got started shaping them while I cooked the bacon for the sauce. (As I said, this step could have been started immediately following the combining of the meatball ingredients, so the pan would have been ready to take the meatballs once they were formed.)

Turning the meatballs in the pan was the trickiest part of the recipe.  We used tongs (I love my tongs, too) to gently push them over to brown all the sides, but some of them still insisted on coming apart a little bit. It took three batches to get them all done.

The sauce was easy, just took some monitoring, since things were added in steps.

By the time the meatballs went in, we were very hungry, so letting them cook for enough time was hard. Pasta boiled, was tossed with olive oil and Italian parsley (instead of marjoram) and then we ate. Yum. Some of the meatballs had come apart in the sauce, so in addition to whole balls there were some meaty chunks. The sauce was a nice texture and consistency, thicker than I would have expected but very smooth and velvety. We found the spice levels to be just right (we enjoy spicy things, being in Texas and all) but if we make it for a group in the future I would cut down on the red pepper flakes in the sauce. Some of our northern relatives would find it to be too much.