Tomato Day

Today I have a variety of tomatoes from grocery shopping.  I can't stop myself from buying good looking red luscious tomatoes whenever I see it. These are some of the tomatoes that I have today. For cherry tomatoes, I'd do slow roast to have it with bread and save some later to make tomato soup for lunch. For Momotaro tomatoes (Japanese tomatoes), we'll have it fresh as mid-afternoon snack.

"No, thanks!, I'm not a big fan of fresh tomato", I used to say that to CP whenever we had fresh tomato added in the dish. But not anymore since the day that I got to know Momotaro tomatoes (Japanese tomato). It's so soft, juicy, sweet and totally delicious. And it's so simple to prepare. All you need it just a drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil and good flaky sea salt.  Taste is heavenly.  G and Z, my two boys love it too.

Tomato soup (modified from Jamie Oliver)

Ingredients

• 1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and coarsely grated
• a handful of fresh basil, leaves picked, stalks finely chopped
• olive oil
• 3 tablespoons double cream
• 400 g super-ripe tomatoes• 600 litres chicken or vegetable stock
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cooking Method

Put onion, garlic, carrot and basil stalks into a large pot with a couple of lugs of olive oil. Cover the pan, and simmer gently without colouring for 20 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. While the veg are simmering, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 30 seconds, then remove the skins and roughly chop the flesh. Add these to the veg, then pour in the stock and simmer for a further 20 minutes with the lid on. At this point it's nice to purée the soup using either a food processor, a liquidizer or a hand-held blender. Once you've puréed the soup, put it back into the pan, bring it back to a simmer, and season very carefully with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Turn off the heat add the cream. Just before serving garnish with roasted tomatoes and some fresh basil leaves.