What's Cooking?

Tomato and Black Olive Soup 


Picked a huge bowl full of cherry tomatoes earlier, and there are still lots ripening so I
have no guilt about making half of them into a simple tomato soup.

- Half an onion and a clove of garlic are gently fried in some oil and butter till soft.
- Meanwhile peel and chop a couple of small potatoes for thickening and add them to
the pan.
- Then the tomatoes – about three pounds in this case, along with a basil leaf or two.

Stir and mix everything then add some stock, vegetable or in this case some chicken
stock from the fridge that Nicola had made. I added a pint but the soup was a bit thin
cos of the amount of liquid from the tomatoes and had to be boiled down a bit until it
thickened up, so next time I’ll only add half a pint I think.
- Anyway, simmer until the tomatoes and potatoes are cooked and soft - about twenty
minutes.
- Now the skin and seeds need to be removed which I do by putting a metal sieve over
a big jug, pouring in the soup and pushing it through firmly with a wooden spoon.
- Wash the pan and put the soup back in to warm through, season and voila – tomato
soup.


But all the way through the cooking I kept thinking it was a bit one dimensional, a
thought kept popping into my head - black olives. So today  I finally got a jar.
- Draining a handful of olives I chopped and squashed them into a paste, then stirred a
small dessertspoonful into the rest of the soup and warmed it through.

Delicious and quite pretty – the reddish orange colour speckled through with aubergine
flecks. It will be my lunch tomorrow at work.