While our fish is cooking in the oven, it’s time to make soup. Soup is a staple in Turkish cuisine. We eat it any time of the day; morning, noon, night, winters and even summers. We’re going to make tomato soup today.

For our tomato soup, we will need one and two-thirds cup of crushed tomatoes, two cups of broth, a tablespoon of butter, an extra teaspoon of butter, a handful of parsley, one bay leaf, salt, one tablespoon of tomato paste, a pinch of oregano, a teaspoon of flour, a third a cup of milk and one finely chopped onion.

First, what we’re going to do is just heat up our chicken broth. You could use regular water on this but I like to add the chicken broth because it gives it a great flavor. You always want to heat it up because every time you add liquid while you’re cooking, it’s best to add it when it’s hot. This way, it doesn’t wash away any of the flavors that are already blending together and it cooks together much faster anyway. We’re just going to put the lid on it, so it comes up to a boil nice and fast.

Now, what we’re going to do here is very simply soften up our onions along with our teaspoon of butter. We just have a teaspoon here because I’m just going to add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil for some flavor and richness, so we’ll do that.

Tomato soups are delicious. It’s a great red color. It’s going to match with our delicious red snapper, it is so filling and who doesn’t love tomato soup? It goes great with sandwiches. It goes great with fish.

So, we just want this to get a little hot and then we’re going to start softening up our onions. So now, we could just add our onions. I always like to add the olive oil also because it keeps the butter from burning. You just want to soften that up for about two minutes and then we could start to add in the rest of our ingredients. As you could see, this is sizzling up and cooking. We’ll just add our tomatoes over here and then we could add in the rest of our ingredients.

I like to add tomato paste because it just richens the color of it. Once we add the broth, it’s just going to lighten up a bit, especially later on when we add our milk, it’s going to become really nice and creamy. The tomato paste is just to keep that rich redness because we love color in Turkish cuisine. We love the variety of the beautiful colors, the reds and greens and how it all blends together.

Now, we could just lower this heat a little bit because you don’t want it to start popping up at you. Then we can add in a little bit of salt. We’ll just take the teaspoon, a light teaspoon and then keep tasting it accordingly; see how it’s doing.

We add our bay leaf and our parsley, just a handful. I like to add it with the stems because it’s going to give it a great flavor, not to mention, we’re going to run this through the blender later on anyway, so everything is going to become a nice, smooth, creamy soup.

We could also add in a little bit of oregano. Some people like to add garlic to this which you can do if you like something with garlic but I just love the way the onions mesh with the flavor of the fish. Every time you have fish, you always have to have some type of crispy onion whether it is seasoned and the onions are raw. You eat just raw, crispy onions. It really brings out the flavor in the fish.

It looks like our stock is getting nice and hot. We’ll just pour this in. I’m going to let this boil together on a low. Let it simmer with it covered for about 15 minutes.