Roasted Tomato Soup

I'd planned on making a tomato soup from this month's Cooking Light issue, but on closer inspection of the recipe, knew there had to be a better one out there for my beautiful tomatoes.
CL's has you throwing everything including un-sauteed onions into a pot and boiling it. I knew I wanted to roast the veggies first and upon conducting an internet search found that Heidi's (101 Cookbooks) did just that. I did feel after making her version that the onions just didn't have enough time to carmelize in the time she gave, but that can be dealt with next time. I'll be tweaking the recipe a bit further next time, but until then it was a delicious combo of veggies with the addition of some hot smoked paprika.

Roasted Tomato Soup:
(adapted from 101 Cookbooks)

~2 lbs, or more vine-ripened tomatoes quartered (original recipe calls for 5 tomatoes)
1 large sweet onion cut into eighths (orig. calls for 3 medium)
1 large red pepper cut into fifths
~5 large cloves of garlic in their skins
olive oil
kosher salt to taste
2-3 cups light vegetable stock, water, or chicken broth, or a combination (I only had chicken, so used water and chicken stock)
~1/4 tsp (hot or sweet) smoked paprika
1-2 tsp tomato paste
~2 tsp, or to taste balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 375.
Line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper.
Place quartered tomatoes skin side down on one sheet.
Place peppers skin side down, onions and garlic on second sheet pan.
Drizzle all veggies with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
Roast for about 45 min or more, until onions carmelize and tomatoes have "collapsed" on themselves, turning the onions as needed to carmelized sides. My onions didn't carmelize enough, but i'll work on that next time.
Remove garlic from the oven early, once they've become golden and squishy in their skins.

This is a shot of the roasted veggies when I was deluded into thinking the hand blender might work fine without adding all the liquid first. Um, no. And you can see in this shot that the onions could have stood even more cooking. That's why I simmered the soup post blending for ~10 min.
Ok...back to the recipe...

Once all of your veggies are done (I had to rotate the sheets in the oven during cooking and then still cook the onion sheet longer), remove the garlic from their skins and the skin from the pepper if it's tough like mine was and place all veggies in a regular blender or food processor adding a touch of your liquid of choice. Heidi suggests that before blending you might want to reserve some of the tomato quarters to be used as garnish...very nice touch in my opinion.
Once all the veggies are blended, add to a pot and mix in more stock/water to make the soup a consistency you're happy with.
Add the paprika, tomato paste and balsamic vinegar and simmer about 10 minutes more. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.
Drizzle each bowl of soup with a swirl of good extra virgin olive oil and top with a couple reserved roasted tomatoes. I thought the soup was particularly good with the addition of whole wheat pepper jack cheese toasts to dunk! :-)