Love my neighbour who gives me lovely fruit & veggies

What's cooking in The Quirky Nutshell today? My very kind and lovely neighbour has just delivered a box full of fruit and vegetables fresh from her garden! Yay! She included tomatoes,  cucumbers and cooking apples. What to do with all these wonderful things?

I'm going to make some fresh tomato soup for lunch. It's super easy to make and tastes amazing when using fresh produce. 

What do I need? 

1 kg fresh tomatoes 

2 red onions

Fresh basil

Salt and pepper to taste

Olive oil

300ml Vegetable stock

What do I need to do? 

Wash your tomatoes, cut them in half and place on a baking tray. Drizzle with olive oil, then add sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Place the baking tray in a preheated oven, 190 degrees for approx 45-60 mins until just starting to blacken around the edges.

Whilst your tomatoes are cooking, roughly chop your red onions. 

When the tomatoes are cooked leave them to cool for a few minutes. Start heating a drizzle oil in a saucepan adding your onions when the oil is hot enough. Sauté your onions until they are starting to turn translucent, add the tomatoes juice and all! Stir and leave to simmer for 5 minutes. Add 200ml of hot vegetable stock, season with black pepper and let it simmer for 15 minutes. 

When your tomatoes are simmered add these to a blender and blitz on high for a few minutes, stir through then add the last 100ml of hot stock. Voila!! Your soup is ready!! Serve with s drizzle of creme fraiche and a few scattered basil leaves and enjoy!! 

Lunch was followed by Apple Crumble Loaf, again a really simple and quick bake, I do like to keep things simple!! The recipe gave us 2 loafs of apple-crumbleness so we delivered some to Grandma and Grandad. Follow the link to take you to the recipe from BBC good food. 

Apple Crumble Loaf

Thanks for reading xxx