Tomato and Bread Soup

I love soup very much.  Tomatoes are still filling the store shelves so I decided to try making tomato soup for the first time. I needed a recipe.  I don't have a blender (shame!) so anything that needed to be pureed was out.  I settled on something pretty simple.  The tomato and bread soup from Jack Bishop's The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook fit the parameters nicely.  It has eight ingredients and that is if you count salt and pepper.  I even had a container of vegetable stock in my freezer that I made a couple of months ago.

I have never tried to peel and seed a tomato before today.  It wasn't really an adventure.  I cut an "x" in the bottoms of the tomatoes and dropped into boiling water for a bit.  The skins came right off.  The tomatoes I got didn't have a lot of seeds either.

The last time I tried to cook tomatoes I nearly gagged on the result so I was a bit worried about how this would turn out.  The garlic and basil flavored the tomatoes nicely.   The hardest part of all this was getting the soup salted correctly.  Dried bread cubes are added to give this soup some substance.  I am not a food photographer so this is the best I could do.

I was happy with the result.

Since I didn't know how the soup would turn out I needed a backup plan.  While the soup was coming together I put some sausage and potatoes in the oven.  Mmm pork.