Post 125: Super nice Tomato Soup (nearly) a la The Ordinary Cook

I've never really been any good at following recipes. I tried here, but failed. Kath - the far from ordinary -Ordinary Cook posted this recipe - theordinarycook.co.uk - the-best-tomato-soup and having a load of tomatoes I attempted to follow her lead.

It all started off pretty well, doubling up on The OC's quantities - because of the aforementioned tomato glut):
- 1 kilo tomatoes
- 8 cloves of garlic
- a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper and stir around to get everything coated

And bob in into a ~140c oven for about 30 minutes. I say about because I some of the tomatoes went a bit squishy before the others; so I took them out a bit earlier.

While these were roasting, I chopped and fried 4 small onions; which were pretty small so that's not loads of onion. Once these had gone nice and soft, I tried to drain the excess oil from them, before adding 2 pints of chicken stock. I was deviating here as on examination of the cupborad I discovered we'd run out of chicken stock (my Mum says to use Beef stock; but I thought chicken closer to The OC's intent).

I was initially thinking that I'd have to remove the thick stalky bits from a few of the bigger tomatoes. But when I tried, it was just far too fiddly - and not doing so didn't seem to have any negative effect in the end. I added all these in to the stock. And then had some great fun squeezing the tomatoes until they popped with my big spoon. Simple things and simple minds and all that.

The original recipe also included bacon. I'd decided not to get any as I'd been planning on giving some to a lady at work. That is until I'd had to use Chicken stock. However, I'd thought that because I'd omitted it, then my soup could be quite bland. And, as I continue to be mildy obsessed with putting chilli in to everything... I cut along the length of a single chilli and dropped that in while it simmered.

After 20 minutes of simmering, I took the chilli out (as I didn't want to end up with random spicy chilli bits through the soup), and then blitzed it all.

The result is... Tomato Soup. It's really nice, very rich and creamy. There's just a slight hint of chilli to mine. All the stalk and skin bits were pretty easily mixed in to the soup to give a nice smooth finish. The ratio of 500gs tomatoes to 1 pint of stock gives a nice thickness without being too thick as to go towards baby food consistency (which is what I normally end up with for soups).

Also really pleasingly, apart from the single Chilli, I'd grown all the ingredients to this soup myself.

Happy days!

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Addendum:

- when I wrote this, I'd just tasted the soup; taking a spoonful from the top of the pan. When it came to serving, there were plenty of bits of skin and pips which I'd not succeeded in mulching despite giving it a very thorough blending. I didn't mind these too much. A quick bit of sieving and the soup was super smooth and even more professional looking.