Homemade tomato soup

As a child, I used to adore instant tomato soup with slices of buttery toast as lunch after school. As a teenager, I became wary of preservatives and MSG and started avoiding packet soups (reading the label can be quite scary!)

It was while training as a chef at Prue Leith's in Centurion that my love of making homemade soup emerged. I guess it's because making a soup is the antithesis of the type of food I would spend my days preparing, namely simple; quick; easy; delicious and comforting.

So here is a fat-free recipe I threw together the other day from ingredients on-hand. It turned out to be oh-so-good, and churned up a bevy of childhood memories of many a day spent sitting at my parents' kitchen counter with toast and soup mug in-hand.

Homemade Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

• 8 tomatoes
  
• 6 sweet potatoes
  
• 1 large red pepper
  
• 2 tsp dried rosemary
  
• salt
  
• black pepper

Method:

• Keep the sweet potatoes unpeeled if you are using the whole, fresh kind but just make sure to scrub them well, so that you don't get any grains of sand in your finished product.
  
• Roughly cut up the sweet potatoes and red pepper, and get them on the stove boiling in just enough lightly salted water to cover for 10 - 15 minutes or until soft.
  
• Add in your tomato chunks and simmer for 5 minutes.
• Take the pot off the heat, add the rosemary and then blend everything together.
• Once blended, season the whole batch with salt and pepper to taste.
• Estimation: this should be enough to serve three people as a deep-bowl main course, and six people as a shallow-bowl starter.
  

As always, born-up-a-tree! :-)