If I were allowed to grow only two things, I think I could answer without much hesitation.

Tomatoes and basil.

Thankfully, no one has imposed such a terrible restriction on my garden, but if they did, those two would have to stay. There is something extraordinarily rewarding about growing a tomato yourself, whether it comes from a sprawling garden plant, a pot outside the front door, or even a sunny little corner where you’ve managed to convince one to grow.

And then there is basil.

Put the two together with good olive oil and I’m not sure food needs very much more help.

This soup honors all three.

I’ve served it at many dinners over the years, and it is one of those dishes people almost always comment on. I’ve even served it to people who said they weren’t particularly fond of tomato soup and watched their opinion change somewhere around the bottom of the bowl.

Lloyd was once one of those people.

When I met him, he wasn’t particularly fond of tomatoes at all. But I don’t think he’d really had the opportunity to know what a tomato could taste like. Once we started growing our own and going to the farmers market together—which we’ve now been doing for about twenty years—he discovered the difference.

A real tomato tastes like something.

It is sweet and acidic and juicy and fragrant, and sometimes so delicious that all it needs is a little salt. Once you’ve eaten tomatoes like that, those pale grocery-store impostors have a difficult time making their case.

And then I roasted them.

That is really the secret to this soup.

Roasting takes everything wonderful about a ripe tomato and turns up the volume. The juices concentrate. The edges caramelize. The garlic becomes mellow and sweet. The onion softens into everything around it. And when all of that gets blended with a generous handful of fresh basil and just enough cashew cream to make it silky, you end up with something that tastes far more luxurious than the simplicity of its ingredients would suggest.

I still remember Lloyd taking his first spoonful and immediately saying something along the lines of, “Wow, this is good. I like this.”

That may not sound like a grand declaration of love for a bowl of soup, but coming from Lloyd—who doesn’t necessarily announce his opinion after the first bite—it said plenty.

And I agreed.

Fresh basil is especially important here. I grow my herbs in the garden, so when I’m making this soup I can walk outside and bring in what I need. Fresh thyme and oregano are wonderful if you have them, but basil is the one I really don’t want you to skip. Use a little less if you prefer, use more if you’re like me, but let it be there.

Tomato, basil, olive oil.

One of cooking’s great little trifectas.

This used to strike me as the kind of soup you would naturally make on a cold winter day, because that’s when we think about soup. But I’ve come to think of this as very much a summer soup. That’s when tomatoes actually taste the way tomatoes are supposed to taste. And although a steaming bowl of soup might not be the first thing you imagine eating on a hot day, this one doesn’t have to be piping hot. I love it warm, and I suspect it would be beautiful served even cooler.

What matters most to me is the texture.

I blend it until it looks wonderfully smooth, but somehow it doesn’t eat like a thin, perfectly uniform tomato liquid. There is body to it. The roasted vegetables and cashew cream give it this gorgeous, luxurious mouthfeel where you can almost taste the texture even though you can’t see it.

And then, of course, there is what you eat beside it.

For me, there are few things better than tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.

Call it humble food if you like. I’ll take it.

Give me homemade sourdough spread lightly with cultured vegan butter, smoky vegan cheddar tucked inside, and the whole thing pressed beneath a heavy iron skillet until the bread is deeply golden and caramelized around the edges. Put that next to a bowl of this soup and I’m not promising there won’t be noises at the table.

It’s funny, because I didn’t particularly like tomato soup as a child. Soup usually came from a can then, and I preferred the alphabet vegetable soup because at least there were interesting little things floating around in it. Tomato soup never gave me much reason to love it.

But Las Vegas didn’t have farmers markets when I was growing up, at least not the world of beautiful produce I know today. I didn’t yet understand what tomato soup could be because I hadn’t tasted tomatoes like these.

I never had the chance to make this particular soup for my mom.

Sometimes when I’m standing in my kitchen making it now, I wonder what she would have thought. I like to imagine her smiling somewhere at the sight of me making a grilled cheese sandwich the way she taught me, only now with my homemade sourdough, cultured vegan butter, and a bowl of tomato soup neither of us could have imagined back then.

I think she would have loved it.

Food has a funny way of doing that. A recipe doesn’t always take you back to something you ate as a child. Sometimes it connects what you learned then with who you’ve become since.

My mom’s grilled cheese. My garden tomatoes and basil. A soup I learned to make years later. Lloyd sitting beside me enjoying tomatoes he once thought he didn’t like.

Somehow they all end up at the same table.

And when I think about where this recipe belongs, I can’t imagine anything more fitting than Small Beautiful Things.

A bowl of deeply roasted tomatoes, fresh basil, and good olive oil really is a small beautiful thing.

And if you go back for seconds?

Well, perhaps it’s a slightly larger beautiful thing.