Quick and easy recipe: Tomato Soup

I've been making home made soup for many years now - they are (usually!) quick, easy and cheap. Plus my soups are often so hearty and filling that they can fill you up for a main course. I batch cook mine, making double quantities and freezing them - that way I've always got a standby dinner to hand that's almost instant after a quick defrost in the microwave!

This is one of my favourites which I make all the time and would love to share with you:

Easy Home Made Tomato Soup 

(for approximately 4-8 people, depending on the size of your bowls, the size of your people and the size of their appetite!)

Ingredients:
1kg tomatoes
1 or 2 Sweet Potatoes (normal white potatoes are fine too, although I think sweet potatoes add an extra sweetness and colour)
Vegetable Stock (I usually just use a stock cube, nothing fancy!)
Seasoning
Sugar
Approximately 50g butter

Peel and dice the potato, then melt the butter in a large saucepan. Throw the potatoes into the pan and stir about over a medium heat. Meanwhile, simply quarter the tomatoes (no need to peel or finely chop). Keep giving the potatoes a stir, then sling in the tomatoes. Give everything a stir and cover with vegetable stock - just enough to cover the vegetables, not too much. I like to add in a few grinds of pepper too. Bring everything to the simmer and let it bubble gently away for about 20-30 minutes until the potatoes are soft. You now need to process the soup - you can either use a food processor/blender, or a handheld blender. Give the soup a whizz until its is smooth, then pass it through a sieve to get rid of the tomato seeds. The soup will probably be quite thick so you'll need to smooth it through the sieve with a spoon - keep going until you've got about a desert-spoon of mulch left in the sieve. Warm the soup back up, and add 1 teaspoon of sugar. This sounds weird I know, but it takes away any bitterness and make the soup taste lovely and smooth. I don't usually add salt or anything else but you can if you like. If the soup is too thick add a little water until its the consistency you like.

You can fancy-schmancy the soup up with a few chopped herbs, or a swirl of cream would look pretty - but mostly we have ours simple and just served with some part-baked rolls from the oven. Yum!

What's your favourite soup recipe?

Sarah :)

Too young to cook..?

How old would your own child need to be before you set them loose in the kitchen? Do you believe a kitchen is a dangerous place (all hot things and sharp knives, and far too risky), or have you always tried to encourage your child to take part when it comes to cooking?

My own daughter Amy was given a fabulous children’s cookery book from Santa this year - if Santa thinks its OK for her to cook a chocolate cake or chicken goujons, who am I to argue?! Amy turned 9 at the end of December, and I’ve always tried to find time to have baking sessions with her. We’ve turned out sticky buns (with lots of icing), the old favourite rice crispie cakes, shortbread (good excuse for using all those shape cutters), and loads more. But it’s always been based around “baking”: weighing the ingredients, stirring them up, rolling out or tipping into the baking tin. Then I would take over with the hot oven bit.

But this weekend was different! Amongst all the cake recipes in Amy’s new book there is a big section on main meals, full of things like chicken skewers, curry and rice, savoury pancakes - and chicken chow mein. It could be the fact that it’s the Chinese New Year, but Amy decided she wanted to cook chicken chow mein from scratch, herself with no (well, very minimal!) help. She wanted to cook a proper grown-up dinner for the family - none of those soppy rice crispie cakes here, thank you! So we wrote out a shopping list for the ingredients, bought everything we needed, and last night she set to work.

Now, chicken chow mein involves all those scary things: hot water to cook the noodles, sharp knives to cut the chicken and vegetables, hot fat to stir fry. Was I nervous? A tad…

I confess I took over the boiling of the noodles - the site of all that bubbling hot water, yikes! But step two in the cookery book involved peeling and slicing carrots, chopping spring onions, slicing beans, etc. I handed Amy a very sharp knife and gritted my teeth….. She was fine - she was very careful and respectful of the sharpness of the blade, took care to make sure her fingers were clear - honestly, she was fine!

So next step: stir frying the chicken. OK, oil put into wok and heated [gulp], chicken tipped carefully in [gulp], wooden spoon handed over: and she was off! Stirring the chicken like a seasoned pro, taking on all my comments about keeping it low so that the oil doesn’t splash, etc, etc. Then we added the vegetables: more stirring in hot spitty oil, and finally the noodles. Stir, stir, stir.

I can only say that the meal was fabulous - tasty, cooked to perfection, and with clean plates all round afterwards. What was most interesting was that the recipe included mangetout and fine beans - both vegetables that Amy normally “hates”, but it seems when a child cooks their own dinner these things lose the yuk factor. She scoffed the lot!

So, despite the fact that it was a great way to encourage my child to eat vegetables she wouldn’t normally, was I right to let her near the sharp knives and hot fat? Would you let your 9 year old do something like this too? Am I overly cautious/not cautious enough?!

Happy Year of the Dragon!

Sarah x