In season - fresh tomatoes

One of Patrick's friends and co-workers, Dennis, gave us some beautiful tomatoes last week. They were red, ripe, and ready to eat. They would have been delicious on tomato sandwiches. But, no one in our household eats tomato sandwiches. Or raw tomatoes. Or any food with large tomato chunks. Caprese pizza is the closest thing to a "real" tomato that we'll eat, and they were on the menu a week or two ago.

So ... what was a girl to do with five ready-to-eat tomatoes? I couldn't let them go to waste.

I did what any technologically savvy girl would do -- I turned to the internet.

We do like tomato soup here at the Witherow house (no chunks, please), and I found a recipe on foodnetwork.com that looked like it had potential, so I decided to give it a try, even though eating soup in the middle of August while it's 90+ degrees outside is a little ridiculous.

Side note - is it weird that I had never tasted tomato soup until college? Or maybe I had graduated college ... anyway, it was not a soup I ate growing up. It is a recently acquired taste of mine. And we don't eat the Campbell's Tomato Soup, either - we go for the good stuff - Wolfgang Puck's Tomato-Basil Soup (I can only find it at Publix). Yum.


Cream of Fresh Tomato Soup
Adapted from Barefoot Contessa's recipe on foodnetwork.com
3 tablespoons good olive oil
1 1/2 cups chopped red onions
2 carrots, unpeeled and chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
4 pounds vine-ripened tomatoes, coarsely chopped and seeded (about 5 large)
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/4 cup packed chopped fresh basil leaves, plus julienned basil leaves, for garnish
3 cups chicken stock
1/2 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 cup heavy cream (I used half & half instead)
Croutons, for garnish

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat. Add the onions and carrots and saute for about 10 minutes, until very tender. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, sugar, tomato paste, basil, chicken stock, salt, and pepper and stir well.

Bring the soup to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, uncovered, for 30 to 40 minutes, until the tomatoes are very tender. Add the cream to the soup and process it through a food mill* into a bowl, discarding only the dry pulp that's left. Reheat the soup over low heat just until hot and serve with julienned basil leaves and/or croutons.

*I don't own a food mill, so I just pureed everything in a blender until smooth and it was the perfect consistency.