Soup: celeriac and bramley apple

Last winter for a while I posted a soup recipe every week. This winter, as soon as the cold winter started, I started making soup again. For a long while I got away with last year's recipes, but eventually I got bored and started again.

 

I like this soup because the smooth, earthy flavour of the celariac goes so well with the sharp freshness of the apples. It's tasty, filling, easy and healthy - next to no fat, and no Weightwatchers points.

A soup so scrumptious it got me blogging again: Thai carrot and coriander

The weekly huge batches of soup started up again about six weeks ago. Once again it's cold enough in Edinburgh for a huge mug of warm, comforting soup to be the best possible lunch option.

Up until this weekend I'd been repeating myself, cooking things I'd done (and usually blogged) before. One week the weekend was so busy we bought a stack of cans of soup instead. The world didn't end, although gratifyingly they weren't as good, as healthy or as cheap as the ones I make.

But this one is so good I had to share. It's based on one my aunt gave us for lunch when we went to visit last weekend - a delicious bought fresh soup. The budget's too tight for us to buy fresh soup for weekday lunches, so when we got home we decided to experiment, and came up with the following. It's got a kick to it, and is thoroughly warming and filling on a cool day. Lovely. And if you care about such things it's very low fat, and only one propoint a portion.

Guacamole-ish

I've been having some luck with the special offers corner in my local Waitrose lately. After the £1.11 beef joint which yielded two steaks and two rather yummy salads, I've been casting my eye over it every time I walk past. I've never got that lucky again, but for one, wonderful week, it became apparent that someone was putting the ripe and ready to eat avocados into the discount shelf at 6pm on the day they went out of date. As ripe and ready to eat avocados rarely are, I grabbed them thinking they'd be good - and most of them were. Bizarrely, though, one pack of two consisted of one gorgeously soft avocado - and one so hard it could have been made of rubber.

I'd planned to make this guacamole recipe, one from the hairy bikers that I picked because it didn't contain cream or mayo or anything else odd - I wanted it to taste super-fresh, not like a dip. But the recipe calls for three avocados. I'd planned to make it with two, reducing things slightly - I used a couple of chillies, rather than four, and just one tomato - which would have been fine. But after the rubber avocado, I found myself with a pile of chopped other ingredients, and just one av. So I shrugged and ended up making it with one.

It worked. The result was light, fresh and zingy. It still had the creaminess of the one super ripe avocado, but in texture it was more like a salsa. As someone who's never been that fussed by most salsas - I'm not the world's biggest tomato fan - it was like a perfect blend of salsa and guacamole.

It tasted so light and fresh I didn't want it with tortilla chips or anything greasy - so instead, we use lettuce leaves. They were perfect - little scoops. And because they were so healthy, I didn't feel in the least bit guilty about polishing off a lot of guacamole in one go!

Embarrassingly easy: jam swirls

So, last week, after defrosting some pastry for a quiche, I realised I had a little extra.

"Never mind," I thought, "You've got five meals out of that pack of pastry, you can just chuck the rest."

Nope. For the next couple of hours, that pastry played on my mind. I couldn't bear to throw away good food.

I also had an idea - there was a jar of no-added-sugar jam in the fridge, which was bound to go off quite soon.

I combined the two, rolling out the pastry into an oblong, spreading it with jam, and baking the result for 15 minutes.

The result was delicious - light, and slightly chewy from the jam. I'll do it deliberately next time - and perhaps even make an effort to make them a bit prettier!

Makes 20 bite-sized swirls
90g puff patry
50g jam (the no-added-sugar stuff, made with grape juice, works well. I used raspberry)
Um... that's it!

Pre-heat your oven to 180C ish.
Roll out your pastry to an oblong about 10cm by 20cm.
Spread it thinly with the jam.
Carefully roll it up into a long, thin sausage.
Cut it up into 20 slices, and place on a baking tray, lined with baking parchment.
Bake for 15 minutes.
Allow to cool a little - jam gets VERY hot.
Eat. Try not to eat them ALL in one sitting. Maybe get up and make another cup of tea halfway through.

(I've tagged this one vegan as a lot of bought puff pastry is vegan - obviously, check your labels beforehand).

Soup of the week: spicey red lentil with cumin and tomato

This recipe has stood me in good stead for at least three years now, and it's probably the single recipe I've pressed on people most. There have been winters when we've had it pretty much every other week because all other inspiration has departed. Now, I try to have it less often, because that way I remember how truly delicious it is and appreciate how incredibly easy and cheap it is, without getting bored with it.

But we spent last weekend at a wedding, and I have to say by the time we got back on Sunday afternoon, exhausted, hungover and smiley, I was pretty proud of myself for heading towards the kitchen at all, even if it was just to heat up a supermarket faux takeaway, knock up another batch of blondies rather than trying something new, and to make the easiest soup I know.

The thing that's galling about this recipe, though, is that I've never managed to improve on it. I must have cooked it twenty times, but I've never found an adjustment that improves on the original. Changing the spicing slightly? Meh. Making it thicker, or thinner? Not right.

