Baked Sweet Potato & Roasted Cherry Tomato Soup

One of the easiest recipes I’ve done lately was from Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Good Tempered Food. Roast some onion, sweet potato and cherry tomatoes with olive oil, sprigs of rosemary and thyme and when all weepy and carmelly good, you peel the sweet potatoes and bung the lot into a food processor with some hot chicken stock (that has been mixed with some brown sugar). Throw it back on the stove and boil, then taste and season. Really delicious. Very simple, but bold, flavours all coming together. I served it with a slice of roasted garlic-scraped sour dough toast.

Now a word about the cookbook. I haven’t tried many things out of Day-Lewis’s book (Good Tempered Food) but I agree with Renz over at Little Bouffe that it’s a good book but there are problems with her recipes. There has to be a certain amount of caveat emptor in creating a Day-Lewis dish as it rarely turns out as good as claimed or expected. But this gives you room to move about and swing your elbows a bit. Luckily for me, I’m useless at reading recipes anyway and tend to work on the Nigel Slater theory that a recipe is a guideline (unless baking or candy making, of course) and that you should personalize it a bit. But beware of her cooking times, best to keep your eyes open. If my incorrigible little Magic Chef ® gas range (with its upside-down clock) has taught me anything it’s that sometimes it’s best not to force a recipe and sometimes you gotta step up and hammer it until it fits. But the decision is yours.