ONE FOR THE POT

When it comes to cooking, there is nothing simpler and more satisfying to make as soup. You can have completely free reign to concoct any mixture of ingredients you want. If you have a hand-blender you can really make anything into soup. And you dont need a fancy stock. A good brand of boullion powder is fine for drawing a bit of flavour. If we're going away and there are vegetables left in the fridge, I will just cook them up, liquidise and freeze. I've even been known to put radishes and beansprouts into soup.

For an amazingly quick soup, just lightly fry an onion, add salt and pepper and stock powder. Chop in any vegetable and pour over hot water. Simmer til cooked, whizz up with the hand blender. Serve with bread and butter. That easy.

For a creamy soup use marrow, courgette, squash or a sweet potato. And then to give it bite, chop up some chilli and garlic and fry with little chunks of bread til toasted. Chuck in at the table. It will bring any afternoon alive.

When my father became a widower one of the first things, after ice cream, he wanted to make was Scotch Broth. And at this time of year it has to be one of the finest lunches around. Stoking the engines to get us through the chill days and packed full of pulses, beans, barley and vegetables floating in golden brown stock.

Most decent butchers will provide you with a mutton bone and a great way to really bring the flavour out is to roast it first. But actually if you have a leg of lamb left from Sunday lunch, it will do the same. The soup pot is the perfect cauldron for yesterdays leftovers and in this case you get all those little meaty bits turning up in the soup. If you can resist spreading the marrow on toast with fresh parsley and butter, then simmer it up with the usual stock vegetables; leeks, carrots, onion, celery and turnip for a couple of hours.

If you have time then leave the stock overnight, which gives you time to soak the dried broth mix over night. In the morning, scoop off the fat and then heat it up again, dredging out whatever is left of the vegetables and adding in dried Scotch Broth mix – this has lentils, marrowfat peas and barley and it needs to simmer for a while. Then add fresh quantities of the same vegetables as before and when they are cooked, it’s ready.

TENDER WORDS

Tender (2009) tells the story of Nigel Slater's love affair with his garden in Islington and the many seedlings he has raised in his box-hedged vegetable patches. It’s a magnificent volume, like a medieval knightly treatise with pictures of his Eden, its produce and many of the recipes he has created from them.

23 May, 2010

FOOD FROM THE HEART

Cooking is a basic human instinct. We’ve been eating, chopping, shaping, flavouring, enticing ingredients into something delicious since time began. But as the way many of us live has changed, the basic skills we require to cook, are no longer valued and it’s often easier to let others take control of what we eat.

21 April, 2010

IN A RIGHT FISH STEW

This week we had sustainable fish stew. It’s a quick and easy way to feed a gang of hungries on a Friday night and doesn’t need much else but some good bread and wine. Like all stews, you need balance, rich liquid and a range of potent flavours steaming from your pot.

15 March, 2010