Chilled Red Pepper Soup and Soured Cream

A very tasty soup and easy to make. It would be a good company dish since it could easily be made the day before and finishing takes a very short time. I can easily imagine sipping this soup while food on the grlll gets ready to eat.

I made a half recipe. A pinch of red pepper flakes was good for my half recipe; two pinches would be nice for a whole recipe.

A small part of the red bell pepper is to be chopped in 1.5cm dice and set aside to be added at the end. I thought this was too large and chopped this bit quite fine; somewhere in between would be best, I think.

The stick of celery I bought to make this dish disappeared into another meal earlier in the week, so I used some dried celery leaves instead of the celery.

With bigger chunks of bell pepper and celery bits of the same size, this would be quite a crunchy soup. That might be nice, but I can also see that having a completely smooth soup might also be nice.

Ottolenghi suggest finishing with a drizzle of olive oil, but I skipped this.

Aside: In general, I've not been very pleased with Ottolenghi's recipe writing style (not just in this book). Simple steps are often over-explained while more difficult things are skipped over. Sometimes prep steps are not given in the most efficient order. (In addition, I find font used in this book particularly difficult to read. I'm trying to avoid developing an antipathy to the book because I have made some good things from it.) This particular recipe, though, is quite well explained. The steps are in the proper order so that you can work from it sequentially without having to plan ahead yourself for the following steps.