I invented a game on Twitter a few months ago called Guess the Soup. It’s very easy to play. All you have to do is, um, guess the soup I’m making that day (or the soup someone else is making).

Today, Cassie started a new round of Guess the Soup. After I guessed incorrectly with combinations such as kidney bean and mango, and butter bean and blancmange, I finally won with cauliflower and butter bean. Realising I had some butter beans in the cupboard and a cauliflower in the fridge, I decided to copy Cassie and make it for my lunch too.

I’m not sure of Cassie’s exact recipe and I don’t know if she added chilli and cheese as I did but this is how I made it:

Cauliflower and butter bean soup

Ingredients
1 cauliflower
1 tin of butter beans, drained
1 red chilli
1000ml vegetable stock
100g cheese
chilli flakes
salt and pepper

Chop up the cauliflower
Put it in a pan with the butter beans, chilli and vegetable stock
Add salt and pepper and chilli flakes
Simmer for about 20 minutes
Add the cheese and blend

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Tideford Organics aren’t a wholly vegetarian company, but out of their six varieties of soups, five are vegetarian and four are vegan. They also produce a range of vegetarian sauces, puddings and jellies.

I tried five of their soups and they were all fresh and delicious (even the carrot and coriander one, which isn’t a combination I usually like) and heated up in their pots after just a few minutes in the microwave. The soups are designed to be drunk on the go and have a cardboard sleeve that keeps your hands from burning. The cardboard sleeve is removable, so you could use the pot for something else, after you’ve drunk the soup (might be best to wash the pot first).

Tideford Organics’ products are mostly sold to independent retailers but some of their range can be found in Sainsburys, Tesco or Waitrose.

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Today’s soup was practically free, as it was made using tomatoes, chilli and a potato grown in the garden.

Tomato and chilli soup (serves 4)
3 lbs tomatoes, chopped
1 red chilli, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 potato, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 litre vegetable stock
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp tomato puree
100ml double cream
Salt and pepper

Fry the onion and garlic in the olive oil for a few minutes, until soft
Add the tomatoes, tomato puree, chilli and potato
Season with salt and pepper
Simmer for about 30 minutes
Add the cream
Blend

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As courgettes are in season at the moment, I’ve been having courgette soup for lunch every day for the past two weeks made with yellow courgettes from the greenhouse, and green courgettes from Riverford.

This week, the soup has been made from our home grown yellow ones.

I’d never even heard of a yellow courgette before, let alone seen one, but The Meat Eater assured me they were supposed to be yellow and weren’t just unripe green ones.

Yellow courgette soup (serves 3-4)

1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 large yellow courgettes, chopped
1000 ml vegetable stock
30g cheese (I used strong cheddar), diced
chilli flakes (use as much as you want, to taste)
salt and pepper

Fry the onion and garlic in the olive oil
Add the courgettes, stock and chilli flakes
Season with salt and pepper
Simmer for about 15 minutes, until the courgettes are tender
Add the cheese and stir until melted
Blend until smooth

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I know it’s not really the done thing to blow your own trumpet, but I really do think I make the best soup in the world. I certainly make better soup than Tesco’s “3 tins of additive filled tins of flavoured water for £1.50”, and so after making this weeks soup, I was very glad I put those tins down and went off to get a cauliflower instead.

I’m not a massive fan of cauliflower, so wasn’t sure how it would be in a soup, but this soup is WOW.

Spicy cauliflower soup (serves 4)
1 shallot
1 cauliflower, chopped into small florets
1 large potato, chopped into small pieces
1 red chilli, chopped
1,500ml vegetable stock
Approx 100g mature cheddar, chopped
salt and black pepper

Cook the shallot in a bit of the stock for a few minutes
Add the cauliflower, potato, chilli, stock and season with salt and pepper
Bring to the boil and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, until the potato is tender
Add the cheddar and blend

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I think I’ve made the perfect soup. Or is it just that you can’t go wrong if you add chilli and cheese to everything? Either way, this soup was amazing. No exact quantities, it was a chuck it in the pan with some stock and see what happens kind of soup. 

Spicy potato and cabbage soup with camembert (serves 5)
1 onion, chopped
1 red chilli, chopped
3 medium potatoes, cut into small chunks
Half a savoy cabbage, chopped
100g (roughly, I’m not really sure) camembert, cubed
1,500ml vegetable stock
Salt and pepper

Cook the onion and red chilli in some of the stock until the onions are soft
Add the potato and the rest of the stock and simmer for about 15 minutes
Add the cabbage and simmer for another 5 minutes or until the potatoes and cabbage are tender
Add salt and pepper and blend
Add the camembert and blend again

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Last week I was ill. Not very ill, but ill enough that I wouldn’t have gone to work, had I a job to go to in the first place.

