Tomato and black olive soup

Friday 1pm

Picked a huge bowl full of cherry tomatoes earlier, and there are still lots ripening up so I have no guilt about making half of them into a simple tomato soup.

- Half an onion and a clove of garlic are gently fried in some oil and butter till soft.

- Meanwhile peel and chop a couple of small potatoes for thickening and add them to the pan.

-Then the tomatoes – about three pounds in this case, along with a basil leaf or two.

- Stir and mix everything then add some stock, vegetable or in this case some chicken stock from the fridge that Nicola had made. I added a pint but the soup was a bit thin cos of the amount of liquid from the tomatoes and had to be boiled down a bit until it thickened up so next time I’ll only add half a pint I think.

- Anyway simmer now until the tomatoes and potatoes are cooked and soft about twenty minutes.

- Now the skin and seeds need to be removed which I do by putting a metal sieve over a big jug, pouring in the soup and pushing it through firmly with a wooden spoon.

- Wash the pan and put the soup back in to warm through, season and voila – tomato soup.

And that is how we ate it Nicola and I, sitting outside - a nice simple soup.

But all the way through the cooking I kept thinking it was a bit one dimensional, a though kept popping into my head - black olives. So today (Sunday) I finally got a jar.

- Draining a handful of olives I chopped and squashed them into a paste, then stirred a small desertspoonfull into the rest of the soup and warmed it through.

Delicious and quite pretty – the reddish orange colour speckled through with aubergine flecks. It will be my lunch tomorrow at work.