Luscious creamy tomato soup (minus the cream)

Well, the mother’s here and sadly my food consumption immediately gets curtailed because she thinks I eat way too much. I wonder why?!! And like all good mothers she feels that if you packed up a doggy bag at a restaurant at lunch, you should finish it for dinner. So in the afternoon we’d gone and eaten at the quite-lovely Café Delhi Heights and packed up some Scamorza pizza – which we couldn’t finish off. And for dinner I was told that we would have to finish said pizaa and a soup and salad would be nice. So I whipped up a lovely creamy tomato soup – without a smidgen of cream – and some salad greens with home-made honey mustard dressing. Made me feel quite virtuous and healthy – but only for tonight. Don’t want to make a bad habit out of eating well. This really is the perfect comfort food, very very sumptuous and ideal for the last few days of winter.

INGREDIENTS

• 5 chopped tomatoes
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 onion
• 1 tablespoon garlic paste
• 1 tablespoon ginger paste
• 1 carrot chopped
• 1 bayleaf
• 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 2 cups vegetable stock (I just add a Maggi vegetable stock cube)

PROCEDURE

• Take a pan, add a tbsp of butter and a tbsp of oil. Heat it and add the bay leaf. Let it sauté for 2 minutes. Add the chopped onion, celery, garlic, ginger and carrot. Saute and turn the flame to low. Cover the pan and let the vegetables soften for 10 minutes.
• Then add the tomatoes and salt, pepper, and sugar. Stir the tomatoes, turn the flame back on low and cover the pan and leave on the flame for close to 30 minutes.
• Uncover the pan, remove the bayleaf and let the tomato pulp cool down a bit. Remove the bayleaf and place the tomatoes in the mixer and puree. You could add some water at this stage.
• The return to the pan and add the milk till you get a creamier colour. Add the vegetable stock till you get it to the consistency you’d like. Tweak the seasoning and serve with croutons. It’s delicious, I promise you.