Hearty tomato-vegetable soup

Mmmmmmm...

 Today is a rainy, chilly fall day. I'm sleep-deprived, coming down with a cold, and the boots I ordered online are not my size. Today is not my day... so it's time for some hearty comfort food! I scraped this together with odds and ends of things that have been living in my fridge for a while or on my shelf, so it's a little impromptu, and also my pan turned out to be slightly too small for this, but oh well. It's delicious.


Ingredients:

-2 roasted eggplants
-1 head roasted garlic
-1 tbsp butter
-1/2 an onion
-1 green pepper
~1 cup water (or veggie stock, if you have it)
-1 large carrot
- mirin to taste
-1 1/4 tbsp corn starch
-1/4 cup cold water
 -salt, pepper, basil, parsley, rosemary to taste
-1 can of tomato sauce
-1 1/4 tbsp corn starch
-1/4 cup cold water
-ennoki mushrooms
-shredded mozzarella (or your favourite) cheese

Pre-roasting: this garlic's been sitting around for a while, oops.

 To roast the garlic:  peel the outer layer of paper off the garlic, leaving the individual clove wrappers intact. Cut the tops off of the cloves and spread a liberal amount of olive oil over each; wrap in tinfoil. Grill it in the toaster oven for about 12 minutes.

You can roast the eggplant at the same time; simply wash the eggplant, cut the tops off, slice them in half lengthwise and stick them face-up in the toaster oven for about 12 minutes.

While you're doing the above, melt the butter in the bottom of a pan over medium heat. Add chopped onion and fry it until the onion's soft; you can fry the green pepper then, too. Add a bit of mirin and about a cup of water; add the chopped carrot and let it simmer for a while; this is when you should be adding the eggplant (cut it into bite-size chunks), and the garlic - take each clove out of their wrappers - they should slide out easily - and chop into bite-size pieces.

Stir together 1/4 cup of water and the corn starch; add this mixture to the vegetables. Add the spices. Add the can of tomato sauce. Add the ennoki mushrooms (separate them first, of course). Let the whole thing simmer for a while to let the flavour spread itself around.

Now, I did this all kind of backwards, so my carrots never really got soft. That's okay: I can live with that. Top the whole thing with mozzarella cheese and enjoy!