Trying to Cook (and Eat and Be) Healthy: Roasted tomato soup with broiled cheddar

So tonight I decided to pull a recipe from Smitten Kitchen the blog. I had bookmarked the recipe awhile ago thinking I might like to try it so tonight I did! I also didn't feel like having a lot of leftovers since I will be in NY this weekend visiting Billy, so I halved the recipe.

Not quite as pretty as the original post's pictures, but tasted good!

Tonight I forgot to take a picture of all the ingredients, so I'll just start off with the first step: roasting the tomatoes. I cut each Roma tomato in half lengthwise and laid them out on a baking pan. Then I sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil. In the picture below, the foil packet in the middle is two cloves of garlic that also get roasted.

These got put in the oven and roasted for about an hour until they get all juicy and brown and delicious.

After letting everything cool for a bit and unpeeling the garlic, I put everything in my brand new food processor I got for Christmas. I chopped it up in there for a few minutes until the tomatoes and garlic were all soup-like.

Look how cute my food processor is!

Then that gets dumped into a pot with some thyme and broth (the recipe says either veggie or chicken, I used veggie). I brought this to a nice boil and then turned the temperature down to a simmer for about 25 minutes.

Simmer, simmer, simmer

While this was going I cut up a few slices of a nice French loaf of bread, toasted them, and put a little bit of butter on one side of each slice.

Once the soup was done I spooned it into a bowl and put it on a baking tray covered in a little foil (to protect against the melting cheese).

Finally I covered the bread and soup with some shredded cheddar cheese and put it in the oven to back for about 20 minutes.

So much cheese!

After pulling it out of the oven I definitely had to let it cool for awhile because the bowl was very hot after being in the oven. And then it was time to eat! It was very good, if a little messy to break through the bread and get to the soup. I didn't put all of the soup back in the oven and saved it as leftovers. I will be bringing some for lunch with a little toasted bread and cheese!