The Scoop on Soup.

Our favourite soup recipes to help chase away your Winter blues.

Courtesy of Midori Photography

It’s warm, cheap, and nutritious. Soup is the ideal food to make on the weekend – it keeps well in the freezer so your meals are ready whenever you are, and it’s astonishingly easy to make. Buy yourself a fresh baguette, add some cheese or fruit and you’ve got a perfectly balanced meal. Here’s how to do it:

One tool for this that’s really indispensable is the stick blender ($20-50) for any puree soup. If you don’t have one, then the cutting and dicing is much more work as everything needs to be in a uniformly small size.

So here’s what you will need:

1. Vegetable oil, olive oil or butter.

2. Onions.

3. Jar of chopped garlic.

4. Bunch of fresh thyme that you keep in a Ziplock bag in the freezer for ongoing use.

5. Large Tetrapacks of chicken stock (much better than water. Look for the organic if you can afford it). Use vegetable stock if you are vegetarian.

6. Salt and pepper.

Now choose the vegetable for the soup. Keep with what is in season and cheap. Right now that means root vegetables – potatoes, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, celeriac, turnips, etc. Once you’ve got your selection, it’s time to make them interesting.

Consider these pairings:

Potato and leek. Carrot with ginger and coriander. Squash with pear. Sweet potato with curry spice. Celeriac with fennel and apple, Turnip with cumin and cream. Or just mix two or three roots together.

Courtesy of Dailymail.co.uk

To start each soup, chop up one onion and fry gently in oil or butter for a few minutes until golden. Now add a teaspoon of garlic. Immediately, tip in the container of stock and add the chopped up vegetable so that the amount is equal to the amount of liquid. Next, throw in a couple of teaspoons of thyme leaves and salt and pepper to taste.

When the vegetable is cooked (approx 10 minutes but will depend on the size of the pieces) you can blend the whole lot in a pot with the stick blender and Voila! Fresh soup!

Another favourite we have is Mint Pea soup (pictured above) using half a packet of frozen peas and one container of mint (the boxes at the supermarket). This one’s very fast to make, just throw in the mint after the soup has simmered since there’s no need to cook such fragile leaves, and they’ll stay bright green while you quickly blend with your stick blender.

If you can’t get a blender, then stay tuned for our amazing Cock-a-leekie and Corn Chowder recipes in the next installment. They’re so easy to make that you’ve probably already figured it out for yourself.

Let us know how your kitchen experiments go!
XoXo
– The Cowgirls