Sizzingly Scrumptious Soup (Soups)

Member Name: hellyphant

Product:	Soups
Date:	23/03/02 (1556 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fast but very good food, nutritious, lasts all week, smells delicious, even your cat will like it (perhaps a disadvantage)

Disadvantages: it just tastes too good

If you're a lazy, fairly busy person like me, then the last thing you're going to feel like doing when you get in from work in the evening, is start preparing a healthy nourishing meal. More than likely, you're going to head straight for the well stocked freezer, and throw one of those ready made meals from Safeways in the oven and just forget about it for 40 minutes or so. Or if like Mother Hubard and her cuboard, your freezer is bare, then you're either going to ring for a pizza or just skip dinner and have a few pieces of toast with a cup of tea. Wow, you can tell I'm a healthy eater, can't you.

The only problem with this kind of 'fast food' is a) you generally always feel quite sick afterwards - especially the case I find, when I over-indulge in pizza, and b) if you're fairly health conscious, you're going to feel pretty guilty. By no means do I eat as healthily as I should, but I do have an annoying obsession with trying to make sure I never eat more fat than I'm supposed to in a day. For women, this is a maximum of 70 grams (95 grams for men). I also try and stick to the 5 pieces of fruit and veg a day rule aswell.

Since summer is fast approaching and I'm soon going to have to stop hiding under my baggy jumpers, I decided I must stop with the fast food, and stop now. So, to get me started I visited that wonderful website - www.ask.co.uk, which you will know, if you have ever visited it, allows you to type in any question you may have and comes up with a list of possible answers. I typed in 'how do you make a nourishing vegtable soup' and 2 seconds later there was page upon page of recipe suggestions.

Now I'm very fussy and there are a lot of vegtables I don't like, such as mushrooms, parsnips and turnips, to name just a few. If you're like me, you can make your question a little more specific and ask 'how can I make a nourishing vegtable soup that doesn&#
39;t have ....blah blah blah in it?'. And lo and behold a list of suitable recipes will appear in front of your very eyes. Pure magic.

I tried out quite a few of the suggested recipes but this is the one I liked best:


********* TOMATO WILD RICE SOUP ********

<<<<Ingredients>>>>>

1 medium onion, chopped finely or grated
2-4 carrots, chopped
2-4 stalks celery, chopped
3 tblsp butter
2 tblsp olive oil
1 28oz can of crushed tomatoes and either another small can or 2-4 diced fresh tomatoes
2 cups wild rice
vegtable or chicken stock

(1/2 cup pearl barley for thicker soup/stew)

spices - salt, pepper, and at least 2 tblsp fresh chopped basil


<<<<<My personal Instructions>>>>>

(So do as you're told, else I'll have you round here doing all my washing up!)

* Find a large saucepan, add the oil and butter and heat gently.

* Take your onion and chop it as finely as possible. Try not to cut your fingers while doing so - I always seem to manage to!

* When the oil and butter are suitably sizzling, add the chopped onions. Don't get too close - the oil may well spit at you.

* Leave to gently sizzle while you prepare the other vegtables. I've personally tried other vegtables to the ones they recommend, but none taste as good so I'd suggest you stick to the carrots and celery. If you like your soup nice and chunky, don't bother cutting the pieces too small.

* When ready, add to the saucepan and leave for about 8 minutes to brown. Delicious.

* The vegtables should be suitably coated in butter and browned before you add the tomatoes. Then add the spices. Some people prefer to do this at the end, but I like my spices to submerge deep into the mixture and become one with the other ingredients.

Be careful with the salt. If you add too much, you'll have proble
ms rectifying the problem without ruining the soup. Add a little then taste. Or alternatively add all the spices except the salt and leave that til the end.

Stir. And smell. You've added quite a lot of bazil so the smell should be quite strong (in a good way). If you leave your kitchen door open, you'll be sitting in the living room later in the evening and the smell will gently waft into your nose buds, making your stomach growl with hunger once again. (<<< note to self>>> must stop writing ops about food when I haven't had any lunch)

* Add stock and wild rice. Now, I had some difficulty finding wild rice. They don't seem to sell it in either Safeways or Sainsburys and I don't really know any specialist food shops. So I settled for Safeway's 'Long Grain and Wild Rice' which is basically a mixture of (just reading off the packet here) 'par-boiled American long grain rice and wild rice'. It's only actually 16% wild rice but it seems to do the trick for me and my soup always tastes delicious. I was also attracted to the note on the back of the pack which claims that 'Long Grain and Wild Rice helps maintain a healthy lifestyle'. Well, comments like that always work for me. Maybe if I used 100% wild rice, the soup would have a completely different taste. I don't know. But feel free to try it out. If you can find it anywhere, that is!

* Simmer gently, covered, usually for about an hour or so. I find the longer you let the soup stew, the tastier it gets. So be patient and you'll get your just reward.


********************************************


And voila - your freshly made, nutritious and healthy soup awaits you. Don't just leave it there on its own. Grab a teaspoon and have a little taste. Go on. You know you're dying to.....

Well? Isn't it just delicious?

The best thing about this soup is that it's very thick an
d chunky and therefore very filling. If you eat a bowl of this with some bread, you aren't going to want anything else. Also, if you use the amounts I've suggested, the soup is going to last you quite a while. Mine usually lasts almost a whole working week, which is ideal and means I don't have to come in and cook every night. It's like fast food, yet good food. What could be better.

You don't just have to eat it as soup either. As the days go by, you'll find the soup gradually gets thicker as the vegtables soak up more and more of the stock. Eventually the soup will become almost like a rice dish, and if you're really hungry you can eat it with some meat, I find chicken works the best - just a small breast cooked under the grill.

Even my cat likes this soup. I made the mistake of leaving the saucepan out the other night and when I came down in the morning, there was cheeky Willow, sitting quite comfortably on the cooker, her bottom on one hob and her head stuck in the saucepan on the other. She was so busy eating she didn't even notice me come in.

So, just remember to put that soup safely away, you never know who might have eaten it come morning.

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