Vicar's Kitchen: Roast Med Veg Soup

This is one of my favourite recipes at the moment partly because I had been looking for ages for a recipe that can use up the two bags of tiny weeny pasta that I accidently bought when shopping online! Now I'm actually quite into it as it fills out the soup so that you hardly even need any bread with it to make a hearty lunch.

The tiny pasta that needed a home and now ends up, well, everywhere!

It's also a great soup for using up whatever is in the fridge, this version uses tomato, courgette and carrot but you could throw pretty much anything in there with the tomatoes. I often just make it as a simple roast tomato soup too and it is delish.

Roast Med Veg Soup

Ingredients

800g tomatoes
1 courgette
1 litre of chicken or veg stock
2 carrots
1 red onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp. of tomato paste
A splosh of balsamic vinegar
100g tiny soup pasta
2 tsp brown sugar

serves 4

Method

• Start by chopping the tomatoes into quarters and the courgette (or any other veg you are using) into chunks about 3 cm cubed. Chuck all the veg into a roasting tin and splosh over some olive oil and the balsamic vinegar. Season with a sprinkle of sea salt and black pepper. Roast for about 20 minutes until the veg is soft.
• Blitz the veg in a blender and put to one side
• Fry the chopped onion, garlic and carrot in a tablespoon of oil in a large saucepan
• When the onion is soft add the stock, the blended roast veg mix, the tomato paste and the sugar.
• Gently bubble the soup for 15-20 minutes until the carrot is nice and soft.
• Blitz the soup in a blender and return to the pan.
• Add the pasta and cook for the length of time that the pasta packet instructs you. I leave it for about 10 minutes. You may need to add a bit more water at this stage if the soup is getting very thick as the pasta absorbs some of the water.

And ta da! Hearty flavoursome soup!

Enjoy.