my currently favourite rice-tomato soup

[freckles_and_doubt]

I don't post enough recipes on this blog. I like cooking, a lot of you like cooking, I also like tinkering with recipes in ways the originators wot not of, and probably never intended, and which I never preserve for posterity because I never make things the same way twice. Blogs, of course, are invented with posterity in mind. If you don't like cooking, feel free to stop reading now.

I also like buying random cookbooks at the cheap book places, the most recent acquisition being something called Practical Rice Dishes, which is a nicely no-nonsense sort of title. I have subsequently conceived an addiction for my version of their tomato-rice soup thingy. Free-form recipe follows, with the caveat that I don't do exact quantities much with this sort of thing, and also become awfully optional and madly inventive with some of the ingredients.

---

TOMATO-RICE SOUP

Ingredients:

• A couple of red onions
  
• Four or five cloves of garlic (peeled and whole, not chopped, and more if you're a serious garlic fiend, as I am.)
  
• A couple of carrots, scraped and chopped into smallish bits.
  
• A dash of olive oil.
  
• A couple of reasonably bitey chillis, chopped but not deseeded (optional, not in original recipe, but Thai food has corrupted me and I like a bite).
  
• A few rashers of bacon, or a couple of bacon steaks (this wasn't in the original recipe, but really works, and allows me to look all smug when the Evil Landlord does his trademark rummage through the dish and plaintive query about where the meat is. You could fry up the fat from the bacon and use it in place of the olive oil, if you wanted).
  
• About a cup and a half of brown rice, and it's even better with a brown/wild rice mix
  
• About a stock cube's worth of chicken stock.
  
• A tin of chopped tomatoes of some sort.
  
• Two or three whole tomatoes, or a couple of handfuls of baby tomatoes, halved and roasted
  
• A couple of tablespoons of tomato paste (I use one of those 50g sachets)
  
• A whole stick of cinnamon (this is actually essential)
  
• Two or three fresh bay leaves, or equivalent dried. (My laurel tree is flourishing proverbially, which means I tend to pity people who have to rely on dried bay leaves. Scrunch the fresh ones in your fingers, they release more flavour, and make your hands smell edible for a bit).
  
• A sort of a generous couple of pinches of soft brown sugar (note to self, try this with honey sometime)
  
• A handful of fresh oreganum or marjoram, or even basil, washed and finely chopped
  
• Optional thingy I discovered last time I made it, and which is delectable: about a tablespoon of Thai roasted chilli paste. Added bonus, it's an excuse to eat the stuff out of the jar with a spoon.

So, find a large pot. Chop the onions to medium small, peel the garlic cloves but leave them whole. Heat the olive oil in the pot on medium heat, and fry the onion, garlic and carrot bits together until the onion starts to do that translucent thing. Chop the chillis smallish and add, together with the seeds. Don't rub your eyes at this point. Aargh. Add the chopped bacon steak or bacon, and fry a few more minutes.

Add the rice to the frying stuff and mix it up; fry gently for a few minutes, mostly to introduce the rice to the flavours in a sticky, intimate sort of fashion.

Add the tinned tomatoes and the chicken stock, with enough water to make sure the rice is covered. Add the tomato paste, cinnamon stick, bay leaves and sugar (or honey, if you're ahead of me on this experimental thing). Stir madly. Add more water so it's soupy rather than gloppy.

Turn pot down to extremely low simmer, put lid on, leave it. Come back every ten or fifteen minutes or so to give it a stir and add more water if necessary, the rice absorbs it. This stage will take probably around 45 minutes.

Add the roasted tomatoes (you could also add fresh, but you'd need to cook it a bit longer) and mix in. Fiddle around with the seasoning: it'll probably need salt. Add more water to retain the soup consistency.

When you think it's pretty much ready to eat, add the fresh herbs and the chilli paste. Fish around for the cinnamon stick and bay leaves and feed them to your compost heap. Adjust seasonings - probably more salt, rice eats salt. You should have a subtle but detectable cinnamon flavour coming through, and the rice for some reason makes the tomato base velvety. Freshly ground black pepper good at this stage. There will be soft, sweet, whole garlic cloves swimming around in this: I consider this to be a bonus.

Serve in deep bowls with grated cheese if you like that sort of thing, which I sometimes do, and with buttered crusty brown bread if the rice isn't carb enough for you. One of these days I'll try adding bunches of chopped-up chorizo just before serving.

This reheats well and the flavours marinate in the fridge overnight; add more water when you reheat, the rice will have absorbed it all.

---