While we’re waiting for Early Girl tomatoes, this recipe from Heid Swanson’s latest book, Supernatural Simple: Whole Food Vegetarian Recipes for Real Life, is an easy substitute, made all the more simple by grabbing ingredients from your pantry. Print
Sriracha Tomato Soup
Warming and simple to make, this is a pantry soup if ever there was one. The sriracha brings some vivaciousness to the whole affair. Look for organic, all-natural sriracha, or a sriracha that’s free of preservatives and unrecognizable ingredients—you want one that contains simply chiles, vinegar, garlic, and so on. Toasted pepitas tend to be my seed of choice for topping, but sliced almonds come in a close second.
Ingredients
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 yellow onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
3 tablespoons sriracha
1 (28-ounce) can crushed fire-roasted
tomatoes 2 1⁄2 cups water
1 cup full-fat coconut milk
Coconut cream reserved from the top of the can, to serve
Toasted nuts or seeds, brown rice, or lemon wedges, to serve (optional)
Instructions
- Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and salt and cook for 5 minutes, until the onions soften but don’t brown.
- Stir in the sriracha tomatoes, and water. Bring the soup to a boil, turn down the heat, and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, until the flavors meld.
- Stir in the coconut milk and bring the soup back to a simmer.
- Remove the pot from the heat and transfer the soup to a high-speed blender (in batches, if necessary). Alternately, use a hand blender directly in the pot. Blend the soup until smooth.
- Ladle the soup into bowls and serve with a swirl of coconut cream and a sprinkling of nuts or seeds or over a scoop of brown rice.
- Either way, you can’t go wrong with a big squeeze of lemon juice.
Notes
Heidi on the transition to natural ingredients:
You see the term natural used a lot in marketing and packaging; it’s a word that’s often open to interpretation. That said, the spirit of the term natural is pretty straightforward. Natural ingredients are whole—they come straight from the plant or animal—or they are made from whole ingredients with as little processing as possible. For example, olives pressed into olive oil, almonds pureed into almond butter, tomatoes crushed into tomato sauce—these are natural foods. Foods that contain synthetic flavorings, stabilizers, and preservatives? Not natural. Natural foods tend to be packed with the good stuff: fiber, phytonutrients, protein, vitamins, and minerals. Ideally, they are the foundation of what you eat and what you cook with, most of the time. When you use natural ingredients, every meal is a fresh start, a new opportunity to power and nourish your body.
Reprinted with permission from Super Natural Simple. Copyright © 2021 by Heidi Swanson. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Photographs copyright © Heidi Swanson
