Creative Cooking Fridays Presents: Tomato Basil Soup

Tomato Basil Soup

So first of all I have to admit that I'm cheating, since technically I do my creative cooking Fridays on a Friday and this weekend I chose to cook on a Saturday instead. The reason for this is because, after 2 weeks of feeling like a truck ran over my face (stupid sinus infection) I was feeling too ill yesterday to cook. Since I was feeling better today, I decided to experiment in the kitchen with a new dish: Tomato Basil Soup. Obviously I chose to prepare another soup this week because I'm trying to build up my immune system and I want to eat more foods that will keep me warm, fulfilled and feeling better. The Chicken Noodle Soup that I prepared last week was excellent, and I was able to make enough to freeze and eat throughout the week for dinner. I'm hoping that I will be able to do the same with this Tomato Basil Soup.

As soon as I realized that I wanted to make another soup, Tomato Basil was the first thing that came to mind. I've never really been that much of a soup person, so I didn't have a ton of soups on my mind to choose from, but I did remember having a great soup in the past. When I was in high school I worked at Mellow Mushroom, a pizzeria, which had a delicious Tomato Basil Soup. During the wintertime, I always ordered it, so I thought that a Tomato Basil Soup would be perfect to make now.

Keep in mind that the title of these blog entries contains the words creative cooking as in it's my first time making these things so I indeed am being very creative. This was especially the case for this soup because I really didn't have any idea what I was doing. Before making the soup I browsed a couple of recipes online but I failed to find a recipe that I liked, and most of them were very intricate and contained ingredients that I knew I wouldn't find here. I was also being very creative because I couldn't find one of the main ingredients that I needed for the soup, fresh basil, which in Spanish is albahaca. Instead of fresh basil, I had to use the dried basil seasoning that you buy from the supermarket. I decided that with this dish I was going to experiment a bit.



Tomatoes



I began cooking at around 8:30pm. I started to play season 2 of Sex and the City, and for the first time in over 2 weeks, I had a glass of wine. I figured that it couldn't do that much harm to have one glass, plus that's not on the list of things to avoid when you have a sinus infection. I started cutting up fresh tomatoes and a few other things that I was going to put in the soup, like onions and garlic. I then grilled the garlic and onions for a bit and added the fresh tomatoes to a saucepan along with tomato juice. I then let the tomato mixture simmer for about 30 minutes.

While this was simmering, I cut up some peppers and onions for the dish that I was going to prepare on Sunday, chicken fajitas!

Once the tomato mixture was ready; I crushed the tomatoes up a bit and added some cream and butter. I then added the onions, garlic, basil, sea salt, and pepper. I topped the soup off with some fresh parsley; I know it sounds strange to put parsley in a basil soup, but I felt that I needed some kind of fresh herb.

When the soup was ready I put some in a bowl and tried it. I wasn't very hungry so I just ate a little. It was full of flavor and it had the perfect creamy tomato texture. It was delicious!

I don't think that the soup was as healthy as I thought it would be, but that's because I added cream and butter; I probably could have avoided it, but it wouldn't have been as rich nor would it have the perfect tomato-basil color.

In the future, I would definitely use fresh basil instead of the dried up stuff that I was forced to use. I'm sure that it will be much easier to find in America, or possibly in a bigger city in Spain. I would also use more tomatoes, because the texture wasn't as thick as I would like it to be. But even with the lack of ingredients and uncertainty on how to prepare the soup, I would definitely say that I am proud of my creation, it turned out great!