Lucky Orange Tomato Soup, and "non" ingredients!

I know I've done a few posts already about tomato soup, but here's another!

Every Fall for at least the past 4-5 years I make and freeze a ton of tomato soup and sauce in my freezer.  It's one of the easiest soups to make, with really only one ingredient, tomatoes!  Making soup, 99.9% of the time starts with an onion.  Well, onion, celery, carrot (mirepoix http://suite101.com/article/mirepoix-a14814), so to me those are "non ingreients"!  I also include the following as non ingredients:

oil/butter
salt and pepper
(sometimes garlic).  

These non ingredients should always be on hand if you want to get in the habit of cooking on a regular basis. Good thing they are also inexpensive.  Onto my soup.

I decided to go the the Farmers Market late yesterday and take my chances on finding a relatively close parking space. (Mark was doing his interview with Scott Iradella)  Lucky me I did!  I went with the intention of buying a box of tomatoes, as the season is coming to a close any day, and the thought of not ever making any homemade tomato soup this year finally became too much to bear!  Double lucky me I got there about 1/2 hour before closing and all the heirloom tomatoes (and everything else) were $1 a pound!  If I would have had my cart with me I would have bought two boxes!  (triple lucky me, I didn't need to hoard anyway!)

I grabbed all of the orange tomatoes that were left first. For some reason orange tomato soup sounded extra appealing to me....quadruple lucky me, it was!  In fact the orange tomato soup was twice as good/sweet as the red.  The red tomatoes were unusually tart. So tart that I had to add sugar, in fact 3 tbls!  But in all fairness I made the red soup with only onion, as I used the only carrots and celery I had with the orange soup!  And this was in a large batch of 3 liters, but still. Looks like I'll have to turn it into some sauce and add celery, and some sweet carrots and red bells to round out the flavors.....but I got the important part done!

Since I knew I was going to puree my soup through a food mill I kept the onion in bigger slices.  As I was cooking the onion and celery I decided last minute to add a big pinch of red pepper flakes (another non ingredient!).  Add in diced carrot, all the tomatoes, cover, bring to a boil.  Turn down heat, move the cover on the pot to allow a bit of steam to escape and tomatoes to reduce a bit, cook for 30 minutes.

Puree in foodmill, which will keep the skin and the seeds out.  If you don't mind risking a slighty bitter taste from the skin and seeds then you can use a blender to puree.  Season with salt and pepper. (and maybe a pinch of sugar).

More blog posts about tomato soup!

http://tracysfoodandthought.blogspot.com/2008/09/tomato-soup.html

http://tracysfoodandthought.blogspot.com/2008/09/back-in-kitchen.html

http://tracysfoodandthought.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-first-batch-this-summer.html