Thanks to a very productive tomato patch, I'm all over the place looking for tomato recipes. On a recent day off, I considered making good on my threat to attempt gazpacho. A cruise through the interwebs and cookbooks revealed that gazpacho is way too much work for a fair-weather cook like me. So I took things down a notch and found a nice basic recipe for tomato soup, with a Mexican twist (cilantro, pretty much) – to which I added a jalapeno pepper (also fresh from garden), cumin, and lime juice; ideas borrowed from some of the gazpacho recipes I'd perused.

This tomato crop of mine has pushed me into the new frontier of improvisational cooking—a realm I thought I'd never explore due to my insane stickler-ism to recipes. I would've never called myself a planner or a by-the-book kinda gal until I started attempting to cook more than boxed mac and cheese. I've always wanted to get to that place where the Jacques Pepins of the world dwell—a place where we know the chemistry of food so well, we can just make up recipes on the fly and know that all will taste lovely in the end.

I'm no chemist, but I did just make a nice pot of garden-fresh tomato soup.

I get my most inventive when I'm through with what a recipe has to tell me and I start fiddling with flavor after all's cooked and done. When my soup had bubbled on low for the allotted time, I started tasting: enter more salt, pepper, lime juice, and garlic powder (to accent the three cloves I'd already used. They were small.) The soup still lacked a backbone, though. It wasn't anchored by that tomato-y zip that I look for in tomato soup. Tomato paste, I thought. Naturally, there wasn't any in the house – the tube of condensed paste we'd had for approximately 100 years had disappeared. Plan B was to add a dash of hot sauce to the pot, since several recipes I'd read called for a dash of hot sauce and hot sauce tends to have lots of rich spices within. Thanks to my husband's bizarre hot-sauce addiction, I had at least eight types to choose from.

Y'ever dump in way more than a dash of hot sauce? Like, maybe, an eighth of the bottle because it was a lot more liquid-y than you anticipated? Yeah. Whoops. Unable to recall what Martha Stewart once said about re-balancing an overly spicy dish, I dug back into the fridge and found tomato paste 2.0: a jar of tomato sauce that was languishing on the top shelf. Several of those gazpacho/soup recipes had also called for tomato sauce or juice, so I made some by mixing up a little water with a dollop of sauce. I added that to the SPICY tomato soup and voila! Peace reigned in the soup pot. The rich tomato sauce pulled that hot sauce back in by the ear and explained to it the importance of mystique. The soup is still spicy, which is what I wanted, but it doesn't make my ears ring anymore.

Now, this is elementary stuff for real cooks, but for this gal to have finally attained a sense of food-alchemy is a massive victory. AND I've used up all the day's tomatoes and didn't spend much money at all on this pot of soup. Only expense? The onion I bought at the Overlook Farm farm stand.

However, my recipe for tomato soup is far from perfected and I've got a lot more tomatoes coming in—anyone out there have some good ways to use up summer tomatoes? (Salsa is the ever-present go-to use for summer tomatoes around here, but I'd like to branch out.) Bonus points if you can do Brandywines justice.

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