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I love a good bowl of tomato basil soup. I grew up with Sunday night dinners being soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. My mom would make the tomato basil soup with milk and that is a food memory that is fondly remembered.
With not eating dairy and trying to keep away from soy as much as possible, seems like whenever I looked at ready-made tomato soups I would find these two ingredients amongst other items I really didn’t want in my soup.
I also love a good recipe challenge, so I set out to make cream of vegetable tomato basil soup, because we can’t just have plain old tomato soup now can we?
It’s important to me to know what is in my food, if it’s processed it’s hard to totally know what all is in there. Our great grandmothers had a good idea of what all was in their food, we need to get back to the basics. We need to strive to make most of what we but in our bodies from scratch. That means shopping the perimeter of the Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Co-ops. Better yet hit the farmers markets or become part of a CSA. That will result in buying more fruits and vegetables and making more of a whole food plant-based meal. Buying your food in the produce and bulk foods area should be a priority and this is where buying organic counts.
Strive to make your meals from scratch and not from a box. Know what’s in your food.
Now while this isn’t the tomato soup I grew up with, the cashews add the creaminess to this cream of vegetable tomato basil soup, it’s fresh and good ol comfort food for a chilly day. Dish yourself up a bowl and sit down with a good book and enjoy. This recipe is enough for a family or great for warming throughout the week.
Ingredients
- 3 cups of carrot juice-I whipped this up with 2 1/2 cups water and 4 carrots in my vitamix
- 1 1/2 lbs of tomatoes chopped or two 28 oz cans of whole or diced tomatoes
- 3 stalks of chopped celery
- 1 small onion chopped
- 1 large shallot chopped
- 3 cloves of garlic chopped
- 2-3 cups trimmed and broken up broccoli
- 1/2 head broken up cauliflower
- 1 red pepper chopped
- couple handfuls of chopped kale
- Any other vegi’s you want to add
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- 1 cup cashews
- 1/2 cup fresh basil chopped, more if you like
- 1 15 oz can of tomato sauce (optional)
Instructions
- Put all vegetables, bay leaf,and thyme in large pot and simmer for 30 minutes until slightly tender.
- Remove bay leaf.
- Remove as much of the liquid as you can into blender,(like a vitamix that has a vented lid).
- Add 1 cup of the vegi’s, and the cashews and blend.
- Add blender mixture back into soup pot.
- Stir in fresh basil.
- Optional to add some tomato sauce to give it more of a tomato punch.
Tags: gluten free vegan Vitamix
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