This One Is For You Tomato Soup Lovers

Roasting tomatoes brings out their best selves.

Soup people are a special breed. We’re persnickety about what kinds of soup we like. Some like it chunky, some like it creamed. Some want it thick — others want it thin. We can drive people nuts.

What we all want is for our soup to knock our socks off.

Because I’m a soupy kind of person — I take pride in creating mind-blowing soups. So prepare thyself.

Today I made soup from the weird-looking leftover tomatoes from my garden. This year my tomato plants were a jungle and produced at least a hundred pounds of delicious beauty. I had boxes of them downstairs slowly ripening which my husband swore at every time he tripped over them.

I’ve eaten them every day for three months. I kid you not.

But some of them haven’t held onto their looks.

Like I said — they were a little ugly.

Out of this little box — I actually made two recipes. One is for a lovely roasted tomato soup and the other is a green tomato pickle my grandmother used to make. You only get the soup recipe today as I am kind of stingy like that.

But — oh boy — these tomatoes were scrappy. Weird lumps and bumps, some of them a little shriveled — none of which I cared about. Because roasting brings out the natural sweetness of tomatoes. And this soup is an excellent way to use the gnarly, misshapen, or not-so-ripe ones.

“Oddly — it is not real cooks who insist the finest ingredients are necessary to produce a delicious something….Real cooks take stale bread and aging onions and make you happy.” — Susan Wiegand, Cooking as Courtship

I picked all the red or slightly reddish ones, cut them into chunks and threw them on a cookie sheet with about 12 big cloves of peeled garlic. You’ll need about 2–3 cups of chopped weird tomatoes for a soup that sings.

I splashed them with olive oil and some Maldon salt. Squeezed some lemon juice over the works. I tossed them about and then they went into a pre-heated 500 degree Fahrenheit oven for 35–40 min. You want them to be quite dark in spots. Remove and cool.

I grabbed my beat-up soup pot I found in a garage sale 20 years ago and sauteed chopped onion in butter until they were soft and translucent. (I love butter and so should you.) I had only one onion left in the house so that’s what I used.

Add the roasted tomatoes and garlic (but not the accidental burnt crispy ones) and about 2 cups of water to your soup pot. I also added a liter of chicken broth and simmered the soup for about 1 hour as I am kind of a stickler about that. And there was a small bit of red wine left from last night so of course, that went in too.

I then pureed the works in my blender. I recommend you add about 1/2 cup — 3/4 cup of cream (depending on how many tomatoes you have) and stir well. Warm it up gently if you plan on hitting the soup spoon right away as I did.

And remember — this isn’t the bright red soup of your childhood that jiggled out of a can with a squished, wet sucking sound like a rubber boot in mud. This is a mature, dusky kind of red soup because it has taken some heat and thrived.

If you like — add a little blue cheese on top. Or get fancy and make your own fried croutons from some stale bread you have kicking around (never those nasty boxed tooth breakers) and float them. Normally I do that, but today — hunger overcame aesthetics. I shaved some parmesan on instead. Lazy me.

Life can be like that sometimes.

P.S. If you don’t have garlic — add a long squeeze of garlic paste to the soup before blending. You can also add a teaspoon of pesto if you’re a basil kind of person.

Kim Duke writes about simpler living for complicated people. She’s especially fond of writing about the quirks of ordinary life (and her cast iron breakfast recipe for lazy people is the best you’ve ever seen. Really.) Kim’s written for The Globe and Mail and her book, A Fine Mess, comes out in Spring 2020.