I was blessed with an abundance of garden fresh tomatoes. There have been so many tomato sandwiches, which I love but I am on a 30 day 100% raw food challenge and I can’t have any bread so I needed to come up with a way to use up some of these tomatoes before putting the rest in the freezer for Winter soups. I came up with two, I will share one this week and one next week.
This weeks recipe requires a Vitamix. It is the only blender that will heat up the soup just with the friction of the blades. You will blend until you see steam. If you have a laser thermometer you can use it- you don’t want the soup to go over 110 degrees. It will be warm but still raw- all the enzymes and nutrients are still intact.
This recipe calls for pesto. You won’t use very much of it so put the rest in the freezer for future recipes. I seperated mine out into 4 ounce mason jars. I only put about 3 ounces in each jar and got 4 jars for the freezer.
Pesto:
- 4 ounces (by weight) of basil
- 3 Tbsp pine nuts
- 2 tbsp minced garlic
- juice 1 lemon
- 4 Tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1/2 tsp sea salt (plus more to taste)
- 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
I put all the ingredients into my blender- except for the oil. I blended the ingredients down and then drizzled the olive oil. I usually don’t use so much oil but I wanted to be able to drizzle the pesto onto the soup. You can adjust the taste by adding more lemon juice, garlic, nutritional yeast or salt to your liking.
Soup:
Everything goes into the blender making it a super easy recipe.
- 1/2 cup raw cashews soaked in warm water for 30 minutes
- 1/2 cup sundried tomatoes and 1/4 cup raisins soaked in 1/2 cup of warm water (you will reserve the water for the soup)
- 1 cup of cherry tomatoes
- 5 medium-large (not huge) tomatoes quartered
- 1 medium carrot cut into large chunks
- 1 green onion
- 1 red bell pepper cut into large chunks
- 2 large cloves of garlic
- 1 tbsp sea salt
Drain the cashews and put into blender. Pour the sundried tomatoes and raisins (with liquid) into blender. Add rest of ingredients. Blend until smooth and then keep blending until it starts to steam or reaches 110 degrees fahrinheit.
Pour into bowl and add basil. I just added drops but you could put basil into a squeeze bottle and squeeze a spiral over the top of the soup. Serves 4.