Pre-heat your oven to 425.
Cut tomatoes all into quarters he long way and drizzle with 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 tablespoon salt, and garlic. Then roast until tender, or about 25 minutes. Careful not to over roast! You can also just cut them in half but you will need to roast longer and I am impatient.
Now time to saute some veggies. This will give our soup and awesome flavor! Cut the onion, carrots and celery up in about even pieces, but don’t worry too much they will be blended later. Saute in remaining olive oil until brown.
Now add the tomato paste and cook that until browned as well. This will make up for some less than stellar out of season tomatoes!
Yummy. Once your tomatoes are roasted add them to the pot with the diced tomatoes, basil, stock and remaining salt and red pepper flakes.
Bring the whole shebang to a boil, and then down to a simmer for an hour. Longer simmer = more flavor!
While your soup is simmering, make the spatzle.
Combine the egg, flour, dash of salt and Parmesan and then keep adding milk until you have a stick dough. I don’t have a spatzle maker so I opted to form dumplings between two spoons to get them as round as possible. I also make them a bit bigger than traditional, so feel free to go with any size you like!
Boil the spatzle in water for 3 minutes and remove and reserve for soup.
Once your soup is done, you want to temper in the milk so it doesn’t curdle. Add a little soup to your milk and stir it up and then dump the whole thing in the soup.
Then blend your soup with an immersion blender (one more for the Hanukkah list) or a blender like I did. If you use a blender, make sure to leave a vent in the top to let out steam. Then strain if you like (I didn’t) and adjust any salt and pepper to your liking.
Serve with spatzle and basil and more Parmesan!