Today (Friday) was the annual Logos Soup Cookoff. I entered, but didn't win. In Logos Cookoff tradition, I made my own soup sign, so people would know what they were eating:
Here's the recipe, if you're interested. A little place just down the street from Logos, the La Vie en Rose bakery, has awesome soups for lunch. One soup they regularly serve is a Tomato-Sausage-Eggplant soup. That was my inspiration.
Ingredients
- two eggplants, peeled, chopped in small pieces (1/2 inch squares? sure)
- one onion, chopped
- five cloves of garlic (minced or pressed w/a garlic press)
- two pounds of ground italian sausage (I used hot italian sausage).
- five 14-oz cans of tomato sauce
- one 14-oz can of chopped tomatoes
- one can chicken stock
- salt, pepper, fennel, oregano, thyme, basil and whatever else you'd like
Process
- dump a bunch of olive oil in a big ol' stew pot. 1/3 cup?
- add some salt
- saute eggplant for, say, 5 minutes or so. You want the eggplant soft and mushy, so however long that takes.
- remove from pan, set aside.
- dump some more olive oil in your stew pot. (a few tablespoons).
- saute onion & garlic; add more salt, pepper, fennel, etc.
- add sausage & brown it.
- add chopped tomatoes
- add tomato sauce & chicken stock
- get the stuff hot (not boiling, but hot), stirring occasionally
- remember that eggplant? it's your thickener. get it wet with some of your tomato sauce, then get a stick blender and puree it. then dump it into the soup and stir.
- bring to a slow boil, simmer for, say, 20 minutes.
That's it.
I was originally going to thicken the soup even more with feta cheese, but I put too much seasoning in as it was. I'd recommend using less sausage or add more tomato sauce/puree (or even more chicken stock) to tone it down a bit; then you could experiment with the feta as a thickener.