This is a great recipe we've come up with, named after a dear friend with great taste!

Elisa Bisque

No, do not cook up your next door neighbor, but rather, how about a rather simple bisque to make that will make people want to be living next to you?

Ingredients:

2-3 very ripe tomatoes

Tomato paste

½ cup table wine

1 jar of Marinara sauce  (regular pasta sauce works just fine)

Hot sauce

6 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup of cream

¼  cup of vanilla ice cream (save this until the end)

Fresh Basil and Rosemary

Sautéed Mushrooms (6 ounces or so)

Two tablespoons of brown sugar

Salt and pepper

Cooking time:  1-2 hours (the longer it sits, the better the end flavour)

 

Bisques can be quite intimidating to the cook, though if you follow some simple rules, they really never fail:

 

1: Low heat.  Do not boil the living hell out of the food.  Take your time, and let it simmer…besides, the home smells better afterwards too !  Think of it as a sort of incense.

2: No Low Fat Milk.  Look, we are making a rich soup here, don’t skimp. Half and Half is as light as you want to go…pure cream is better.

3: Fresh Ingredients.  Yes, you don’t want to use a whole lot of dried up desiccated things in this.  No canned mushrooms if you please.

4: Patience.  Just like Guns and Roses sang…this just needs some time to really simmer and let the flavours meld.

 

OK. Enough of the H.S., let’s get on with it:

Step One: Searing the garlic.  If you just mince up raw garlic and try to make it into a sauce, soup, or a stew, you end up with little pockets of “übergarlic” that will shock your diner’s mouths. Searing the chopped cloves until they are golden brown in olive oil is the way to go. I like to add a little bit of brown sugar at this point, just a pinch.

Step Two:  The tomatoes. Slice them, dice them, jump and down on them if you want, but get those fruits knocked down to size (about ¼”) !  Dump them right into the pot with the now beautifully browned garlic bits, and listen to the sizzle.  I heavily recommend adding fresh basil, or at least re-hydrated basil  now too. 

Step Three: Fluid. The tomatoes have probably started to shrivel a bit, they are drying out, so it is time to re-hydrate them with a good stock, or in my case, a mediocre wine and some water. The pan should be bubbling and steaming by this point. Let the stuff simmer for quite a while, a good fifteen to twenty minutes, this allows the flavours to meld together.  I like to put in some tomato paste as well, just to thicken thing up a bit. Flour in a bisque makes me naseuous.

Step Four:  If you want to add in meat, such as the traditional shellfish, you will want to do it now. Tonight, we are serving vegetarian.  Shellfish cooks quickly, and can become rubbery in texture if you let it sit too long…I would recommend not more than five minutes prior to serving. I guess you could put in cured anchovies, but that would be really disgusting.  This is a good time to add the rosemary, too.

Step Five:  O.K. You have a pot of simmering, not boiling (!) red liquid that smells heavenly. Is it ready yet ?  NO ! We still have to add the cream (or milk for you pansies out there), and it is a very crucial step to making a bisque. This is why we have not boiled the mixture. Boiled cream = gross.

Step Six:  By now, you should have a terra-cotta coloured liquid that needs little else but some sizzle. Pick your favourite hot sauce ( I like Amore or Cholula) and season to taste. Make it hotter than you would normally like it, trust me here.

Step Seven:  Here is where we really deviate from the norm:  the addition of ice cream. I put several healthy scoops of a good quality vanilla ice cream into the seasoned mixture, and stir it up. This completely calms down the spice, and at the same time transforms it into a wonderfully complex soup that you will not believe.

Step Eight:   Salt and pepper as necessary, though I usually use neither. Let the mixture cool down slowly on a low heat setting until it is just warm enough to be palatable.  I like to serve it with a fresh loaf of French bread, we like to dip the bread chunks into the spicy soup, and then finish off the rest with a spoon.

Enjoy!