Tomato Soup - A Food Tech Homework - The Yorkshire Dad of 4

One of the great things about your children starting at secondary school is that they are suddenly exposed to a whole new world of education. Gone are the primary school days where numeracy, literacy, and PE were all they could muster when asked about their day. Now they have days and weeks filled with individual subjects and they’re exposed to new ideas.

One of the new subjects that you year-7 will encounter is Food Technology (Food Tech or simply FT). It’s not just a class about cooking, but about food science and nutrition too. I remember it as home economics but let about how old I am.

With Coronavirus affected all our lives, especially how schools are operating right now, it’s inevitable that FT has been altered. At the moment Delilah is not able to actually do any cooking in school as this seems to have been isolated just to those in year-11 studying GCSE FT.

So, Delilah’s FT homework tends to be to make something or help prepare a meal at home. Her latest homework was to make tomato soup.

I LOVE tomato soup and it’s even better when it’s homemade. I like to make a simple tomato soup using tinned tomatoes but on this occasion, we went with fresh tomatoes and roasted them first.

There’s nothing better or more comforting on a cold winter’s day than a steaming bowl of tomato soup with some buttered crusty bread to dip in it.

Delilah did bring a recipe home with her that she was provided with. However, she did say the teacher said they could make their own version – so that’s what we did. I pretty much just made this up on the spot!

Here’s the ingredients we used and this made 3 portions:

1kg tomatoes (quartered and seeds removed)
3-4 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp butter
1 medium leek (halved lengthways and finely sliced)
1 large stick of celery (finely sliced)
3 cloves of garlic (roughly chopped)
1 tsp paprika
600 ml vegetable stock (2 stock cubes)
2 tbsp tomato puree
salt & pepper

Now, the leek was used in place of an onion as we had a couple of leeks left hanging around in the fridge that really needed using up. The other went in a bacon and leek carbonara.

Making soup really is pretty simple and in reality, chopping the veg up took the longest time.

I allow Delilah to use my sharp chef’s knife because I want her to be confident with kitchen knives and learn to use them properly. But, always make sure you supervise your children with knives (got to get the health and safety bit in).

We left the tomatoes to roast for about 30 minutes, checking on them occasionally and tossing them around, and got on with chopping the other vegetables.

So, to prepare this tasty tomato soup we started by chopping the tomatoes into quarters and removing the seeds. We then tossed them around in the vegetable oil in a roasting tray and whacked them into a pre-heated oven at 220 celcius (gas mark 9 or 240 C without fan).

As this soup is going to get well and truly blitzed in the blender you don’t need to be too fussy about how you chop your veg for this. We trimmed the leek and then sliced it lengthways before roughly chopping it. The celery was roughly chopped, as was the garlic.

Melt the butter in a large pan over a medium heat and put in the leeks, celery, and garlic. Mix it around until it’s all covered in the butter and cook until soft. Keep stirring it occasionally so it doesn’t start to stick.

Take the tomatoes out of the oven after about half an hour and add to the pan of veg. Stir it around and add the vegetable stock and tomato puree. We used two vegetable stock cubes in 600ml of boiling water.

Stir and add the paprika, then add salt and pepper to taste.

We heated for another 5 or so minutes before putting in a jug blender and thoroughly blitzing it until smooth. We started with a stick blender at first but it just wasn’t doing the job right.

Delilah was really pleased with how this came out and tasted, as was I. We allowed it to cool before popping it into a tub and keeping in the fridge overnight.