Red Pepper Soup with Lime

Today I made another of my favourite "wishing I were in Mexico" soups. This one is even easier than Tortilla soup, and the ingredients are here most of the year, and in Mexico always. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes to create, and has a citrusy, sweet-with-a-kick taste that exemplifies Mexican flavours to me. We have it cold in the summer, with guacamole and tortilla chips, or hot with corn on the cob. In the winter, it's good hot, with chicken thighs baked with cilantro pesto under the skin. Yum.

Red Pepper Soup with Lime

Ingredients:

1 large onion, chopped
4 red bell peppers (or orange, or yellow)
1 tsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced or 1 small red chili pepper, sliced (if you don't have these on hand, a couple or ten drops of hot sauce does the trick)
3 tbs tomato paste (or carrot or squash puree, see below)
1 litre / quart chicken stock
1 lime, juiced
lime zest
salt, black pepper to taste
cilantro leaves for garnish
yoghurt for garnish.

Instructions:

Soften the onion and peppers in the olive oil in a pan. Allow them to sweat for 5 minutes or more in a covered pot.

Remove the pepper skins. My method is to press the peppers through a sieve, making sure to get all of the pulp, but leaving behind the skins. Another method is to leave the peppers in bigger chunks (and sweat them longer) in the first place, and peel the skin off in biggish strips when they cool slightly.

Add tomato paste, chili pepper (or jalepeno), garlic and 1/2 the stock. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Puree the mixture (I use one of those stick-type blenders, right in the pot), and add the rest of the stock and lime juice.

Season with salt and pepper.

Return the soup to the boil. When hot, serve with garnishes.


Variation:

Use yellow pepper or orange pepper, and substitute mashed carrots or squash (or a can of babyfood) for the tomato paste to get a sunshine yellow coloured soup.

This soup is also great served cold.