Cooking Fresh from the Garden: Rustic Skillet Tomato Soup
THE FARMHOUSE
Gardens can be a wonderful hang out spot, but the harvest is their raison d'être! And while I share lots of pictures of our garden throughout the summer, I don’t talk much about what we harvest and how we use it. So today I wanted to share a quick dinner we’ve been making - from garden to table. This rustic skillet tomato basil soup makes use of the tomatoes we have in abundance right now and it’s fresh, healthy, and full of flavor. Hope you enjoy!
This soup speaks my fall love language. It’s full of fresh and bursting-with-flavor veggies, but it’s hearty in the way a good chunky soup is.
You can catch the entire process from tomato harvest to dinner in the video below.
Garrett and I would both tell you that sometimes living in the country is pure magic and sometimes it’s exhausting. There's a lot of maintenance to do on a 3-acre property (the mowing!) and there’s a lot of jumping in the car and driving to town for anything and everything. But getting to walk out your door to harvest fresh basil and tomatoes to whip up this fresher-than-fresh lunch, is our kind of country living!
Of course you don’t need 3 acres to grow tomatoes and basil, a couple containers would do! Or a quick stop at a farmer’s market would get you the fresh produce needed for this soup. Let’s get to it…
Rustic Skillet Tomato Soup makes ~4 medium bowls
6 cups cherry tomatoes in halves or 1/4’s
Hand full of basil
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
1/3 cup olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp basalmic vinegar
‘mix ins’ - sausage, zucchini, mozzarella, poached egg, garbanzo or white beans
eggs for top, optional
fresh bread for serving
Heat olive oil in a cast iron skillet on medium. Add minced garlic and shallots and sauté until fragrant. Add tomatoes and sauté until soft, about 5 minutes. Add basil then remove from heat and pour into a bowl. Add salt and basalmic vinegar. This is the soup base.
In the cast iron pan, sauté any ‘mix-ins’ you’re using. Chop into bite-size pieces and combine everything in the skillet. Note we sautéed the mozzarella and served it on top instead of incorporating into the soup.
If you’re adding eggs on top (we did poached eggs), cook those separately and place on top.
Serve soup hot with fresh griddled (or toasted) bread.
Voila! Fresh tomato basil skillet soup right from the garden.
