Nice. Not my cup of tea, but nice. I'm not really clear about this flavor profile, but if I had to guess, I'd say African. There's peanut butter, but it's not your classic Asian peanut butter treatment, i.e. sesame or hoisin flavors. Instead, it's heavy on the tomatoes, with ginger and eggplant and cilantro, and as I mentioned when I made the Spinach with Tomatoes, the tomato-ginger combo is not my fave. Still, this is a solid recipe that turns out a solid soup. More like a stew, actually.
I do have a gripe though. It has to do with I&T's alleged cooking time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Not even close! I mean, if you do the math, the shortest possible time from start to serve is 2 hours. What's more likely is 2:20-2:30. Granted, the last half hour is spent waiting for the soup to cool (flavors to meld?) before you're "allowed" to salt it. (And you know I salted it. Liberally.) So it's not like you're spending 2.5 hours solid over the stove. But still, that's a significant time difference. I think I'm going to classify this as another typo alert.
About that salt, again there's none added in the body of the recipe. There may be some in the tomatoes or the peanut butter you use, but there's no extra addition. And this really needs it. I made the mistake of tasting this dish before the first big simmer. Ugh. It tasted like nothing! Then I tasted it again after the last ingredient went in, and after all that simmering, it had a much broader, more interesting flavor, but still, no salt! Is this just salt-crazed me? Unfortunately, I ate this solo, so I couldn't ask someone else for a reality check, but there are leftovers, and I will be quizzing some lucky person.
I ate it, as suggested, with jasmine rice, which was perfect. And I definitely recommend using all the optional garnishes: the chopped cilantro (not really a garnish, it goes in with the lemon juice), the cilantro leaves and the chopped peanuts. They really boosted the flavor!
Incidentally, I&T describe this soup as being "naughty," i.e. not low fat, and "outrageously rich and savory." I didn't find it to be that heavy. The overwhelming flavor here is tomato, and therefore it skews to the acid side of things. The flavors that I associate with rich and savory and heavy (salt, fat, cream) stayed in the background, so this dish didn't feel like it weighed me down. Of course, I didn't check the calorie count....
SFO: 7
(There's nothing that screams scary-vegan about this... no weird grains, beans, or soy products... but I find the flavor profile to be quite unusual, so that's why there are points off. Funny, I give vegans credit for generally embracing unusual flavors, and I assume that meat-eaters will be turned off by them. I acknowledge that there are both adventurous meat-eaters and fussy vegans out there, but I'm sticking with this rating anyway.)
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