I made this recipe to help deal with my bounty of fresh tomatoes and basil. It turned out great but I did make quite a few changes. To make the recipe more lo-cal, I used 2 T butter and 2 T olive oil which worked fine to sauté the onions with out any sticking or dryness problems. Then so many reviewers said that they didn’t like straining out all the solids, so they didn’t strain the soup. I wanted the tomato solids but not the seeds, so I peeled the tomatoes after dropping them in boiling water, then I removed the skins, and then I quartered them and seeded them. To seed the tomatoes, either remove the seeds with a spoon or gently squeeze the quartered tomatoes over the sink to remove the seeds. This takes a bit of time but then no straining is necessary. I reduced the chicken broth to 1 - 14.5 oz can so as not to dilute the tomato taste too much and I think that worked well. Also I didn’t have any heavy cream, so I used evaporated milk. Evaporated milk has a richer taste than regular milk even if you use evaporated skim milk. I have an immersion blender, so that worked very well, no scalding of myself. The resulting soup was great and my husband who doesn’t like tomato soup, loved it.

Reviewed On: Aug. 24, 2009

I prepared this for dinner and thought it was excellent. The only substitution I made was to use red wine vinegar. For such a simple recipe, it is a great result. I love the flavor of the blueberries when you bite into them in this recipe.

Reviewed On: Mar. 19, 2009