RECIPE: Elizabeth's Homemade Tomato Soup (Chapter 10)

I'm having a bumper crop of tomatoes this year in Tauranga - I think all this hot weather is helping them. A tip is to feed your tomatoes with leftover milk dregs mixed with water - just tip over the leaves (not during the hottest part of the day, though). When you're planting them, add a good couple of handfuls of sheep pellets (manure) and a teaspoon or two of milk powder in the hole.

So far, I've made some soup and a few bottles of sauce. If you don't grow your own, see if you can buy them by the boxful from your local fruit and vege mart for this recipe because you'll need a few... 12 pound to be precise! And remember, the riper - the better (especially for sauce).

Ingredients:

12lb ripe tomatoes (or 5.4 kg)

3 or 4 onions

3/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons pepper

3 or 4 cloves (or 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg)

1 pint water (or 570mL)

1 tablespoon salt

sprig of parsley

4 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons flour

Method:

• Chop up tomatoes roughly.

• Put everything (apart from the butter and flour) in a very large saucepan on the stove.

• Boil for between 30mins to one hour, then put through a mouli sieve (if you have one), or strain.

• But soup back on the stove, and bring it back to the boil.

• Mix flour and butter together and add slowly to soup.

• Once soup is boiling, turn off heat, and leave it to cool down.

• Then, measure out portions into containers and put in freezer.

• I then take the frozen blocks of soup out of the containers and put into freezer bags to store.

#recipe #tomatosoup