Tomato Soup

This is a healthy and foolproof recipe.  It’s also easy to keep the ingredients in the house, and quick to make!  It’s not the best tomato soup that I’ve ever had (bad introduction, but full disclosure), but it’s non dairy, low in fat/calories, and easy to make.  I’ve adapted this recipe from the stock class I took at Kitchen Window a couple of weeks ago.  http://www.kitchenwindow.com/.  This recipe starts with chicken stock.  More on that later.  I cheated on this one, since I didn’t have any chicken.  This is a critical ingredient to make chicken stock.  I made veggie stock with Chicken Soup Base that I had in the fridge.  Reasoning:  I had two bags of groceries to carry home from the bus the other day and couldn’t bear to add a chicken to the load.  That was poor planning.  I just signed up for grocery delivery.  One less chore to do in my free time.  Yeah!  Is this a great country, or what?

Ingredients:

• 1 can whole peeled tomatoes (I use an imported brand from Italy.  Kind of snooty, but delicious!)  Strain out the juice and keep to add later.
• 2 tbsp. extra butter.
• 1 cup yellow onion, chopped.
• 1/2 cup carrot, peeled and chopped (doesn’t need to be pretty)  This soup gets blended at the end.
• 1/2 cup celery (chopped).
• 2 cloves garlic.
• 1 cup chicken stock.
• 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper (or other seasoning).

Garnish with fresh parsley, cilantro, other herbs, cream, sour cream, or whatever you like.

Process:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  On parchment paper, place tomatoes topped with garlic.  You don’t want to cook tomatoes on a metal surface.  Place onion, carrot, and celery in hot cast iron pan with butter.  Put all veggies in the oven for 10 minutes or so.  The tomatoes will blacken pretty quickly.  They’ll need to come out first.  Leave the other veggies in for another 10-15 minutes.
2. Heat the stock while the veggies are in the oven, in a saucepan.
3. Add veggies when they are caramelized and tomato juice that was strained earlier.  Add other veggies.  Heat stock and veggies until carrots and celery are soft. This takes 15-20 minutes.
4. Puree.  I used a blender, but you can do this a lot of different ways.  Make sure the blender can breathe.  Place a towel over the top, rather than the lid.  If it’s airtight, it’ll form pressure that will make a mess, at a minimum, and may even be dangerous.
5. Serve with garnish and some fresh bread.  This would be really great with a grilled cheese sandwich.  Even though this soup sounds kind of light, it’s actually really filling.