Roasted sweet potato, butternut squash and red pepper soup

A perfect hearty, healthy, winter soup recipe…
Serves 4

You’ll need:

Drizzle of oil
1 large onion
1/2 butternut squash
1 medium sweet potato (approx 300g)
1 red pepper
Sprinkle of chilli flakes
Vegetable stock cube
A splash of milk
Salt and pepper to season
1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds (optional)

I use a soup maker, but a large pan does just the same job – you’ll just have to transfer to a blender after it’s cooked and cooled down a bit.

What to do:

Pre-heat  the oven to 180⁰

Peel the squash and sweet potato, remove any seeds and chop into rough chunks

Put on a baking tray with the roughly chopped, deseeded pepper

Add the chopped onion

Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle sparingly with chilli flakes and salt and pepper. If you want to, you can add about a quarter of a teaspoon of cumin seeds too

Roasted red pepper, butternust squash and sweet potato soup

Roast in the oven for about half an hour, or until the squash is soft but the peppers and onions aren’t burning – leave to cool slightly before handling

Transfer the tray of vegetables to the soup maker, sprinkle in a vegetable stock cube and add enough water to make 1400ml

Bring to the boil, simmer for 15 minutes, then blend until smooth

Add a splash of milk to the final stage of blending

Roasted butternut squash and red pepper soup

Another quick and easy soup recipe – delish!
Serves 4

You’ll need:

Knob of butter
1 large onion
1 butternut squash
1 red pepper
2 cloves of garlic
Sprinkle of chilli flakes
Vegetable stock cube
A generous dollop of creme fraiche
Salt and pepper to season

I use a soup maker, but a large pan does just the same job – you’ll just have to transfer to a blender after it’s cooked and cooled down a bit.

What to do:

Pre-heat  the oven to 180⁰

Cut the butternut squash and red pepper in half, remove the seeds and place on a baking tray

Drizzle with a little olive oil, peel and crush the garlic cloves, and pop one in each halves of the squash, and sprinkle sparingly with chilli flakes

Roast in the oven for about half an hour, or until the squash is soft but the peppers aren’t burning – leave to cool slightly before handling

Put the knob of butter in the soup maker on ‘Low’, add the onion and red peppers, stir and leave to sweat for a minute.

Scoop out the butternut squash flesh, and add to the soup

Add enough stock to make 1400 ml.

Simmer for half an hour, then blend until smooth

Season with a little salt and pepper, and stir in the creme fraiche just before serving.

Enjoy!

Roasted butternut squash and red pepper soup

Carrot and lentil soup

Another concoction using fridge leftovers – scrummy!

You’ll need:

Knob of butter
1/2 large onion
1 washed, chopped leeks
4 peeled, chopped carrots (medium size)
4 dessert spoons of dried red lentils (about 75g)
Vegetable stock cube
Salt and pepper to season

I use a soup maker, but a large pan does just the same job – you’ll just have to transfer to a blender after it’s cooked and cooled down a bit.

What to do:

Put the knob of butter in the soup maker on ‘Low’, add the onion and leek, stir and leave to sweat for a minute.

Add the carrots and lentils, and add enough stock to make 1400 ml.

Simmer for half an hour, then blend until smooth

Season with a little salt and pepper just before serving.

Optional extras

Give a bit of a chilli kick by adding half a chopped red chilli pepper at the same time as the onion and leek

Stir in a little cream or creme fraiche just before serving

Bon appetit!

Carrot and lentil soup

Leek and potato soup

I’ve never made this before, so thought I’d give it a go. Just had a taste, and it was blooming delish – so definitely worth a blog…

You’ll need:

Knob of butter

1 onion
2 washed, chopped leeks
2 medium-sized peeled and cubed potatoes
Stock – chicken or vegetable. I actually used the water the gammon joint boiled in yesterday
Cream or creme fraiche
Black pepper

I use a soup maker, but a large pan does just the same job – you’ll just have to transfer to a blender after it’s cooked.

What to do:

Put the knob of butter in the soup maker on ‘High’, add the onions and leeks, stir and leave to sweat for a minute.

Add the potatoes, and add enough stock to make 1400 ml.

Simmer for half an hour, then blend until smooth.

Stir in a dollop of cream or creme fraiche, and season with some freshly ground black pepper.

Enjoy!

Leek and potato soup

Courgette lemon cake

Looking for a way of using up the glut of courgettes that are still being produced down the garden, I thought I’d try baking a courgette cake.

