Tomato Vegetable Soup

I made tomato soup yesterday--I had extra tomatoes on Saturday that I had peeled, so I put them in the blender, then refrigerated the resulting juice until I had assembled the rest of the vegetables. The basic ingredients are onions, carrots, celery, and bell peppers. This year we also added corn and green beans. I like to chop them by hand so I get uniform sized pieces. I've tried them in the cuisinart, but they are so ragged and not at all uniform. It took me about 2 hours to do all this chopping. All the vegetables were from our garden except the celery. I ended up with 10 quarts.

It's a rather inexact science to decide on proportions, you can vary depending on what you like--but approximately---
5-6 quarts tomato juice
5 onions
10-12 carrots
one bunch celery
5-6 green peppers
Other vegetables are optional--we added
4-5 ears corn (blanched before cutting off the cob)
a couple of cups of green beans---cut to the right size
(Then I added a quart of whole tomatoes that hadn't sealed the other day)
2 Tablespoons salt
1 tsp pepper

Mix together and heat to boiling. Pack into clean bottles, seal with new flats and old rings. You could also put it into freezer containers and freeze at this point. Because of the low acid vegetables this must be processed in a pressure cooker--following the directions on your cooker--process at 10 pounds pressure (12-13 for my altitude) for 45 minutes.

This soup is delicious in the winter--you can add some ground beef or shredded chicken, pasta, herbs etc and cook together before serving--or just eat it as it is. (I have made it with alphabet pasta, but the process of pressuring makes the noodles overdone--it's better to add them later.)