Tomato Purée

I have had lots of good metabolism from beef-vegetable soup. (Chicken soup tastes good but doesn’t cut it for me metabolically speaking.)

I find that 2 thick slices of beef shank is enough for the stock. I do an as-I-remember-it version of Julia Child’s brown beef stock. Brown the meat and onions. Simmer in water to just cover with celery, bay leaf, salt, parsley, thyme until the meat is very tender. I put the meat aside and let the stock sit overnight so I can pull off the fat. (I save some of the tallow for cooking.)

Prepare beans the day before if you want to add that.

Next morning, chop vegetables you like. My usual is:

Onion (not too much for my post-Covid taste), garlic glove crushed, celery, carrot, zucchini, summer squash, some red pepper and some poblano for a little heat and color, mushrooms and mushroom water (prepared a la Ray, meaning boiled 2 hours), cabbage, chopped fresh tomato, and enough TOMATO PUREE (I like the imported Italian kind in glass jars) to get it to your tomato-y preference. I mistakenly added a Parmigiano-Reggiano rind recently, thinking I was making minestrone, but I liked the result. Bay leaf, thyme, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper to taste. Simmer until all the vegetables are tender.

Finally I brown some grass-fed beef or bison in a frying pan, nice and brown. Spoon the meat into the soup, leaving as much fat behind as possible. Add this and the beans to the soup in the last half hour of cooking.

The beans and sweet vegetables are really enough carbs to balance. But I like to add boiled pasta (to my soup bowl, not the whole pot, otherwise leftovers will get mushy) when I am not watching starch strictly. Or you could cook a potato in the soup. I decided after many tries that potato was not needed for me. Fresh basil or parsley when you serve if you dig that.

@Gawdawg

I just posted the recipe for this Brazilian Shrimp Stew which calls for almost 2 cups of canned chopped tomato or puree or even fresh. It is on my RECIPES page.

The shrimp and the pasta with red sauce both look great!

When I was a child, spaghetti, tomato sauce, and meatballs was my favorite dish. But in the last 10 years, I have had a falling out of love. I think I have a general subtle problem with nightshades. Peppers were the first to go, which I learned after a bad reaction to pepper steak (poison in the dose–way too many peppers in one serving). Eggplant just doesn’t sit well for me now, though it tastes great. I am still drawn to tomatoey dishes, though the taste for me is now a bit distorted, due to whatever I had in the Covid era. I still eat potatoes, but the thrill is gone. Like ’em, don’t love ’em.