one soup, two soup, red soup, blue soup...

Soups are a great choice weeks like this one: a long, tiring post-holiday season week. Soups are quick, easy, and really capture the essence of any vegetable included in the pot. Even better – they can be made ahead of time. On Saturday afternoon, I made two, figuring it best to clear out the refrigerator of extra produce, lest it go to waste.

One soup..

Beetroot soup – this time jazzed up a bit differently. The week before I used beetroot, onion and horseradish, always a great combination. It tastes great, but it tastes… singular as well. It's not a soup to be regularly slurped down at lunchtime.

This time I tossed in a red onion and some rosemary along with the vegetable stock and let the beetroot soup simmer for about half an hour. Once ready, I whizzed it with the hand blender until perfectly smooth.

The result: A great lunchtime soup, filling and sweet. I may try it next time with some lovely powdery sage.

Two soup…

Wednesday night, after a long walk home in the fresh, nearly-autumn air, another soup was on the cards. I'd seen a recipe for a green bean and parmesan soup, which sounded lovely, but I felt it needed more. Some late-summer garden courgettes did the trick.

I sautéed the green beans, courgettes and a clove of garlic for a few minutes, and then added the vegetable stock. After bringing to a boil and simmering for about 15 minutes, the soup simply needed the hand-blender treatment. I swirled in about 50 g parmesan, a tablespoon of single cream and some freshly-ground black pepper.

The result: This was brilliant. The extra parmesan really crept into the vegetables and gave the soup a lovely soft and grainy yet creamy texture. The courgettes were brilliant – softening the tough green beans.

Normally I wouldn't use both cream and parmesan cheese anymore, but I think I learned a lesson here – there's no reason why both cream and cheese (and even a bit of oil in the sauté pan) can't be used, as long as it's not overused. The result was gorgeous – and lower calorie than a lot of other meals I've prepared recently.

Red soup…

Wednesday night's soup was another Saturday concoction that I've made before: a tomato-ginger soup, but this time with chilli.. I once found it in a recipe served with grilled cheese baguettes with curry mayonnaise, which is still one of my favourites.

I remember making it about a year ago in France whilst on holiday, with a glut of wonderfully ripe tomatoes. I think that was the best one I've had.

The result: Unforunately the chilli (grown locally and wizened in my fruit bowl) overpowered the soup. It may not have overcome it had I served the soup immediately on Saturday, but three days to "mature" was that bit too long. A few dollops of crème fraiche mitigated a bit of the pain, but not enough. I actually had to leave some in the bowl.

Blue soup…

Sorry, it stops here. The only blue soup I've ever seen was Bridget Jones's – and I'm not about to recreate that one.

Three soups in a week was a lot, but not too much, I don't think. But they must have the essence of the season in them. As it's getting a bit colder outside, next week I'm thinking a lovely fish stew may be in order…