How To Make Dehydrated Soup Mix

My wife and I both love eating soup, it makes for a great lunch with a fresh roll or for a warming tea. 

 The other night I made a huge batch of squash soup for tea. Some of my squash have just started to go bad so it was time to use them up. In the end I made about 6 litres of soup and it was really tasty!

I have no real set recipe for soup, I tend to just make it up as I go alone with what I have to hand. This one contained half a Oregon Homestead Squash (about 4kg I'd guess), three large onions, 6 cloves of garlic, a couple of white beetroots (so as to not colour the soup), one massive carrot and enough water to cover the lot. I then left it cooking until everything was soft and tender.

Beetroot Soup

Wednesday night I made beetroot soup.

When I was out in the garden I saw that the mice had been at my beetroot again (see this post from a previous year) So I decided to pull up what was still edible and make a soup for tea. 

A simple soup consisting of about 6 beetroots, a couple of carrots, a red onion, loads of garlic, some stock and a cooking apple. 

The onion and garlic were sweated first to soften, then the other veg were added for a bit, the stock cube and water was poured on after about 15 minutes. I left this to simmer, prepared some dough to prove for rolls and went to bath the kids (the dough was mixed in the bread maker earlier though!)!

I left it to simmer for an hour then blended it with a stick blender. 

I served it with rolls on the side and some crumbled feta in the soup. 

Lovely! 

Now to take care of those mice in the garden, I have a cunning plan....

Parsnip Soup With Sourdough

Made parsnip soup with sourdough last night.

I used the no kneed recipe again with the bread, it's really easy but I think I might try it in a bread tin next time rather than free form on the bread stone, it does have a certain charm but it could do with being deeper with less crust. 

 As for the soup it's a good way to use up my glut of parsnips before they go over. Neither my wife or I go mad for parsnips so having it curried like this is the way to make it more palatable. 

Our curried parsnip soup recipe is pretty easy.
4 large Parsnips
1 onion
oil
1 Tbsp of flour
1 Tsp of cumin
1/4 Tsp of fenugreek
1/2 Tsp of tumric
Pinch of salt
Rapeseed or olive oil
Chilli powder to taste
Chicken or vegetable stock

Just soften the onions in the oil in the bottom of a thick bottomed pan, add the parsnips, spices and flour and keep stirring until they're all coated. Add the stock and cook until it's all soften and falling apart. Then blend until smooth and add more stock to get the consistency you like. 

Anyone else have any good recipes for parsnips? I've got loads to use up and everyone is fed up of me giving them to them!

Roast Tomato Soup

After reading Gills post on using up the tomatoes I thought I'd add our roasted tomato soup to the mix. Every summer we make this soup and it's easily our favourite. 

Fresh tomatoes

 Get as many ripe tomatoes as you can find. cut the big ones into chunks and the rest just scatter in a roasting dish, peel a few cloves of garlic and chop some shallots in half. Pour over some olive oil and add the rosemary, mix it all up and bung in the oven for twenty minutes or so - until they start to brown ever so slightly to give that roasted taste.

Tomatoes, shallots, garlic and rosemary roasted in the oven

 Blend this mixture then add some vegetable stock until you get the consistency you like. We never bother to sieve it but if you like your soup smooth then it's easy done. We like this recipe because it's so easy and fuss free, normally we do a big batch with a couple of roasting trays full of tomatoes and freeze whatever we don't eat

All blended together and not sieved. Great served with fresh bread.

The little one seemed to like it as well!

How does everyone else make they're own tomato soup?

Nettle Soup

Last week we had our first meal from our smallholding, nettle soup! It's going to be a while until our veg is ready to eat so I thought a foraged meal would be a better place to start.

Nettle

Unfortunately, finding the nettles was far too easy.

Collecting your nettle in a old Waitrose bag makes them feel posher

The recipe i used goes as follows:

One carrier bag of nettles,

One onion,

Two garlic cloves,

One potato

1200ml of stock

salt and pepper

Adding them to the saucepan in batches as they soon wilt down

Fried the onion in a little oil till softened, then added the diced potato and garlic. fry these for 5 minutes before adding the stock and the nettles (well washed).

Wilted down nettles

Leave this to cook for 20 minutes then blend it together 



Blend it

Nice, cheap tea

 Although the soup was nice it did taste a little like it was missing something, maybe some herbs and spices would have improved it - anyone with any suggestions?