Tomato Soup Sky

 This was the sight out of my kitchen window the other morning...ahh so beautiful

And this was our fuel for the afternoon while my sister and I chopped and stacked wood. This soup was adapted from a recipe in The Pioneer Woman Cooks cookbook. It makes a non-tomato-soup-liker into a tomato-soup-lover. So here is my lower cost & calorie version (and you can use up some tomatoes from the garden for this recipe):
1 med onion, diced
6 tbsp. butter or margarine
8-10 small tomatoes washed and stems cut out. To remove skin, place in pot of boiling water until you can see the skin begin to peel away and get wrinkly. It takes about a min. Then dunk into cold water, and the skin will slip right off.
5 cups tomato juice or cocktail
3 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. chicken soup base
pepper
2 cups milk (I used skim)
2 tbsp. each: dried parsley and basil

Process --- > Melt the butter in a large pot, and cook the onions. Then add the rest of the ingredients, plus a cup of water, excluding the milk and herbs. Simmer the soup over medium heat. Turn off the heat just before it boils then add the last 3 ingredients. And now if you have a hand mixer that will make it easy to puree the soup to make it smooth. Now that is some yummy soup.