Well as promised we have a little trip into my kitchen today. Now let me be quite clear if you are expecting Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsey you are going to be sadly mistaken, its just me and my assistant the monster cooking food we love. So here we go…
First select your vegetables, I confess I decided not to add the onion as I decided that it would be too much with the leeks. This is a great idea for the end of the week, not matter how much supermarkets tell us the quality of food has improved I think we all know that veg does not last as long as it used to. If you are lucky enough to have green fingers and a garden or allotment then you have a head start on the rest of us though we are going to attempt veg again this year lets just hope for less rain.
So you have your veg now choppy choppy choppy time…
I like to have everything ready before I start I hate cooking then half way through needing to stop to weigh something or dig it out of the cupboard. Now you will notice I am using my soup maker but you really don’t need one I use it because I love gadgets and persuaded the other half to buy me it for Christmas last year and given the price tag he would not be happy if I didn’t use it so if you don’t just grab your biggest pan and throw the veg in.
Now at this point throw in a knob of butter – I don’t really understand why only that my Soup book says so for every recipe I have tried so I just do it automatically now. Then add around a litre of vegetable stock. I personally like the knorr stock pots but any stock cube will do just remember to put in enough to cover the veg but so that it does not bubble over – boiling soup travels far further than one would expect as I learnt from experience.
Keep any spare stock on one side you can always add it later if the soup is on the thick side. Next bring to the boil then simmer until all the veg are soft.
Now comes the fun bit blitzing it all up. At this point you may wish to add extra stock or water depending how thick you like your soup. Now the advantage of the soup maker is that I just hit a button and it blends it for me, if you are using a pan you need to either transfer it to a blender or use a hand blender, personal taste now comes into play but I am not a fan of lumps in my soup so I blitz mine until smooth. Then taste time at this point season to taste and I decided to throw in Rosemary and Thyme (which worked really well taste wise but possibly could have done with being added about ten minutes earlier just to soften the thyme a little more) .
Give it a another quick blitz to chop the herbs up then serve with crusty bread.
Really simple and really tasty, fills a couple of your five a day and any spare can the thrown in the freezer for another day or taken to work for lunch the next day. Anyway hope this was interesting for you I will try to cook some more interesting things at some point but I can say that I have Tasty Tuesday posts lined up featuring Parkin, Roast Butternut Squash Soup (so simple its ridiculous) and Sausage and Apple Pan Roast
Paula Acton 