Carrots

Celeriac

I have never liked Winter but on the plus side it is a great time to be cooking comfort foods and what better (and easier) comfort food to make than a bowl of warming soup.

Carrots are always available and are a low cost ingredient for making a soup, supplement with Celeriac, a big bunch of Coriander and some vegetable stock cubes and you have a wonderful and impressive tasting soup.

You can't beat good home-made soup and this is another easy one to make. When making this sort of soup quantities do not have to be exact and ingredients can be changed to suit your own personal taste.

I have used all vegetable stock cubes to make it a vegetarian soup but you could replace them with chicken stock cubes or a mixture of both. My stock cubes of choice are Knorr but that is entirely up to you.

The carrots I bought were wonderfully clean so all I had to do was remove the tops and then chop them up. If you buy carrots in their natural condition you will of course need to wash them thoroughly and peel them if they are a bit rough. Only cook the Broccoli florets, discarding the big thick stem.

Ingredients

1kg Carrots, chopped into one inch segments
1/2 Celeriac, chopped into bite size pieces
4/5 Garlic cloves, roughly chopped
4 Vegetable stock cubes
1 tsp salt
Bunch of fresh Coriander
Freshly ground Black pepper
Water

Method

• Clean, peel and chop the carrots into roughly one inch pieces and place in pan.
  
  
• Peel your Celeriac and cut into cubes. Add to the pan.
  
  
• Add water to the pan so the level is about one inch from the top of your pan. Bring to the boil and then leave to simmer for an hour or so.
  
  
• Remove half the cooked carrots and celeriac from the pan, drain them over a bowl so as not to lose any of your liquid and then discard.
  
  
• Peel and roughly chop your garlic cloves. (You can use more or less according to your tastes.) Crush and add to the pan.
  
  
• Add three vegetable stock cubes ( I prefer Knorr stock cubes. I use the stock cubes both to enhance the flavour but also to season the soup as stock cubes are quite salty which is why you should add and then taste after they have dissolved.) Once dissolved taste again to see whether you want to add the fourth vegetable stock cube.
  
  
• Taste to see if you should add the teaspoon of salt or not.
  
  
• Finely chop your Coriander (plenty of it) and add to pan. Add a generous few twists of freshly ground black pepper. Continue to simmer for a further two or three minutes and then remove from the heat.
  
  
• Liquidise the soup in either a liquidiser (will need to do in batches) or with a hand-held liquidiser so that a smooth consistency is achieved.
  
  
• Serve immediately or leave to cool and store in the fridge and reheat as required. If not using all at once only reheat the amount you need each time and not the whole pan of soup.

Serves 8

Making anything like this does not require you to use precise amounts so do not worry too much about weighing or the size of the ingredients.

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