Tomato soup

Serves 4 as a starter, 2 as big bowls of soup for a main meal. Ready in 30 mins, 10 mins prep and 20 mins cooking.

Tomato soup is a real comfort food. It is delicious but unfortunately there is a lot of just plain terrible tomato soup out there. Out of a tin tastes tinny and sweet. Out of those refrigerated pots tastes watery and lacks depth and robustness.

This is a very simple soup with very high impact. The secret is the sun blushed tomatoes and herbs and spices.

Funnily enough it was a recipe that was not supposed to make the blog - for a number of different reasons. It is one of those things that went wrong at every step and turned out tremendously well. It is truly flavour packed, but it was supposed to be very lightly flavoured so I could stir in a garlic leaf pesto.

It went wrong from the beginning. The market had no garlic leaves, so I made a last minute switch to dill. Then I got cooking after 2.5 ciders and a put in much more rosemary and thyme than intended. It was too full of earthy flavours to top with a dill pesto. I was disappointed but my flatmate loved it, wanted the recipe and convinced me it needed to be on the blog. Thank you Steph!

The final touch was ½ tsp hot, smoked paprika. Gorgeous!

Ingredients:

• 12 tomatoes on the vine
• ½ cup sun blushed tomatoes
• 1 veggie oxo cube
• 1 red onion
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• 1/4 tsp dried thyme
• S&P to taste
• ½ cup water
• ¼ -½ tsp hot, smoked paprika (Start with the quarter, let simmer and taste. Add a quarter more if you want it.)

Crème fraiche for the top.

Core the tomatoes, removing the seeds, and cut them and the onion in big chunks. Put them in a pot with all other ingredients. Blend with a hand blender. Put the soup on a medium high heat until it boils. Then turn down and simmer for 2o mins.

Serve and dribble crème fraiche on top. If it is not drippy enough you may need to add a little bit of water, but be careful, not too much!