Souper!

One of our favourite things to have for our lunch when we are at home is soup. Soup is pretty brilliant. It can basically be made out of any vegetable; if you can blend it you can make soup with it. When it comes to soup there is definitely a wide range of skill levels. Usually we opt in for the super easy, cheap and fast options, as we are both pretty greedy and impatient when it comes to waiting around for lunch.

Two of our favourites are probably pea and mint or carrot and coriander. They both just involve boiling the vegetables until they are soft in some vegetable stock, blending them, and then adding the herbs and blending again. The bit where you add the herbs and blend again is probably the crucial part when making carrot and coriander soup as it stops the soup from going a strange greeny brown colour. Gross! Sometimes we even skip the fresh mint step when making pea and mint soup and just stir in a few spoons of mint sauce. Yum yum.

We do very much enjoy all soups, but at the moment there is a new soup in our flat that we can’t get enough of: cauliflower cheese soup. This soup takes a little more time than other soups we make, and is in no way classed as healthy, but taste wise it is delicious. We found the recipe on Good Food, but we have adapted it a little to make it more unhealthy (and therefore, more delicious!).

Ingredients

Knob of butter
1 large onion, diced
1 large cauliflower (you need to cut off the leaves and chop it into florets)
1 spud (peel off the skin, chop it into small-ish bits)
700ml vegetable stock
400ml milk
200g cheddar, diced (OR try mixing up your cheeses. We added some smoked cheddar too)

Step one: melt the butter in the saucepan. Add in your diced up onion and sauté it for a bit until it goes all soft and translucent. Keep stirring so you don't get bits of burnt onion stuck to your pan.

Step two: add the cauliflower, spud, vegetable stock and milk (and a bit of salt and pepper, if you like) and bring to the boil. Turn your hob down and then leave it to simmer for about half an hour or until the spuds and cauliflower and nice and soft.

Step three: BLEND! The best bit about making soup is blending. We have a hand blender that does a pretty good job. The original recipe said that you could use a potato masher but, quite frankly, that sounds mad to me. Anyway, after a bit of blending your soup will be thick and creamy. But it isn't finished yet!

Step four: CHEESE TIME. Tip in your cubes of cheese and put the pan back on the hob. Stir the cheese around until it melts into the soup, but if you're impatient you don't have to wait until it's fully melted. It's nice having lumps of half melted cheese gloop in your soup.

Step four: serve in bowls with some bread (or toast!) on the side for dunking.

Try it! Or maybe you have a better soup recipe? Let us know, please!

See yer!

L and S

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