So, because I was ill, I should have been eating healthy meals but because I was ill, I couldn’t be bothered to make any and so I lived on a diet of crumpets and packaged food. Why wasn’t The Meat Eater looking after me and making me healthy meals, you may ask? I also asked him the same question.

Bah.

What I should have had is this bean and vegetable soup. It’s one of those soups that make you feel healthy just by looking at it as it’s crammed full of, um, beans and vegetables.

It’s taken from The Vegetarian Student Cookbook which contains loads of quick and cheap recipes, more of which I’ll be testing and posting soon.

Bean and vegetable soup (serves 6)

1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1.2 litres vegetable stock
2 carrots, diced
150g mushrooms, chopped
2 courgettes, diced
700ml passata
400g tin cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
150g green cabbage, shredded
3 tablespoons freshly chopped basil
salt and black pepper

In a large saucepan, soften the onion and garlic in 4 tablespoons of the stock for 5 minutes, with the lid on. Stir in the carrots, mushrooms and courgettes, season and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the passata and the remaining stock and bring to a simmer, then cover and cook for 10 minutes.

Mix in the beans and cabbage, re-cover the pan and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Adjust the seasoning and stir in the basil just before serving.

Credits:
Bean and vegetable soup
Recipe by Tamsin Burnett-Hall, The Vegetarian Student Cookbook, Ryland Peters & Small

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I must have gone off salad as, although there’s been loads of salady type stuff in the fridge, all last week I’ve ignored this and made myself cheese and coleslaw sandwiches instead. That’s not quite in keeping with the eat healthy lunches regime I usually have. So I decided to go back to the make a load of soup on Monday to last through the week thing. And today’s lunch was spiced carrot and lentil soup from the BBC Good Food website. I love that site.

I also loved the soup. Easy to make and whilst probably a bit hearty for a summer’s day (well, it would be if we had a flipping summer’s day), it was very filling.

Along with the soup, I decided to excel in today’s flurry of domestic goddessing and made some home made bread. Well, home made as in out of a packet mix and made in the bread maker. I used half the packet and 2 hours and 53 minutes later, out came the smallest loaf of bread in the world. Is it just me or does it look a bit like a curly dog poo?

Still, curly dog poo notwithstanding, the bread was quite dense and very filling but very nice, especially as I had it while it was still warm, fresh out of the bread maker.

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Vegan Planet is a cookbook I’ve had for years but only made one recipe from; a recipe I didn’t really like but after recently reading good reviews about it on amazon, I thought I’d give it another go.  Rather than risk giving The Meat Eater something that would downgrade me from domestic goddess to domestic idiot, I thought I’d better experiment on myself first.

So, this week’s lunch for me is miso soup with tofu and spinach which sounds disgustingly healthy and as I was making it, I was a little worried that it would taste disgustingly healthy, with ‘disgustingly’ being the operative word and it certainly was one of those soups where you could feel healthiness coursing through your veins but it tasted very nice.

There is tofu in there somewhere, honest.

Miso soup with tofu and baby spinach (serves 4)

6 cups water
1 ½ cups baby spinach leaves, cut into thin strips
½ cup thinly sliced white mushrooms (I didn’t have any mushrooms, so poured in some mushroom ketchup instead)
3 tablespoons minced scallions (that’s spring onions to us English people)
1 tablespoon tamari or other soy sauce
¹⁄₃ cup mellow white miso paste (I only had brown miso, so used that)
4oz extra-firm silken tofu, drained and cut into 1/4-inch dice (I used normal tofu; the stuff that comes in a box; isn’t silken tofu that runny stuff that comes in a carton?)

1. Place the water in a large pot and bring to a boil over high heat.  Add the spinach, mushrooms, scallions, and tamari.  Reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the vegetables soften, 3 to 6 minutes.  Reduce the heat to low.
2. Place about 1/4 cup of the hot soup mixture in a small bowl and add the miso, blending well.  Stir the mixture back into the soup, add the tofu, and simmer for 2 minutes, being careful not to boil.  Taste, adjust the seasonings, and serve hot.

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A cookbook I haven’t used for a while is Vegetarian Express by Rose Elliot so I had a flick through it yesterday looking for inspiration for this week’s soup and came across a recipe for spinach and potato soup.

It was very nice.

And very green.

Ingredients
(serves 5)
1 small onion, chopped
400g spinach
400g potatoes, diced
1400ml vegetable stock
1 tbsp olive oil
Ground nutmeg
salt and pepper

1. Fry the onion in the olive oil for about 5 minutes
2. Add the potato and cook for about 5 minutes
3. Add the spinach and press down, stirring occasionally until it softens and wilts, about 5 minutes
4. Add the stock, bring to the boil and simmer for about 10-15 minutes, until the potato is tender
5. Remove from heat, add nutmeg, salt & pepper and blend

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