Easy, but...
The ingredients for Tomato Soup are not expensive, and I might as well give you the recipe:
Into a soup pot, put two choppped sweet onions with some butter, and cook them over over medium heat until they're soft. Add 30 quartered plum tomatoes and three quartered Granny Smith apples. Stir to blend. After a minute or two, pour in a shot or two of good Calvados. When the alcohol has boiled off, add four cans beef broth. Throw in a couple of bay leaves, but don't crumble them because you'll want to remove them. A few berries of white pepper won't hurt; add salt very judiciously if you must. Simmer this mixture for about an hour, until the apple skins float away from the apples.
There, wasn't that easy?
Now we get to work - and here's where the money comes into it. You will see in the picture, center, an All-Clad stock pot, flanked by a Cuisinart and, in the sink, another All-Clad item, the base of their pasta pentola. Sitting in the pasta pot is a chinois, or very fine conical sieve. The cooled contents of the stock put are run through the Cuisinart (three ladelsful for four minutes) and then strained through the chinois. I might as well venture that this is a man's work, and it takes about an hour. When you are done, there will be about three-quarters of a cup of debris in the chinois - apple skins, tomato seeds, paper labels that are hard to remove and that remain mysteriously intact during the food processing. The rest will fill the stock pot with a rich and velvety tomato soup that never tastes quite the same from batch to batch. (Although it might if the ingredients were measured by weight.)
I invite you price the equipment in a Chef's Catalog. Of course, the All-Clad and the chinois will outlive you, so thoughts of amortization are not silly. But I have to stop myself when people ask how hard my Tomato Soup is to make. "Hard" is not the hard part.
