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| It really was just a case of bunging it all in the crock pot, cooking on high for five hours then cooling before pouring the lot in my Ninja for a blitz.. |
This post started out as just a bullet point for my Thrifty Thursday, but I decided it might be worthy of a post on it's own. On Tuesday, I made a slow cooker pepper and tomato soup. I looked at several on-line recipes and then sort of merged what I thought would work. I do this regularlly with soups and hotdishes, and have become more adventurous with altering baking recipes too-but not with a copycat recipe! I can't really give credit to any one source, as this ended up really being just a throw stuff in the slow cooker, cool, blitz, and call it soup-or pasta sauce, or...whatever you might like to use it for.
My ingredients were a pepper losing its prime, a kabob kit ( red and yellow peppers, onions, and zucchini-about one medium size of each) brought home from my daughter, a 15 oz. can of tomatoes, two cups of water, loads of pepper, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and Italian seasoning. I'm going to guess that the total cost was $2 to me including the going bad pepper in my fridge. I could argue that based on the pepper about to be trash in another day I could cut the cost by $1, but I won't. Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper Soup is $2.99. This had a sort of TJ soup comparison for flavor, though mine ended up being vegan and the store soup is not.
This made a bit more than 4 cups. It is a thick soup-I didn't have any vegetable broth, and didn't want to substitute another cup of water and a chicken stock cube. as I thought my daughter might like it. I figured with all the veg, seasoning and water it would be fine. Because of how thick it turned out, It might be a good sauce perhaps over pasta. Adding some parmesan, or a dollop of yogurt or sour cream would be nice for non vegan palates. 
I froze 2 cups worth as well, but this will do nicely for a meal. Bonus resource save, old pickle and sauce jars used to save soup.
The main point of this post was to suggest another way, at least new to me, of using up vegetables. Easily, a person could add other odds and ends of lurkers if you had them, though some might change the flavor more than others. I could decrease the water and truly make more of a sauce-I'm thinking over ravioli or tortellini it would be really tasty. Other things of note, I maybe should have peeled the pepper skins off, but I blitzed them really well and I don't mind the bit of texture. You or your family might be put off by that though. Zucchini was a bonus add as part of the kabob platter, but I think carrots or a sweet potato might add a bit of sweetness. I think I would have liked a bit more tomato flavor, so if I had a spare seeded tomato, I'll throw in if I make again. It's still warm and sunny here, but in just a few weeks, we'll start getting some early tastes of fall. A hearty bowl of soup with some crusty bread will be a winner.
