A courgette and tomato soup for lunch

The garden is bursting with vegetables at the moment so it seemed like a good idea to make a light soup for lunch. There are about 5 courgettes in the fridge and a small bunch of tomatoes in the fruit bowl which need to be eaten so that more can be taken in off the plants. The first of the leeks are also ready to eat. I didn't get many leeks to germinate this year (new seed next year I reckon), but those I did plant out came up well.

I decided to make a light soup using as much of this stuff as I could.

First sweat these vegetables (finely chopped) in a good glug of olive oil.

1 onion
3 carrots
3 celery sticks
1 leek

This takes about 15 minutes. Then add a litre of light vegetable stock - I used marigold powder, but anything else including chicken stock would work fine.
Then skin 4 or 5 tomatoes and chop them into quarters and cut 2 small courgettes into thick matchsticks.

Throw these into the pot and season with pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 10 minutes.
Serve with plenty of chopped fresh parsley and some bread and cheese. It makes a lovely lunch. We used the currant bread that I made a couple of days ago, toasted and spread with real butter and topped with slices of cheddar.