Super Easy Tomato Soup

My husband surprised me yesterday bringing me a present, a cookbook based on a TV series that I've been watching recently. The programme is situated in a restaurant and generally features the so-called "trendy cooking", rather than traditional recipes, thus I was a bit surprised to find a recipe for tomato soup. When it comes to soups, it's not a secret that they are rather easy to prepare, yet I didn't quite expected a recipe that doesn't require either chicken or vegetable stock! I knew I had to alter the recipe a little, as following the proportions given in the book we would obtain water mixture with a faint tomato flavour - not exactly what we want :)

To make the soup I used:
10 large, ripe tomatoes
1 litre of water
3 bay leaves
4-5 allspice berries
a pinch of dried dill
1 tablespoon of dried vegetables
1 table spoon of butter
salt and pepper to taste
cream or yoghurt
a handful of pasta (farfale or other)

Put tomatoes into a bowl of boiling hot water for about 10 minutes. Take them out and peel - soaking in hot water should make them peel more or less 'automatically'. Then dice them and put into a pan, add butter, salt and pepper, and simmer until tomatoes reduce into a pulp. At the same time boil water (1 litre) with dried vegetables, bay leaves, allspice, dill, salt and pepper. When tomatoes have reduced mix them with blender and add to the water and spices.

Cook pasta according to the instructions on the packet. Serve the soup with pasta, add a tablespoon of cream or yoghurt per plate. All in all, the soup turned out to be a pleasant surprise - a tad different to what I usually make - thicker texture, deep tomato flvour, very nice, indeed.

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