Here's a quick recipe which doesn't have many ingredients and uses tomato paste to speed things up. If you want to use fresh tomatoes, have a look at this tomato soup recipe, or maybe this one. Neither have feta cheese in the ingredients, but it would be easy enough to add some. We do use a couple of fresh tomatoes here, to give a bit of texture. It's a bit like those orange drinks with 'real orange pieces'. Why don't they just make the whole thing out of real oranges? There's always a reason. Just like when we make soup with tomato paste because we only have two tomatoes in the fridge and we're just about to set off travelling and don't want to go buy more.
So, this is tomato soup with real tomato pieces. It's a fast recipe - two tomatoes to prepare and one clove of garlic and that's about it. I suggest peeling the tomatoes, which is not difficult and involves simply covering them with boiling water for a minute or two and then the skins will come of easily. The recipe will be even quicker if you don't peel the tomatoes and even quicker still if you use just one tomato or even don't use fresh tomatoes at all. That's a possibility. Add about an extra teaspoon of tomato paste and 80g of water for each tomato you leave out. If you have veggie stock cubes or something like that, you could chuck a bit in. A wee pinch of cinnamon would go quite nicely to....but then it starts turning into a complicated recipe.
I could say something about feta cheese before we begin. I used the type that comes in a box and keeps for ages in the fridge. It wasn't very good cheese, but I chose it because it was cheap, keeps for ages in the fridge and was made using microbial rennet. The reason I mention this is to point out that feta cheeses vary in quality. Some are light and crumbly and some, like this stuff, are sticky and gloopy and don't cut up or crumble well. Whatever kind you have, your soup will turn out much the same - not very pleasant to look at because of all the wee bits of cheese floating about in it but, nonetheless, very tasty. If you blended it, I think that would make a great improvement to the final appearance. I don't have a blender.
I'm waffling again. Let's just get on with it. Here are the blue-prints and the quantities will make enough for two people.
2 tomatoes
5 teaspoons of tomato paste
1 clove of garlic
A few generous pinches of dried basil
80-100g of feta cheese
Salt
Olive oil
700-800g of boiling water
Peel the tomatoes and cut into quarters. Remove the seeds and chop roughly. Stick them in a bowl until needed. Peel and chop the garlic and then heat a little oil in a pan. Add the garlic and fry for 10 or 20 seconds before adding the tomato, boiling water and salt. Bring back to the boil, then leave the soup simmering while you roughly chop or crumble the cheese. When you've done that, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese and basil.
Serve with bread and butter and when you've finished, put the rest of the feta cheese in the freezer and rush to catch your plane....