Happy soup

To have time to make soup, that’s a good weekend.

All attention on a spoon and saucepan and away from other clutter.

It’s not a stressful thing, soup. Not like a cooked breakfast which needs careful timing to get eggs, toast, sausages and tea all ready at once. Not like a roast dinner, sitting quietly until it unleashes fifteen final minutes of chaos. Soup is done when it’s done.

I’ve a lot of time for soup.

This carrot and coriander soup makes me happy. It’s the colour of a hug and tastes lovely with a dollop of horseradish in it. You can eat endless toast with soup. Toast is another thing I have a lot of time for.

Ingredients:

(makes four hungry people’s bowls)

About 8 or 9 decent-sized carrots, roughly chopped
An onion, roughly chopped
About 3 garlic cloves — chopped or crushed, whatever is easiest. No stress
A good shake (just under a tablespoon, probably) of ground coriander
A slightly smaller shake of ground cumin
An equally smaller shake of turmeric
1 measuring jug of vegetable or chicken stock — I use vegetable to make this a totally vegan soup, but chickens are nice too
A handful of fresh coriander
Olive oil* for cooking the onion and garlic
Salt and pepper for extra flavour
A hand blender, or something to make it into soupy form.

If there’s no turmeric or ground cumin, no bother, you can still make this soup. This soup is very non-judgemental, it’ll take whatever you want to give it. The only thing it really needs is carrots, liquid, coriander of some kind, and for you to want to make it. If you really hate coriander, then you could instead make a spiced carrot soup and replace the ground and fresh corianders with garam marsala or madras powder. I haven’t made that soup though, so it’ll have to be your experiment.

How:

Do all the onion, carrot and garlic chopping first, that gets that bit out of the way. I tried to do it like chefs do once, nearly lost a fingertip. chopchopchopchopchop

Pour about a tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan and warm it on a medium heat; you don’t want to burn your onion and garlic when you put them in. Like most of us they enjoy a toasty bed, not one that’s on fire.

Once the oil is warm enough, put your onion and garlic in with a pinch of salt and stir to coat with the oil. My mum told me you can tell when oil is warm enough because if you look in the pan the reflection of your kitchen ceiling will start to wobble. Look for the wobbly ceiling.

Now do a dance around the kitchen or make up a song about onions and garlic, giving them a good stir every so often so they don’t stick to the pan. Add more oil if you need. Whatever floats your boat. They want to go slightly golden just on the edges before you’re ready to put in the chopped carrots. At this point, take a big sniff of how good they smell and be happy that onions and garlic are in your life. Then do the running man over to your kettle and make up the measuring jug of stock.

Slide back over to your saucepan, throw in your carrots and dry spices, stir again and cook these all together for about a minute before pouring in the stock. It should generously cover all the veg like a king-size duvet. I add a pinch more salt at this point, too. Stir it up.

Now turn up the heat, get this party started.

Bring it to the boil, stir again, whang a lid on the pan and turn it down to a low/medium heat for a gentle simmer for about 15–20 mins. The carrots will bob up to the surface to say hello every so often.

What can you do in 15 minutes? Read a chapter of a book. Paint your nails. Consider who invented soup in the first place. Do the 100 push-up challenge. Call someone and tell them you love them. Water some plants. Tweet about your soup-making achievements. Whatever you want as long as it doesn’t stress you out.

Every so often, just go and check in on your soup friend, see how she’s going. Maybe give her a little stir.

Once you think she’s ready, turn off the heat, get out your blending apparatus, throw in the fresh coriander (or whatever) and get to blending bzzzz,bzzzz,bzzzz. I quite like a rustic texture, so I don’t bother doing it more than I have to, plus I’m hungry.

Taste. More salt, some pepper, and then get it into a bowl.

I like it with enough dippy toast to scoop up half the soup at least.

That’s nearly an hour of just taking time to make me and some veg happy.

Soup. Time well spent.

*If you’re being healthy I’ve found they now do spray olive oil, which is just olive oil in a spray bottle. It doesn’t have loads of chemicals in it like the other spray oils and it means you use less oil.