Weekend cooking - homemade vegetable soup

The thinking behind my soup
I didn’t try to make soup for many, many years. In fact, I only made my first pot about 2 years ago. Then I realised that you really can’t go wrong and I became much, more creative. So while I wrote down exactly what I put in this time, I usually just throw add vegetables in any amounts! It sounds vague because it is.

Money-saving tip
If you can see that you’re not going to get to use vegetables before their use-by date, and you don’t want to waste any (like me), toss them in a Ziploc bag and into the freezer. You can always use them in soup as the quality doesn’t matter because it will be liquidised anyway.


I like to have a protein in soup so that it’s a complete meal once you add a bread roll. So I added lentils. If you are using it as a starter, then you don’t need any protein and you probably don’t want it as thick as this one is. Just add more water until you’re happy with the consistency.

Ingredients
200g onions
220g carrots
200g marrow
100g spinach
410g canned tomato & chilli
400g lentils (cooked)
Tomato stock cube
1 tablespoon garlic
1 teaspoon salt (or more, to taste)
Worcester sauce
2L water


Method
Heat a few millimetres of water (or 1 tablespoon of oil) in the pot.
Leave the pot on very high heat and add the onion and carrots. Cook through for about 5 minutes.
Add the garlic (you don’t have to add such a lot but I do because we’re going into winter and garlic is good for the immune system).
Then add the rest of the vegetables except the tomato.
Dissolve the stock cube (you can use beef, chicken or tomato – I like tomato) in some of the water.
After another 5 minutes, add the stock and the rest of the water to the pot.
Reduce heat, add the can of tomato and cook through for about 30 minutes.
Add the cooked lentils and the Worcester sauce (I didn’t measure – a couple of shakes of the bottle?).
At this point before you liquidise, check that there’s enough salt and pepper, to your family’s taste.
once you’re happy, pour the soup into the liquidiser until smooth.

Serve with a wholewheat or garlic roll!

This made 9 portions of about 300g.



Here are all my containers for the freezer!