Recipe: Delicious Green soup to keep you healthy

Soup is one of the easiest yet often most impressive things you can knock up from the contents of the bottom your fridge. Maybe 5 mins of prep, and 15 to cook & blend, plus a few seconds of presentation inspiration and you can have a bowl of something that looks restaurant ready — and tastes better than most of the ready-made muck you can buy on the chilled produce shelves.

During Fashion Week I never have time to cook, so I normally spend the week before filling my freezer with LLG-made ready meals, unfort I was in New York beforehand this time, so I had to rely on M&S. I bought a tub of what they called Green Soup, thinking how scrumptious that sounded. God was I disappointed: inside the tub was a gelatinous broth-y beige gloop, with little chunks of potato and shards of unidentifiable green floating about. Didn’t taste of much either.

So here is my nice, bright GREEN version. Not a chunk or bit of gloop to be seen. I found a tired old leek, a small bowl of cooked broccoli and a packet of spinach leaves in the fridge so that is what I used, along with an onion & a potato, but you could use peas too. (I wldn’t use cabbage or kale here — too sulphurous.)

SO for enough soup for four people:

It’s as simple as: soften onions/leek in olive oil, then cook them & rest of vegetables in stock. Whizz in blender, add cream. Eat.

Put the kettle on, and grab two pans — a small saucepan filled with water and a nice big pot with a tablespoon of olive oil. Put the small pan on to boil and the big one on to heat and, whilst you are waiting, chop up a medium/large onion and the leek (or leeks) if you happen to have more than around, & cook them in the oil over a very low heat, stirring occasionally.

Grab a potato, chop it into inch chunks, and add it to the boiling water.  (Of course this is the perfect Monday recipe when you can use the leftover veg from Sunday lunch, so you cld strike lucky and have some cooked  boiled potato kicking about.) Chop up you broccoli (cooked or raw) into small pieces.

The idea is to sweat the onion/leek to softness slowly, not colour them brown. Once they are lovely & soft, lob in your broccoli (cooked or raw), your large packet of spinach leaves (keep small handful of leaves to one side for later if you want a garnish). I don’t see why you couldn’t use frozen spinach here either, and enough boiling water to generously cover the lot.  Add a vegetable stock cube — or a couple of teaspoons of Marigold bouillon — (much better than a cube), lots of black pepper, and then drain and add your potato, which should be cooked by now.

Cook this unappealing looking mixture for five minutes or so until the spinach is properly wilted. If you are cooking the broccoli from raw, it’ll be more like ten minutes.

Then carefully pour the lot into a food processor or blender. DO NOT USE A STICK BLENDER — these tend to chop rather than amalgamate, and the point of this soup is its pureed texture. (You could use a mouli or a sieve and push the veg through with the back of a wooden spoon, but I am way too lazy & always in a hurry. I LIKE electric gadgets.)

Whizz it all together, and then add a couple of large dollops of something creamy. I used marscapone as that is what was in the fridge, but cream, even top of the milk would be good too. Then check the seasoning: you’ll probably want to add salt and more black pepper. A pinch of nutmeg might be nice too.

Pour into bowls. I then zapped my reserved spinach leaves for 30secs in the microwave, and floated them on top, along with baby quenelles of marscapone (okay now I am just showing off,) but you could  swirl some cream instead. Grind over some more black pepper and you are done.

Ingredients:
onion
leeks
cooked boiled potato
bag of raw spinach leaves/ frozen spinach
cooked or raw broccoli
vegetable stock cube
marscapone/cream
olive oil
salt & freshly ground black pepper