Yesterday I made some roasted tomato soup, based on this recipe. When it was finished, I poured myself a bowl and commenced to eat it. But there were weird things in it, which can best be described as resembling…well… fingernail clippings. Or the shed claws that you sometimes find around the house if you have cats. Or tiny plastic bristles from a nylon brush. Description of one: 1/4 inch long, white, curved, hard, stiff, thickness of lightweight fishing line, equal width along the length (which shed cat claws aren’t). Actually they were like 1/4-inch lengths of thin fishing line, but curved like a fingernail clipping. There weren’t many of them… maybe in a coffee-cup-sized portion of soup there were 3-4.
Here are the details, 'cause i know y’all like details.
I made the soup with
[ul]
[li]four medium-sized fresh tomatoes that I had bought at a farmer’s market the day before, as supermarket tomatoes are worthless[/li][li]Sliced yellow onion[/li][li]Fresh garlic–two cloves[/li][li]Three mini red peppers (seeded). I don’t know if these are available all over the country–you get a bag of small, pointed, red, yellow, and orange peppers in the produce section. They’re quite tasty and sweet–great with cream cheese spread on them. I had used some from the same bag in another recipe, and even ate some from the bag, and there was nothing weird about them.[/li][/ul]
I tossed all of this stuff with olive oil, spread out on a sheet pan on non-stick aluminum foil, and roasted in a 400-ish degree oven for 45 mins. Then in a saucepan, I put a good squeeze of tomato paste from a brand-new tube and about half a teaspoon of Better Than Bouillon (beef flavor) in some olive oil and stirred it around. I added a cup of filtered water, a couple of sprigs of basil from my garden, then all of the roasted veggies. Simmered for half an hour or so, then used an immersion blender to puree. The immersion blender doesn’t liquefy like the Vitamix, but I was too lazy to get the Vitamix out. There were definitely pieces of tomato skin, but that didn’t bother me.
But then, eating the soup, I felt something odd in my mouth, tiny and pointy. I thought it was a piece of basil stem that hadn’t gotten blended, and when I retrieved it from my mouth, I expected to see something green. But it was (as described) white, curved, hard, like plastic or a baby’s fingernail clipping.
Was this something from inside the tomato? I ate another one of the fresh tomatoes later that day with no weirdness. The onion was a half that was leftover, so I had already used half of it with no weirdness. Likewise the peppers. The garlic cloves came from a new head of garlic and I peeled each one. The weird things were much harder than garlic skin–almost felt like plastic–like if you wash something with a plastic brush and some of the bristles come off in it.
I’m stumped.
