A few years ago my husband and I considered opening a vegan restaurant in our town. It seemed like a great idea at first: there wasn’t a whole lot of vegan food around at the time, but our town is definitely the kind of place where you’d expect it to be in demand. We even went around and looked at some potential spots for our establishment, talked to other local business owners, that kind of thing. In the end, we decided not to because opening a place like that is a big investment and super risky. And at the time I already had a budding business: this blog, which conveniently was a lot less risky and required little initial investment to get started with. Well the universe must have been spying on us because in the two or so years since we first toyed around with that idea, the amount of vegan food available within just a mile radius of where we live just about exploded. We have so many options now! Haven’t even gotten a chance to try them all yet (I cook at home a lot, as you might have guessed). Anyway, a couple of the vegan and vegan-friendly places we’ve been frequenting have been offering tomato soup lately, and that set me off into a bit of a tomato soup kick. I got inspired to make a version of my own. Guys, this tomato soup on its own was super tasty, but add some gnocchi and fresh basil…this stuff was amazing. Whenever possible, I like to make my soup into a meal, and regular old tomato soup isn’t quite meal-worthy. That’s where the gnocchi comes in. Not only does gnocchi make the soup super satisfying, but the combination of the soup with little potato pasta dumplings is delicious as heck. I made the soup itself extra creamy by adding some coconut milk. I know not everyone that reads this blog is down with coconut milk. If that’s you, feel free to sub your favorite non-dairy milk (cashew would be a good alternative). If you have an immersion blender (even a cheap one like I have is a great investment) the soup ends up being an easy one-pot meal.
