Tomato Soup Recipe (Canning!)

Yes. All I write about right now is canning. But it's canning season and I've definitely become obsessive about it this year. I think it's because we planted too many tomatoes, maybe? We have GOBS of tomatoes and I can not, I must not let them go to waste!

So I made some tomato soup last night! It turned out to be absolutely delicious. I combined a few recipes and here's what I came up with:

Ingredients

• 8 quarts of tomatoes, roughly chopped (I left the skins on, but that's up to you.)
• 1 T Italian seasoning
• 2 T dried parsley
• 3 white onions, chopped
• 5 T brown sugar
• 1 t black pepper
• 2 T salt
• 8 T butter
• 5 T flour

Directions

1. Combine tomatoes, onions, Italian seasoning, and parsley into a large stock pot and put on medium high heat, stirring frequently until boiling. Once at a boil, simmer for 10 minutes.
2. Remove from heat and use an immersion blender to blend until smooth. (NOTE: DO NOT USE A REGULAR BLENDER WITH ANYTHING HOT. Apparently it can blow up in your face when you turn it on due to the pressure from the heat. I learned this not through experience but through my friends' personal experience.)
3. Add remaining ingredients and stir, allowing sugar to dissolve and butter to melt.
4. Once again, use the immersion blender to blend until creamy.
5. Put back on medium high heat, and return to a boil, simmering for 10 more minutes. Stir frequently.
6. Ladle into sterilized canning jars and put into pressure canner. We cooked ours at 10 pounds pressure for 20 minutes. (Another word of wisdom: don't overfill your jars. A lot of canning recipes say to fill up to 1/4" to the top... Which is what I did for this, except apparently one of them was just a liiiittle too full and it seeped out a bit while in the pressure canner. So fill your jars allowing 1/2" of space from the top.)
7. Once the canner isn't steaming anymore, remove the lid (be careful of the steam! I burned my knuckles again last night!) and remove the jars with a jar lifter.
8. Set jars on towel to cool.

Side note: this is also very easy to cool and freeze in either freezer bags or plastic containers.

Tomato soup and grilled cheese, anyone?