Creamy Tomato Basil Soup

My husband and I have a favorite little neighborhood restaurant, where we often go to have a late breakfast (and by late, I may mean 11am, or I may mean 4pm), or have a quiet lunch when we have a day off work, or have a late-night dinner-and-talk-and-not-have-to-hurry-at-all session. This restaurant has good food, comfortable food, but not earth-shatteringly terrific food. It's not pricey, and you can definitely show up without combing your hair. It's all about comfort at our neighborhood restaurant.

They do have one thing there that I think is amazing, however, and that is the tomato-basil soup. I love this soup so much! It's creamy goodness is something that I actually crave when I haven't had it in awhile, and I have even been known to get it for take-out. I have always wanted to try to make the soup at home, but I've never made anything remotely like it, and I couldn't even tell what might be in it, aside from tomatoes, basil, and cream.

Well, with our abundance of basil plants and lots of tomatoes left, we decided to have a soup-making Sunday. Usually we make chili or something else super-easy on football Sundays, but on this Sunday we decided to make the tomato basil (as our try-something-new for the week) and a big batch of chicken noodle, too.




We looked up a few recipes for tomato-basil soup online, and from these, my husband decided what should go in the soup would be: tomatoes, tomato juice, basil, heavy cream, butter, salt, and pepper. Normally we look online and then adapt recipes to our liking, but this one we found at AllRecipes and followed it almost exactly.

Ingredients to make around 4 servings (we made 16 and froze most)
4 tomatoes - peeled, seeded and diced
4 cups tomato juice
14 leaves fresh basil
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup butter
salt and pepper to taste

Directions
1.Place tomatoes and juice in a stock pot over medium heat. Simmer for 30 minutes. Puree the tomato mixture along with the basil leaves, and return the puree to the stock pot.
2.Place the pot over medium heat, and stir in the heavy cream and butter. Season with salt and pepper. Heat, stirring until the butter is melted. Do not boil.

I really loved this soup and I thought it was every bit as good as our neighborhood restaurant's, if not better. It looked beautiful, too. My husband is crazy and does not care for tomato soup, so I get 16 servings of soup all to myself. Most of the soup ended up in our freezer, for use as quick and easy weeknight meals. Yay!

It should be noted that this soup is not low-calorie or low-fat in any way! I used the highest quality ingredients: the freshest tomatoes, basil right off the plant, real butter and cream. I like to eat soup for a meal, so I figure that the extra calories and fat will help it have sticking power.