Smokey Chipotle Carrot and Butterbean Soup

Isolation time means more cooking and baking (of course), and I got my two children to help me out with this, and served it with some home made cheese scones. It's a relative quick and easy recipe. If you don't have chipotle paste to hand, you can substitute with a mixture of tomato paste and spices (see recipe notes below).

Potato and Stilton Soup

This soup is pure comfort food; we ate it in our house with home made cheese scones and it was delightful. You could also substitute the onions in this for leeks if you want to make a jazzed up potato and leek soup.

Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup

Autumn is here and that means one thing in my house: soup is back on the menu! We've had a cold snap here in the UK this week and this soup was perfect over the weekend to add a bit of warmth into the house. For extra heat, you could add fresh or dried chilli peppers, though I omitted them because I was giving this to my 11 month old daughter, who absolutely loved it. 

Roasted Pepper Soup

As the Starks would say: Winter is coming. And in my house that means one thing: soup!

This is a relatively simple soup recipe but it is still very tasty. I used shallots but you could just use onions instead. This soup uses a couple of potatoes to bulk it up; I cooked the potatoes in the stock to be included in the soup, so as to retain the starch for thickness. The resulting soup was very thick (how I like it) but if you prefer a thinner soup, or you want it less starchy, you could cook and drain the potatoes before adding to stock, or use slightly more stock.

Leek and Cannellini Bean Soup

This is a light, simple and tasty soup, perfect for the spring weather (which has unfortunately yet to arrive in the UK yet). It's a relatively hassle free recipe which takes very little effort. This is another Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe which I've adjusted slightly - he used fresh herbs but I substituted dried, and he also suggested using chilli oil, but since I didn't have any, I just used olive oil instead.

Carrot and Coriander (Cilantro) Soup

Well here in the UK the winter seems to be sticking around for a bit longer and generally overstaying it's welcome. This is a lovely warming soup that is perfect for heating you up on a cold evenings. The nutmeg and lemon juice add a nice edge to the soup, but if you prefer to omit them, please do. Similarly, the cream is simply there for for consistency, so if you'd rather leave it, feel free.

Mushroom, Lentil and Carrot Soup

This soup recipe comes from my first vegetarian cookbook, which I bought when I was still eating meat but wanted to cut down my intake. It has been many years but I still come back to this recipe time and time again. The reason? One word describes this soup: tasty. The addition of red wine and soy sauce gives it a really rich, savoury flavour. An absolute must to get you through the winter!

Leek and Potato Soup

Leek and potato soup is great comfort food now the evenings are long and it's cold out. The combination of milk and cream in this recipe means this soup is not too rich, but retains a lovely creamy texture. You could jazz things up a bit by garnishing with some fresh chives, but I didn't bother. 

French Onion Soup

Another busy week, so squeezing in a blog post before I head off to work (yes I'm working on a Saturday, not for the first time this month, nor, sadly, the last). It's getting colder now and as autumn/winter rolls around  I find myself gravitating towards soup more and more, so expect to see plenty of soup recipes in the coming months. This is a  very straightforward and cheap soup that tastes delicious. It takes a bit of time because the onions are best cooked slowly on a low heat. I had some shallots lurking in the garden I used for this, which gave it an extra special tastyness.