Corn and Roasted Red Pepper Soup

corn, roasted red pepper and tomato soup

I know that summer and hot soup aren't always synonymous with one another, but soup is so easy to make, and makes great leftovers to take to work, so I decided to crank up the AC, and pretend it was soup weather.

To start, I took two red peppers and cut each into four, flat pieces. Skin side up, I put them in the broiler for a few minutes, until the skin was blistered and black. Besides adding a nice roasted flavor, doing this makes it easy to get the skin off (which can leave a weird texture in a puréed soup.)

While this cooked, I put on a small pot of water for the tomatoes. Then I coarsely chopped one medium onion, and three large garlic cloves, and set them aside. I then cut the corn kernels off of three ears of corn, and set that aside separately.

By now, the peppers were done, so I carefully (they are very hot) peeled off the skin and added the pepper flesh to the bowl with the corn.

Now, I prepared my tomatoes concassé by cutting a shallow X into the bottom of each tomato, and dropped them into the boiling water. This lightly cooks the tomato, and also makes it easy to get the skin off and seeds out. Because the smaller heirloom tomatoes in my garden are getting ripe, I used a variety of grape and cherry tomatoes, with the largest one just bigger than a golf ball. Using this method, smaller tomatoes will float when they are ready to be peeled. Once the tomatoes were done being peeled and seeded, I added them to the reserved corn and peppers.

In my soup pot, I heated about a tablespoon of olive oil and added my chopped onion. Once the onion started to turn translucent, I added the garlic and stirred for about 30 seconds, then added the corn, peppers, tomatoes, about six cups of vegetable stock, salt and pepper, both to taste. (For a thinner soup, feel free to use more vegetable stock.)

I turned the heat to low, and cooked for about an hour.

Once the corn was soft, I scooped out some of the corn and vegetable mix, trying to mostly get the corn, and set it aside while I used my immersion blender to blend the soup as smooth as I could. After the soup was puréed, I added the reserved corn back in to give the soup some texture.

This surprisingly delicious vegan soup made about four servings.