Dubious at first, but willing to give it a try (remember the days when carrot cake was ‘just weird’), I whipped up a courgette and lemon loaf yesterday. I think it was a success as it had a life span of about two hours. The whole lot was snaffled up by the family… gone!

All agreed the cake was delicious, moist and obviously very moreish…

What do you think?

Lemon courgette loaf

Serves 12, Prep: 15 minutes, Cook: 45 minutes, Suitable for home freezing

You will need:

200g (7 oz) peeled, grated courgette
150g (5 oz) caster sugar
1 egg
125ml (4 fl oz) sunflower oil
200g (7 oz) plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Grated rind and juice from half a lemon

Method

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees/gas mark 3.

Grease and line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

Add grated courgette, sugar, egg and oil to a bowl and beat together.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and cinnamon.

Add this to the courgette mixture, and beat together until just mixed.

Stir in the lemon juice and rind until well combined

Pour the mixture into the prepared loaf tin and bake for 45 minutes.  A skewer or knife inserted into the loaf at the end of cooking should come out clean.

Allow to cool slightly in the tin before turning out on a wire rack to cool completely.

Some variations I may try in the future are to add some poppy seeds to the mixture. I also think that a sprinkling of brown sugar on the top of the cake before cooking might be nice.

Courgette and lemon loaf

Cabbage soup

It’s well documented on this blog that the only things that scoff our cabbages with gusto are the pigeons, the slugs and the caterpillars. In that order. The humans of the household need a little more persuasion.

The problem is, it’s one of the few things I can actually grow…

I’ve come up with some ingenious ways with cabbage to make it more inviting to the family, from sauteeing with chopped onions after steaming, to actually hiding it in the mash and calling it ‘bubble and squeak’.

Presently we have a whole patch of cabbages that need to be eaten. For one, I’ve earmarked the spot they are in with a polytunnel, and for two I am tired of picking caterpillars off on a daily basis. So yesterday I decided to make soup.

A quick rustle around the garden produced six very small onions that were drying in the shed, a couple of cloves of garlic, a whole savoy cabbage and some cherry tomatoes that were ready.

After a thorough wash, I chopped it all up and popped it in my soup maker – I also sprinkled some chilli flakes in for good measure, added a beef stock cube,  chucked a bit of salt and pepper in the top and topped up with water to 1400 ml.  Half an hour later the beeper told me it was done. A quick blend on the liquidiser mode, and there you have it – free lunch for a week. It actually tastes pretty good too.

I persuaded the other half to try it, and he wrinkled his nose, commenting, “It tastes… healthy“.

I realised I was on my own for this cabbage-chomping marathon, but consoled myself with the thought that if the rumours about cabbage soup are true, I’d surely be a Size 8 by the weekend.

There may however be an unwelcome side effect. I’ll have no-one else to blame fo the inevitable ‘quilt ripping’ that will surely follow…

Broad beaning my horizon

I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly eaten a broad bean.

I seem to remember eating some slimy things that came out of a can that made me gag in the distant past, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t broad beans. Anyway, I decided to have a bash at them this year as a) people seem to rave about them, b)  you can sow them in the winter when not much else is happening, and c) the seeds were cheap in a half price sale.

So, in October last year, I poked a few rows in, and amazingly for how cold it was, they all seemed to pop up. They’ve needed hardly any looking after as well, which suits me just fine – all I’ve had to do is put a cane at each corner of the bed and wrap string around, so they don’t get bashed about and fall over.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed black ants running up and down the stalks. Either they were in training for the ant-equivalent of the Three Peaks Challenge, or something was afoot. A rootle around on the t’interweb (it’s a marvellous place!) told me that if you have ants on your beans, it’s pretty certain that black fly are on their way.

The next bit is quite amazing… evidently black fly feed on the sap inside the plant, and in doing this secrete a sugary substance called honeydew that ants love. The ants then herd the flies up to the top of the plant, as they’ve worked out that the honeydew produced when the flies feed there is even sweeter. Clever stuff indeed.

However, black flies are the last thing I want, as they suck the life out of the plants and once you have them, they are hard to get rid of. I try to avoid spraying the veg plot as I don’t fancy eating pesticide and I don’t want to accidentally kill something that’s good for the garden – like ladybirds. And that’s another thing. Earlier in the year, I found ladybirds all over the place… now there are none. I was banking on them keeping my black fly population down.

