Hi everyone! So here's another post from me with one of my other interests combined: gardening and cooking! π
Half of March, every year I start by planting tomato seeds in the house so they can grow strong before I move them out, about 8 weeks later.
I'm from Europe so the seasons here prevent us from gardening the entire year, by half May there's little chance of freezing temperatures at night so it's safe for my baby plants to go outside and get much stronger, after the holiday season in the second half of August it's time to start harvesting the first tomatoes, I like them because it's an easy crop to grow with large yield and it's a nice activity to do with my kids so they learn the process of seeding, growing and harvesting.
With so many tomatoes we usually make pasta sauce and tomato soup, it's healthy and delicious!
This recipe is for approx. 7 bowls of soup.
So, what do we need?
- preparation and cooking time required: around 1 hour.
- 1 kilo tomatoes
- 1 union
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1 cube of chicken broth
- 1 tea spoon of dried basil
- 0.5 tea spoon sambal
- 1 tea spoon salt
- some pepper
- 1 eat spoon sugar
So, first we need to harvest or buy around 1 kg of tomatoes, remove the crowns and wash them.
To make it easy to peel the skins, we cut a cross in the bottom of every tomato and boil a pan with water to cook the tomatoes for two minutes, with they're done, we're saving 750 ml hot water for later use (preserves energy!) and throw away the rest, then fill the pan with cold water and let the tomatoes cool a bit so we don't burn our fingers, so now we can remove the skins and start cutting the tomatoes in small cubes.
While we wait until the water is boiling and the two minutes has passed we can cut the onions and garlic in to small pieces.
because of the heat and then sudden cold the skins come off easily now.
I'm saving the hot water I used to boil the tomatoes in to preserve some energy, it's good for my wallet and for the planet π but you can also use fresh water for this, we need 750 ml.
Now the pan is empty we quickly clean it, add some oil in it and put it on the furnace (well it's electric in my case) until it's hot and then fry the onions and garlic until they get a somewhat transparent, glass like look, this should take no longer than ten minutes.
Peeled tomatoes look pretty strange, the veins inside are clearly visible now.
Cutting them is quite messy because the juice will start to leak so make sure to empty your cutting board in a plastic container, it's too much to cut all at once.
Well, most of the work is done now, put everything on the list in the pan and let it boil for 20 to 30 minutes while stirring every now and then.
When it's done let it cool a bit and then puree the soup as much as you prefer, we don't like large pieces in the soup so this takes two or three minutes, watch out for hot splatters!
It's all done! We like to eat the soup as lunch with buttered sandwiches to soak them in the soup and eat them like this, delicious!
Bon appetit!
Eet smakelijk! we say in my country!
I hope you liked my post, I'm looking forward to see some nice recipes to make from other parts of the world, like ramen.. I've never made or tasted it, I will try to make it some day!
yay :) thank you and I will!