The only thing I've learnt is that it tastes better using a stock other than marigold bouillon powder. It's fine with it (and nine times out of ten that's what I have in the cupboard), but with chicken stock, real or cubed, or even another veg stock cube or powder that doesn't reek quite so much of celery, it's a bit nicer.

So here are the ingredients:

Here is a link to a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  recipe so good I can't improve it (I do tend to ignore the yoghurty bit though - life is short).

And here is the finished result, doubled up so it serves eight as ever.

Oh, and did I mention that, made with the right stock, not only is it veggie but it's also vegan? Man is a genius. That is all.

Soup of the week: butter bean, thyme and chilli oil

Well, seeing as I cook a big batch of soup pretty much every week to see us through workday lunches, and seeing as a large proportion of my posts seem to be about said soup making, I might as well call it a regular feature.

Here are the ground rules. I tend to cook a big batch of soup on a Sunday - eight portions, to see us through Monday-Thursday at work. Friday is treat day. They get shoved into tupperware on Sunday, sometimes the ones for the end of the week are frozen, sometimes we decide the fridge is cold, Edinburgh is cold, and we've both got decent immune systems, and they just stay in the fridge. Our freezer is basically just an ice box at the top of the fridge, and looks very full with a bag of peas, some stock and some ice cubes, so risks have to be taken. The lack of freezer space also explains the soup monotony - I'd love to be able to freeze ahead and mix it up, but it's just not possible right now.

The enormous quantities required mean I spend a lot of the time doubling recipes, so it's safe to guess that my recipes can be halved. quartered and so on!

We aren't veggie, buy my soups are almost always suitable for veggies - if I've used meat stock because it's what I have in, substitute with veg. And the dairy can pretty much always be skipped to make them vegan friendly too.

When the weather gets warm, or we get fed up of soup, soup making is suspended and replaced with salads, cous cous etc made rather more piece meal throughout the week. However, I live in Edinburgh. The summer is short. Soup's a feature of life here!

So here's this week's soup - Butter Bean, thyme and Chilli Oil

The recipe originally comes from here but I upped the quantities, used tinned rather than dried beans and fiddled round with the proportions, so I'll tell you what I did. It wasn't difficult.

Ingredients all laid out

Ingredients
Four tins butter beans
Two litres veg stock (cubes or powder are fine)
Two onions, diced
Three large carrots, chopped
Four large sticks of celery, chopped
Two fat cloves of garlic, chopped
Two bay leaves
A few sprigs of thyme leaves
Chilli oil
1-2 tbsps low fat Creme Fraiche - optional (and not an option if you're cooking the vegan version)
Olive oil
Pinch cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

1. Soften the onions and garlic in the olive oil for a minute or two. Add the carrots and celery and soften while you drain and rinse the butter beans throughly.
2. Add veg stock and butter beans, bay leaves and a couple of sprigs of thyme, cover and boil for 20 minutes or until everything is soft.
3. Taste and adjust seasoning. At this point I thought it was a bit "meh" so whacked in more salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper and some creme fraiche I had in the fridge that needed using up, which seemed to help.
4. Fish out thyme sprigs and bay leaves. Puree using a stick blender.
5. Dish up. The original recipe suggests swirling chilli oil prettily on top. I attempted this but it was pretty much mixed in to the rest of the soup by the time I got it to work. However, I could taste it and it did lift it from a plain bean and veg soup. I divided the rest of the thyme leaves between the pots, they made a big difference too.



The finished product. I'd already dished up half
before I remembered to take a picture.

It looks bland without the chilli oil and thyme, but with them it became great - soothing, certainly, but with a bit of a kick from the chilli oil and cayenne, and a freshness from the thyme.

Yes, more soup.

Mmm.

Ok, ok... it does taste a lot better than it looks

Anyone who's stuck with me through various interruptions will have gathered one thing: I cook a lot of soup. It's really all about practicality - there isn't really a nicer, easier way to have a warm, healthy, cheap and delicious lunch at work, especially in the Edinburgh winters and the deceptively cold Edinburgh springs.

Now we've given up on the veg box, though, I'm not faced with a once-a-fortnight recipe challenge involving a pile of unappetising, knobbly-looking veg and a stock cube. This means I can have more variety - look, no beetroot! - but also means I've been running out of ideas.

So when I read this recipe for Black Bean soup in Saturday's Guardian I had to give it a go. It's a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, with tomatoes, beans, chilli and spices. I doubled up the quantities and there was enough for eight medium portions. I didn't bother blending any of it - he said to blend just half, but life's just too short for blending that can't be done easily with a stick blender in the cooking pot. I was out of ground coriander so substituted garam masala. I'm adding a dollop of sour cream and a couple of coriander leaves to each in the morning before taking it to work.

It's absolutely delicious. I was worried it would be too hot, but actually it just has the smallest kick - I might throw an extra chilli in next time. But it's both rich and fresh tasting. I can't wait to finish it all up.