Tomato Basil Soup from Scratch

The other day Kalissa posted this on Facebook.

“My mom Roger Jo Kramer is the best cook in the entire world  ESPECIALLY during garden harvest! Her eggplant Parmesan + tomato basil soup was so so so good! Thanks for the feast Ma!”

I did make all of this food in one morning while she was visiting.  Five of the grandkids were here at the time too.  It was a crazy morning but so much fun.  I just LOVE cooking and miss having a husband to cook for.  This day was my day to make up for lost time and make everything.

The comment section was really busy after Kalissa posted this.  I have had requests for my Eggplant Parmesan recipe and my Tomato Basil Soup recipe.

I am going to apologize in advance.  I have no recipe.  I didn’t base this on any recipe.  I just made something I thought I would like and it slightly changes every time I make it as I’ve never written down the recipe and I’ve never measured a thing…it’s ALWAYS GOOD is the only thing that is consistent.

I didn’t take any pictures when I made this so I’m going to piece together pictures from a few different blog posts.  I want to be able to share the recipe while ingredients are still readily available from your gardens.

I’m going to warn you in advance that mine has tomato seeds in it.  The recipe is a little more hearty than most.  I start out by making yard sauce.  I didn’t know a thing about yard sauce until… I watched this video.  It’s SUPER easy to make and I highly recommend it.  For the yard sauce “recipe”, watch the video.

Here are the tomatoes and garden “stuff” that I put into this batch of yard sauce.

Making yard sauce is a great way to use up all of the cherry tomatoes in your garden.  This has a variety of all the different tomatoes I raised.  It has peppers and onions.   This batch didn’t have the fresh basil on it yet.

I drizzle olive oil over the top.  I salt the entire concoction too.  I bake this in the oven for about an hour and 15 minutes on 400.

When it comes out of the oven it looks more like this…

Let it cool until it’s easy to work with.

Normally all this would be put into a blender as is and blended. Then you can use that sauce as you would spaghetti sauce.

I’ve learned I don’t love that it is liquid-y as it takes quite a while to cook down the sauce into a thicker consistency for spaghetti sauce.  Because of that dislike, I got the idea to start trying to make tomato basil soup with more of the liquid part of this concoction.

So…  I spoon the mixture into the blender. Trying to get a half and half measurement of half chunkiness (tomatoes, peppers, etc) and half liquid.  I put that into the blender and blend on the medium setting until it’s pretty smooth.

I have a Ninja Blender and it is the very best blender I’ve ever owned.  I will not buy a different brand ever.

Now is the tricky part of the “recipe”.

I make this in a large quantity so I freeze some and use some right away.  To freeze it, I put it in plastic containers and pop them in the freezer.  I unthaw to use it.

Now to actually use it, I put the amount I want to serve into a pan.

On this day I needed soup for Kalissa, Gannon, and me.  I added a little bit of cream to it.  I’m going to take a wild guess and say 1/4 of a cup of cream for every bowl of soup you are making.

From here I taste test.  I add garlic, pepper, onion powder, paprika, Italian Seasoning, and salt if needed.

This is another thing you’ll have to do to taste.  Experiment and find out what works for you.  (PLEASE NOTE:  Do not add cream and then freeze it.  The cream is only added when you are in the final preparations to serve this)  Heat the mixture to the temp you want to eat it and serve.

Now about the rest of the yard sauce that was in the pan…put that in your blender and blend that.  I freeze that in gallon bags (only put about how much you would use for a batch of spaghetti in each bag) and use it when the snow flies and I want a reminder that garden season is coming.  I use this in lasagna and spaghetti.  It’s so GOOD.  I also use it in eggplant parmesan.

Karl’s friend was over the other day and had supper with us.  He said he wasn’t a real fan of tomato soup.  Oh my.  He changed his tune after he tried this and had a second bowl of soup.  I’ve been eating this LOTS over the last week with a sandwich.  It makes the perfect meal.  YUM!!

I know this isn’t a real “recipe” but it’s about as close as I can get to one.  As I said earlier in the post, the idea really only came about because I wanted to use up some of the liquid of the yard sauce so I didn’t have to have it on the stove to cook down quite as long.  It was a great solution.

Let me know if you try it!!  I’d love to hear what you think about it.