Tomato Soup Recipe

Two days ago, Ramki visited HeyMath! along with the teams which won first three places in Math Modeling contest of Kurukshetra 2009 . The only thing I knew about him was the fact that he cooked all alone for 500 people in just 3 hours (starting with cutting vegetables )  During his short informal talk, he spoke about how cookbooks cut short our creativity in cooking, by creating an illusion  – there is only one way to cook a recipe. According to him, the only requirement to cook a recipe is knowing the properties of basic ingredients(which he calls building blocks) to be used. Never use ingredients about which you do not know. By altering the amount of various ingredients or replacing one with another, one can cook the same recipe in different flavors. I wanted to try something on my own today, a simple one to start with like  Tomato soup ( the word ‘tomcat’ was resting at some spot of my cerebrum which  made me end up in ‘tomato’ soup)   Main ingredients – 4 or 5 medium sized bangalore tomatoes, 2 or 3 medium sized onions, 1 small capsicum, 3 to 4 garlic cloves, a tumbler of milk. Salt, maida flour, butter, olive oil, coriander leaves are needed in small quantities. Cook the tomatoes and peeled off onions for about 10 minutes in a pressure cooker. After cooling, peel off the tomatoes. In the mean time, apply olive oil on the surface of capsicum and keep it in direct fire such that its skin [alone] gets burnt uniformly. After sometime, peel off the capsicum. Now take the onions, tomatoes, capsicum, garlic cloves and mash them up in a mixer to a paste. Heat a pan and add a tea spoon of butter. When it melts, add a spoon of maida flour and stir. Add the tumbler of milk followed by the paste we have. Cook uncovered for about 3 to 4 minutes in medium heat.  In the end, add a pinch of salt, few pinches of pepper and coriander leaves. You may want to strain the soup to remove skin or seeds, if any. The quantity would be more than sufficient for 4 serves. It tasted good, really!  The only negative comment i received from my sis was about the color(it wasn’t really red or not even orange). Still, i can call it tomato soup Suggestions/improvements are welcome! Thanks to Ramki for rekindling my interest in cooking and to my mom for the basic ideas (and for certifying my recipe as well:)) As my interest in cooking is growing at some rate, i’ll come up with more recipes in future!