The Best Tomato Soup IN THE WORLD!

Well, I haven't had all the tomato soup so maybe I can't know for sure, but this soup is pretty awesome and we have eaten a whole mess load of it in the past month.  I got the inspiration for it here. But we are pretty much dairy-free over here so I had to tweak the recipe a bit. 

Ingredients:

About 6 pounds of tomatoes (any tomato will work, but Roma tomatoes will have more meat in them and give you a slightly thicker soup)
3 Tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion
4 cloves of garlic (more or less to taste)
4 large carrots
1 cup cashew cream* (or heavy cream, or light cream)
salt, pepper, herbs such as oregano, basil, thyme, or whatever you like.  I just put in an ice cube of pesto from the freezer

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 
Cut tomatoes in half, trim the stem end and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper cut side down.  Don't worry about peeling them, when they're done roasting the skins will slip right off.  Roast for 30 minutes.  Let cool slightly so you can handle the skins without damaging yourself.  Pull off the skins.

Heat the olive oil in a soup pot and saute onion and garlic until soft.  Add carrots. Add tomatoes.  cook on a low simmer until carrots are soft. 

Alternately you can skip all the steps after roasting the tomatoes and throw everything in the crock pot and cook on low for 2-4 hours until the carrots are tender.

Use an immersion blender or a blender in batches to puree the soup. 

Stop here if you'd like to freeze the soup.

Add cashew cream (or the cream you're using) and drop in your frozen pesto, if using.  Heat the soup back up slowly.  If you use real cream make extra sure not to let it boil. 

Yay!

Cashew Cream?

Cashew cream is the best thing in the whole world if you avoid dairy and even if you don't!  I have used it in this soup and in a corn chowder and neither of the soups have that, "this should be cream, but clearly we're dealing with hippies with some sort of dairy-free notion and they refuse to use the good stuff" taste.  Really, it adds something magical to soups.  You make it using raw cashews , which don't have the strong flavor of cashews you're thinking about.  It's thick and creamy and gives the soup a deep flavor. 

This is how you make it:
Measure 2 cups raw whole cashews (pieces tend to dry out) and cover in cool water.  Put bowl in the fridge over night.  Drain the water and put the cashews in a blender and cover with water (about an inch over the cashews).   Blend it until it's smooth.  I have heard the suggestion to strain it if there are any tiny pieces in it your blender couldn't take care of, but I never had that issue and my blender wasn't the best.  Try it!  It's sooo good!

Tomatoes

If August were a woman she would be draped in red, with long red hair, and a fiery temper.  I'm pretty sure she just stormed into my house dumped a bunch of tomatoes and zucchini on my kitchen floor, looked at me lovingly, and, just as I was getting used to having her around, said she was about ready to leave.  Sigh.  That is the way of passionate love affairs, I guess.  When it goes that way, you can usually console your self with a zip-up hoodie your fiery-tempered lover has left behind in their haste.  In this way August's leaving me is similar.  She is leaving her bounty for me to savor while she slips out the door and the slow, cool comfort of Autumn takes her place. 

Last year, with the blight, there was scarcely a tomato around.  I bought a box of sauce tomatoes from a local farm and made a batch of ketchup that wasn't very good.  Well, it was good, but it wasn't ketchup.  If you thought of it as tomato spread, or something like that it was alright. But if you sat there with your french fry and thought, "I can't wait to have some ketchup," you would find yourself disappointed.  The spices were too strong and all wrong.    It did, however, make a mean BBQ Sauce. 

This year there are tomatoes! It is very exciting. So far, I have preserved them by:

1. Roasting and Freezing:  Set your oven to 200 degrees, cut Tomatoes in half and line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and place tomatoes on the sheet cut side down.  Roast for 2 hours.  When they come out of the oven, let them cool so you can touch them.  The skins with just slip right off.  Pack a mason jar 2/3 full only! (the jar will crack in the freezer if it's more than that), and pop it in the freezer.  These can be used later for sauce or soup.  The roasting makes the flavor absolutely incredible. 

2. "Sun Dry" (dehydrate):  I sliced the big tomatoes into thirds and dehydrated them in my electric dehydrator for about a day.  The plum tomatoes I sliced in half and dehydrated them for longer.  The manual says it shouldn't take this long, but that's how long it took.  I am still having trouble finding the right consistency.  I know they should be leathery, but when they are they still seem wet, and I don't want them to mold.   So the truth is some of them are a little crisper than usual.  I'll have to soften them in water before I use them.  I have also dehydrated the cherry tomatoes. We had an abundance, and I couldn't figure out what to do with them.  We sliced them in half and dehydrated them (they are doing this right now) and I will pack them in olive oil in jelly jars. 

3. Tomato Jam:  What's tomato jam?  I don't really know.  It seems like it's similar to ketchup bu not as thick.  My two-and-a-half-year-old says, "I yike dis tomato jam, Mama."  I took the recipe from The Big Book Preserving the Harvest. 

4. Tomato Sauce:  This recipe I took from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  It is a water bath recipe, which means that it doesn't have to be pressure canned.  It has lemon juice added to boost the acidity so we don't get botulism.  I also boiled the ever-living life out of that stuff.  So hopefully we won't all die from a home cooked spaghetti dinner. 

I am hoping to make some salsa, some real ketchup, and some more tomato sauce.  I don't really have enough right now to make it through winter.  I think more than likely I will be spending the weekend gathering sauce tomatoes and canning.  Which is fine, really.  Now that the summer is coming to an end, my panicky feelings that it won't be enough are (mostly) turning into contended feelings of having done the best I could.  And after last year, I'm grateful for any tomatoes.