This easy soup is one for the tomato lovers. I’ve used tinned chopped tomato, but be very picky with tinned tomato and don’t just buy the cheapest. The tomatoes I use (Napolina brand) are 70% tomato by weight, in tomato juice with added citric acid (preservative) and that’s the entire ingredient list. It could be replaced with an equivalent weight of blanched and skinned Roma tomatoes and a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, but I’m after low-effort here.

Use fresh tarragon if you can get it (to taste, maybe 2 or 3 tbsp of packed chopped leaf), and add it with the basil. The last time I bought fresh tarragon from Tesco what I got was not tarragon, I’m 100% certain of this, it didn’t look like tarragon and it didn’t have even slightly the right flavour!

Hunting

• 200g Brown Onion — peeled and diced
• 25g Unsalted Butter
• 400g Carrot — peeled, topped, and tailed
• 10g (small knob) Ginger — skin scraped off and thinly sliced
• 15g (4 cloves) Garlic — peeled and sliced
• 1 (10g) Chicken Stock Cube
• 1200g canned Chopped Tomatoes (in “Rich Tomato Juice”)
• 3tsp (heaped) Dried Tarragon
• 2tsp Black Pepper — fresh ground
• 100ml dry White Wine
• 25g fresh Basil — chopped

Killing

1. In a large pot melt the butter and start frying the onion, with the dried tarragon, sliced ginger, and black pepper.
2. Meanwhile peel/slice carrot as required and place in with softened onion (not browned!).
3. Toss carrot with onion then pour in wine and let simmer away.
4. Now add chopped tomato, stock cube melted in 500ml of hot water, and the sliced garlic.
5. Put on very low heat and let simmer until the carrot is granny-cooked (30 minutes should do), then remove from heat and let cool.
6. When cool enough that you could eat it without pain it’s time to emulsify!.
7. First fine-chop the basil and stir through the soup, then blend to a smooth consistency in whatever sized batches fit your emulsifier.

Serving

Heat to desired temperature and eat, or package and fridge/freeze. I’d serve
this with some fresh chopped basil, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a
dollop of natural yoghurt.

The serve to the right has all this except the basil, there’s a generous grinding of pepper on there though. The small serve (100g) of new potatoes adds a bit of extra fodder to this meal. They’re microwaved for 3 minutes, tossed in EVOO, pepper and a little salt and then browned under an overhead grill. The beer is Innis & Gunn — Oak Aged Beer. It’s taking a long time to find a decent variety of drinkable British beer and this is a new favourite — now if only the Poms sold decent beer by the case like we do in Australia!

Counting

A serving for me is around 300ml and this recipe makes 6 servings, but could probably make 8 if you prefer a less thick soup (add 1.2l of water instead of 500ml). Based on a serving being 1/6th of this recipe with a 2g drizzle of EVOO and a 20g dollop of natural yoghurt I’ve calculated this approximate nutritional information (thanks to gourmet, USDA and a few manual database entries). The essentials and highlights:

Thing	Value
Energy	142 Calories
Carbs	20g
Protein	5g
Fat	6g
Saturated	2g
Sodium	379mg
Dietry Fibre	4g
Calcium	153mg
Iron	2mg
Folate	35µg
Vitamin A	8598IU
Vitamin C	26mg

The potatoes and beer aren’t accounted for here. Around 70Cals for the spuds with 15g of carbs. Beer? That’s just getting daft.