132/365 Tomato soup

Having a sudden glut of beefsteak tomatoes I decided to have a go at making some tomato soup. This is one of my favourite cookbooks, so I browsed through and found a recipe to follow.



Here are the ingredients. Sadly only the tomatoes and carrots are home grown, there wasn't enough space for onions this year, and the herb garden is still at the drawing board stage. I also made a few minor adjustments to the recipe, using sunflower oil instead of olive oil, mixed herbs instead of fresh thyme and marjoram, and garlic puree instead of fresh cloves.




First off, I quartered and de-cored the tomatoes, pealed and chopped the onions, scraped and chopped the carrots, then gently fried the onions and carrots for a few minutes until the onions were soft.




Next all the other ingredients were added to the pan. The recipe made no mention of water or stock but I felt sure that was a mistake, so I added 300 ml of water. With the benefit of hindsite I should maybe have added more, as although the finished soup is lovely and thick, there isn't much of it!




The pan was covered and left to simmer for 30 minutes. The recipe said that was long enough, but I decided it wasn't, as the carrots were still quite hard, so I added an extra 15 minutes.




Everything was then poured into a sieve and mashed until as much as possible had passed through into the bowl below. It was at this stage that I realized a liquidizer would have been a valuable asset (note to self to buy one soon).




And here is the finished product, a fabulous, thick, rich tasting soup, but to paraphrase Nim, my favourite food blogger, a lot of hard work for very little result.