The other day I was wandering around the supermarket and spotted a lot of interesting looking tomatoes from Turkey. Green tigerish looking ones. Yellow and red mini-plum ones. Cherry red on the vine. And though it’s a fools dream, given I’m sure they were picked far pre-their-best and ripened in transit, I thought back to how awesome tomatoes, peppers and produce were when travelling through Turkey last autumn and was compelled to buy them.
Before: yes it is a bit of a tragedy to homogenise all that beautiful colour
Now what does one do with a shedload of tomatoes? Well, in the end, as tragic as it was, to destroy the wonderful colours I decided to make a soup.
- 1½kg fresh tomatoes
- 100g of goats cheese
- ½l vegetable stock
- 1 large onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- olive oil
- salt and white pepper (you could use black of course
- Wash and deseed the tomatoes – this is easiest done by just halving them and squeezing them in your fist. And it’s quite therapeutic I might add.
- Place a large (enough for 3l or more) on a medium heat, add a generous amount of olive oil, roughly dice the onion (you’ll blend it later anyway) and add.
- Add some salt and milled white pepper. Being careful with the salt as you will later add salty ingredients like stock and, especially the goats cheese.
- Dice the garlic and when the garlic has softened add that to the pot.
- When the garlic has had a couple of minutes (you want to take the edge off but not for it to get colour) add the tomatoes.
- Stirring occasionally, leave the tomatoes to dissolve – this probably takes about 45mins to an hour.
- Once the tomatoes have cooked down and lost their shape, spoon the mix out into a blender and blitz to a…. soup.
- Return to the soup to the pot on the heat, add the stock and mix.
- Once the tomato puree and stock are mixed, remove the rind of the goats cheese and crumble into the soup, stirring.
- Stirring regularly, once the cheese has dissolved, taste and check the seasoning.
- Enjoy!
after: it you see a slightly ethereal haze to this that's because the camera hadn't quite warmed up from a walk in -20C just before this. There's nothing quite like a bowl of warm homemade soup after a walk out on the sea ice.