Soup Glorious Soup

Hello my lovelies!

Sorry for not posting in literally months – but now I have a little more free time in my life so will be updating you all on what I’ve been concocting over the past few weeks, staring with this stonking soup I made the other day – cheap, filling, easy, delicious; all the adjectives I’ve used in the past plus more. I thoroughly recommend you make it.

Soup

Soup is usually one of those things that you really enjoy until you run out of bread to dip in it. I get it, I really do – but this soup changes that.  For once in my short, soup-filled life, the soup surpassed the bread (yes, even that homemade, nutty stuff I served it with) and was so delicious I ate two portions and nearly incinerated my soft palate in doing so.

I didn’t mess around trying to find bizzare flavour combinations with this soup, or adding magical ingredients like caramelised Doritos or glitter. What I did do was to let the ingredients sing for themselves, only adding a wee lift with some freshly chopped parsley at the end.

This’ll make around 4-5 portions and you can customise the veg that goes in, but hot recommend on the parsnips as they’re so naturally sweet.

Anyway, enough of the waffle, let’s make some soup instead.

y’all’need

• 2 tablespoons of butter bc butter* makes vegetables taste delicious – 25p
• 1 big onion -10p
• 1 or 2 cloves of garlic – 5p (ish)
• 2-3 HUGE carrots – 10p(ish) (They were 19p per KG at Lidl hahah)
• 2 parsnips – 10p – also on offer
• 1 potato (this was a very sad potato but it needed using up) – 12p
• Handful of very finely chopped parsley – 20p
• Splash of milk – 10p
• Veg stock kuube – 5p
• Salt
• Pepper

What u do

Melt thine butter over a medium heat in a big pan. There should be a lot of butter. Now, cook it some more so it’s just starting to go a little bit brown and is smelling quite caramelly  – but don’t burn it; if it doubt, turn it down. While the butter is melting and browning, you should chop ya onion quite small, and then add it to the pan, along with the garlic cloves, which you can either chop or crush with the heel of a knife. Stir this all around for a bit and add some black pepper and a pinch of salt. Put the lid on and sweat (the onions, not you) until they’re translucent and going golden around the edges.

While the onions are doing some cardio, chop ya veg into smallish chunks – if thou possessth not a blender or a liquidiser, chop them smol, cos then you’ll have good old chunkaay soup. I tend not to bother peeling anything but you can do as you please.

Add the chopped veg to the onions and butter, and let them try to go a bit brown on the outside (I know I keep going on about brown but this is where the flavour is; it’s called the maillard reaction is is responsible for making EVERYTHING taste great). Once you’re happy, or bored, add around 1.3 liters of stock (made with kettle and stock cube, because no one makes their own stock…ha…ha…ahem…). Stir this all around and boil it for at least 20 minutes, or until everything is soft and stabbable with a fork, or other sharp implement of choice, such as an ice axe.

When all is soft and lovely, get your blender out and liquify the lot – if you don’t have a blender, that’s cool, give it a good old stir and mibbe get a whisk in there to break stuff up a bit more; idk I have a blender so don’t need to worry about this. If you feel it’s a little thick and wouldn’t get more than 80 on an IQ test, add some more boiling water.

Add a sploosh of milk, season with salt and pepper again and stir in the parsley. It should be smelling gorgeous at this point, so make the most of it: spoon it into a bowl, top with whatever you want (I drizzled some olive oil over bc I have no shame – cream would be equally beautiful) and eat eat eat! It’s really nice with some hot buttery bread too.

*please use actual butter, not the I ‘Know It’s Hard to Believe But This Actually Bears No Resemblance to Butter’ kind of bullshit that they sell in supermarkets bc it’s marketed as healthy. There is no substitute for the real thang and it’s really not as terrible for you as people think.

As you were, gentlemen…