259: Tomato and Roasted Pepper Soup

As summer came to an end last year, I stripped all the green tomatoes, left them to ripen and then finally made a soup. Very good it was too. This year, my tomatoes haven't done nearly so well - so there was little to strip. The other thing about this year's crop, was that the skins were tough; this can happen through not watering sufficiently but I suspect it was more because they'd just taken so long to grow. All of which left me with a pretty paltry crop - which I've be stowing in the freezer through the summer.

I was thinking maybe it wasn't really going to be worth bothering with. I then though went to the allotments at the office in work (to check progress on my completely failed Cabbages) and there were loads of unloved ripe tomatoes which were falling off and going to waste. Well... there was only one answer here - go get a carrier bag! Across several different allotments, I wandered round and collected the fallen where the skins were still intact. And *naughty confession time*, I then assisted a few more to oh so luckily fall in to my bag. Any allotment that looked well tended, I left alone - I only assisted with ones that were going to go to waste in anyway.

All this got me to starting my soup production with
2.2 Kilos of various tomatoes

1 Pepper

1 big onion

3 (big) cloves garlic

2 pints of beef stock

Method:

• Onion and garlic slowly fried in a little olive oil
• Tomatoes and pepper on to baking tray with olive oil, salt and pepper in to a medium ovenAfter ~20 minutes, starting to remove any tomatoes which  had started to peel - and then completing the peeling and putting the skin aside.
• Once all the toms were cooked I then simmered the tomatoes, stock and pepper
• Then blitz

Peeling all the tomatoes was something of a faff, and but it certainly improved the texture of the soup. I liked the addition of the pepper; it added a bit of extra depth of flavour. It would've been really nice to put a bit of cream to make it even richer; but I'm trying to be healthy and the soup was plenty tasty as it was.