Week 3: Tomato, Fennel and Feta Soup

The book: A Soup For Every Day (The New Covent Garden Food Co.)

The recipe: p262, "Tomato, Fennel and Feta Soup"

A Soup For Every Day is a rare example of a cookbook in my collection that actually gets pretty decent use. Even without the involvement of randomness, I largely ignore its calendrical structure, though; for example, this week's recipe is on the page marked "September 13th", which I acknowledge means some of the key ingredients are currently out of season - but then that's precisely why we have aircraft to help us rack up horrific food miles, isn't it? Modern life FTW <3

The book was a family Christmas gift a few years back, along with a Morphy Richards soup maker that has proved to be something of a godsend for a hungry homeworker like me. Stock up on cheap veg from Lewisham market, chop it all up, then sit back and enjoy that lunchtime goodness after a mere 22 minutes in what can only be described as a giant soup kettle:

As this week's chosen recipe involves multiple phases and that's not the soup maker's strong point, I decided to go the conventional route and make it in a pan instead. (Still used the kettle for blending, though - beats faffing around with the food processor.)

The prep: Mainly fridge and store-cupboard staples here, though tracking down sundried tomato paste proved to be surprisingly tricky considering I live in an area that's supposedly mid-gentrification. Like last week, doing my shopping on a Sunday doesn't help matters, but them's the breaks.

I opted for some nice vine tomatoes, as well as splashing out on quite expensive Actual Feta instead of supermarket-brand "salad cheese" (ahem). Though I do wonder whether there's much point in chucking high-end ingredients into something that's essentially going to end up as a bowl of mushy red liquid whatever you do with it.

Like quite a few of the Covent Garden recipes, this is notable for being a soup that doesn't use stock cubes just for the sake of it. I broadly approve - I'd far rather control the salt content myself and let the flavour and seasoning come from the ingredients wherever possible (a recipe containing feta is hardly going to be short on saltiness, after all).

The making: A diced potato, a chopped onion, tomato purée, garlic and a small amount of the sliced fennel are heated in a geet big pan until nicely soft. Caster sugar and white wine vinegar are added and boiled down slightly, then several chopped tomatoes (unpeeled - surely that's asking for trouble?),  sundried tomato paste and water are added.

After a good slow simmer for 30 minutes, the contents of the pan are blended, then the remaining fennel slices are added along with some cubes of feta. The recipe calls for a mere 50g of feta for a recipe that claims to feed four people, but obviously I use more, because feta.

I have no idea, I just googled "feta meme"

Another ten minutes of simmering to soften the fennel and melt the feta slightly, and we're done! A "rustic roll" (again, ahem) from Sainsbury's is the accompaniment of choice.

The eating: Fennel is great. There's an evocative recipe called "Devil's Fennel" in The Silver Spoon that I love, in which chunks of fennel are slow-cooked with anchovies and mustard. But of course I almost certainly won't get to write about that here.

Anyway, my point is that the fennel and feta flavours are what lifts this from the ordinary, giving it a subtle tartness and a sharp edge that work really nicely in combination with the robust tomato base - it's surprisingly fresh on the palate for something that feels like it's going to be quite heavy. That also means it tastes a lot less tomato-ey than the orange-redness of its appearance might suggest:

Now if you're thinking that's not the world's most attractive soup, you'd be right - the late-added slices of fennel and cubettes of feta aren't exactly designed for elegant visual impact, and the mouthfeel (box 4 on your Random Kitchen Buzzword Bingo card, folks!) is a little odd and lumpy. But at least there aren't any bits of tomato skin floating around in there as I'd feared - the long, slow cooking time ensures that even they end up being successfully blended. In any case, the flavour more than makes up for any shortcomings on the texture side.

At the end of the day, though, it's still just a soup. Indeed, after three weeks, I'm starting to realise that random.org seems determined to give me a lot of

• things that don't look particularly thrilling in photos;
• things that aren't particularly hard to make; and
• things with quite a lot of red in them.

Whether this reflects the uninspired nature of my cookbook collection or is just plain bad luck, I suppose only further throws of the dice will tell. It's all been nice enough, though - no disasters so far - and the overall quality trend is an upward one, so I look forward to whatever next week may bring.

Maybe I'll even be allowed a different colour or two.

One-word verdict: Tart.