Nic Dempsey

I eat soup at least once a week and as the temperature drops and it gets darker, soup becomes the perfect food, easy, quick and comforting, so I eat it more!

There are a couple of soup recipes on here. The lentil soup that I love and ate every day one winter, there’s Borlotti, Pancetta and Spring Green Soup, French Onion Soup and even Accidental Soup.

What has never appeared here is the soup I eat most often, which doesn’t have a name or even a recipe, it’s the ‘use the vegetables in the fridge drawer’ soup. At the some point over the weekend, I will gather all the vegetables that I didn’t get around to eating during the week and make soup with them. I don’t like to waste food and soup and frittata are my two favourite ways of making something good to eat (also pickled carrots) and Friday Night Pizza is the other place that the end of the week vegetables go to avoid the bin! Menu planning should mean that I don’t waste any food but it happens and I hate to throw food away so soup is always a meal option for one night a week on the plan and it’s normally this one. If of course there are no leftover vegetables, then I just make the lentil soup and am just as happy!

The ingredients change all the time but the basic principle is the same every time I make it. Chop the veg, saute it for a bit, add some garlic, ginger or any herbs that are around and/or red lentils (although if there are any cooked lentils in the fridge I just bung them in), add stock (if I don’t have stock I use Marigold Stock Power or a stock cube and hot water), simmer until the veg is cooked. Put soup through the blender, done. Although it might need some salt and pepper. Sometimes for variety, I roast the vegetables and just blend them with some stock. Either way it’s really easy.

This can lead to some interesting soup, it sometimes comes out an off putting sludge colour that I probably wouldn’t serve to other people but am quite happy eating myself, it always tastes good!  I most often serve it with additional sautéed vegetables and chopped kale (another Tina trick), sometimes with cheese, seeds or yoghurt. There are hundreds of ways to dress it up and make it interesting.

How do you make sure that you don’t waste food? Are you a fan of soup or do you only eat food you can chew?