Recipe: Roasted Tomato and Red Capsicum Soup

This soup began as a bag of tomatoes and red capsicums that were beyond their salable best.  I snapped up the $2 bag last week whilst grocery shopping, and they have been skulking about in my fridge ever since.

Well...Sunday night happens to be soup night quite often so armed with a recipe from Julie Goodwin's Our Family Table I decided to deal with these less-than-impressive vegies.  As it turns out Julie's recipe was not what ended up in our bowls, apart from the fact that my tomatoes were indeed roasted! 

Roasted Tomato and Red Capsicum Soup

Ingredients:

1kg tomatoes, quartered

4 red capsicums, seed and stem discarded

1 red onion, peeled and diced

2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

2 tablespoons tomato paste

a slurp of red wine

800g tin diced tomatoes

2 cups chicken stock (water and stock powder is fine)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.  Place the tomatoes, cut side up, on a lined baking tray.  Spray with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.  Bake for 45 minutes.
2. Preheat the griller and lay the capsicums skin side up on the tray.  Grill until the skins are completely blackened.  Remove from griller and cover so the skins sweat and are easier to remove.  When cool, remove skins.
3. Saute the onion and garlic in a large soup pot until softened; add the tomato paste and cook for a minute or two while stirring.
4. Add the wine (maybe about 1/4 cup?) and stir to release the tomato paste from the bottom of the pan.
5. Place the roasted tomatoes, capsicums, tinned tomatoes and chicken stock in the pot.
6. Using a stab blender, blend the soup until it is completely smooth.  
7. Add salt and pepper to taste.
8. Serve with a nice crusty bread.

A loaf of red capsicum ciabata bread went very well indeed with this soup.  We even had leftovers soup, which I've just had for lunch today.  Ooohhhh so good.  Rich, robust, smooth.

This was the perfect lunch to counter my most-incredibly-frustrating-morning-ever, which included tears, tantrums and a great deal of growling.  Loudly.  The kids wisely avoided me and stayed at the other end of the house.  Those people are smart when they need to be.  However, as a kindred spirit with Jen I overcame the technology and I won "like a boss".  Yeah, maybe not so much bossing, but more whimpering and relief as I fell across the line when the goal was reached.  Don't ever tell me I have to set up an online learning module using my University's platform to do so.  I don't even know how those people live a sane life.

But the soup - not so hard.  You can do that "like a boss" without even blinking an eye.