In any case, the advice was to pinch out the tender green shoots at the very top of the plant. The black fly and the ants would then lose interest, and all would be well again. This I did: the ants disappeared, the flies never arrived, and the beans look healthy and well.

We had the first batch for Sunday lunch. They were a bit small and there was about enough for a spoonful each, but I steamed them with some summer cabbage and sautéed the whole lot with a finely chopped onion before serving. Delish!

Sloe gin – the sticky end

Well, all that chasing around country lanes in the pursuit of sloe berries was well worth it! We finished up with three bottles of sloe gin and two bottles of sloe vodka – result!

After weeks of agitating the bottles once a week (think bell-ringer), the gin and vodka was ready just before Christmas. I carefully poured the liquid off the berries, and into clean wine bottles. The lesson learnt from last year was NOT to try to strain it through a clean cloth. It came out smelling and tasting of washing powder and the whole batch was ruined.

The smell was divine, the liqueur was thick and almost syrupy, and I have to admit I felt rather smug with my little haul.

We had a family get together over Christmas, and I proudly presented my home-made stash of moonshine. The family were dutifully impressed and the sloe gin/vodka took a mighty bashing that afternoon… it was fair to say that it slipped down like honey!

I’d kept one bottle of sloe gin in the pantry to be savoured in small doses throughout 2012, but the rest of it was ‘open house’.

This plan was doomed for disaster. Our pantry is in fact, a glory hole. You’ll find everything from hoovers to lightbulbs in there. It never gets sorted out, and you almost have to hold the stuff in with one hand, to shut the door with the other. Whilst rustling around in there, the other half inadvertently knocked something over. This in turn created an avalanche of junk. Sod’s law dictated that this would not land on the vintage bottle of Cinzano that’s been lurking around in there since time began…oh no… it only went and landed on the treasured bottle of sloe gin.

If you have ever spilt a glass of red wine, you will know how far it travels. Imagine a whole bottle of sticky, red liqueur smashed all over the pantry floor…

The pantry floor was duly emptied and cleaned, but there is still a faint whiff of gin in there – some of it must have gone down the cracks in the tiles. So instead of having a lovely glass of something yummy, I’ll have to make do with sticking my head in the pantry and taking a big lungful of ginny aroma.

The glass that should be full of sloe gin... but is, in fact, empty.

Minestrone soup – about 20p a portion

A quick rummage around in the fridge yesterday produced some veg that needed using up. Too much to throw away, but too little to make a meal, I decided to make soup. The finished result was tasty, cheap and nutritious, and I think i’m finally getting the hang of the soup maker!

I used:

2 carrots, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 small courgette, diced
5 cabbage leaves picked straight from the garden and chopped finely
a handful of brussels that had grown loose – finely chopped
1 can of chopped tomatoes
1 vegetable stock cube
approx 10 sticks of spaghetti, broken into pieces

I fried the onion in the bottom of  the soup maker, then added all the rest of the veg, stock cube and bits of spaghetti. I then filled the jug up to 1400ml, and let it work its magic. (Brought to the boil, then simmered for about 20 mins).

End product… delish!

Sprout and potato soup: 5p a portion

In the spirit of growing your own and trying to be a bit more self-sufficient, I’m always on the lookout for ways to make nutritious meals out of next to nothing.

Yesterday I dug up my first sprout stick. All summer it looked like it was going to be the King of the Sprout patch, as it grew thick and strong, and quite frankly, made the other specimens pale into relative insignificance. I’d wander past, giving it a sage little nod, thinking ‘You’re Christmas Dinner!’

However, as time went on, it turned out to be  all leaf and no action – the sprouts growing on it were not tight and nutty, so we ended slapping them around a pie – actually quite tasty albeit odd shaped.

I then decided that there was loads more foliage on the plant that might be useful, so hunting around, I came across this recipe: Anthony Worrall Thompson’s sprout and potato soup.  As the recipe called for the sprouts to be shredded and then blended, I reasoned that it really wouldn’t matter what shape or size they were at the start. Add the fact that I’d just picked up a bag of potatoes for 15p at the late night Tesco, and everyone’s a winner.

So I popped all the ingredients into my soup maker last night, and hey presto: half an hour later I had enough soup  for my lunch for the next few day. For about 5p per portion. I’m just hoping there are no nasty… ahem… side effects of so much sprout concentrate…

Something this colour has to be either extremely good for you, or extremely bad!

They say that ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’, but I think I’ve nearly cracked that one!