Bloke's Cookbook - Vegetable Soup

Blokes know what vegetables are for. They're an accompaniment to meat in all its glorious guises and they're there to soak up gravy. But bear with me on this, because this very simple veg soup is cheap, fast to prepare and dead easy, as well as being filling and tasting good. The downside is it takes a long time to cook. However, the preparation takes 5 minutes.

You need:

A couple of large potatoes (4-5 inches long)
A leek
An onion
2 stock cubes (vegetable ideally, chicken if you don't have veg)
Olive oil

Wash the potatoes but don't peel them. Wash the leek - these get alot of grit in the end, so make sure you've got any little black bits of soil out. Chop the tip off the bottom of the leek and chop the green bits off the top, and discard them. Now chop the leek along its length into pieces about 1/2" thick. Then chop the potatoes into bite-sized cubes. Now peel the onion and chop it into smaller pieces.

Find a big saucepan, and put plenty of olive oil into it. Put it on the hob and turn the heat up to medium. After a minute, put the chopped onion in. This needs to sizzle - gently - for several minutes until it softens and starts to go translucent. If it starts to brown then you've got the heat up too high. Whilst this is happening, boil at least 2 pints of water in the kettle.

Once the onion's softened, add the leek. Mix the onion and leek together and let them cook together on the medium heat for 5 minutes or so. This will make sure the leek softens.

Now you need to use the stock cubes to make 2 pints of stock. This is simple - place cubes in jug, add hot water, stir. When you've made this, add it to the sizzling leeks and onions in the saucepan.

Stir the leeks and onions together.

What you'll have now is a saucepan with some hot stock and cooked leeks and onions in it. At this point, you should add your potato chunks.

This is, in essence, the base for the soup. At this point you can add other vegetables if you want, or you can just stick with this leek and potato soup. I add parsnip and sweet potato, which makes for a great winter soup.

Now, just stir all your veg together, cover the saucepan, turn down to the lowest heat possible and leave for at least an hour, longer if you can wait. Stir everything together every half hour or so.

When the soup's done - after at least an hour, preferably two hours - you can eat it. Personally, I don't like those big chunks of veg, so I use a potato masher and mash around half the soup. I then mix it all together. The starch in the potatoes firms the soup up a bit but it doesn't end up too runny or too thick. You may prefer to use a liquidiser to make the soup very runny, or you may like the chunks. It's up to
you.


How to make your own croutons.

It's a doddle. Heat the oven to 200C+ - 250C is better if your oven goes that far. Get some bread.

Slice the bread into cubes. Get a baking tin - a small one is preferable - and slosh some olive oil into it. Chuck the bread in and mix the bread and oil together - gently - so that all the sides of the cubes of bread have some oil on them. Then, place in the tray in the oven. They should take about 10 minutes to do - take them out when they're golden.

You can do this with plain old sliced bread from the supermarket. I think it works better if you buy those uncooked baguettes - the ones that need to be cooked for 10 minutes - and chop one into cubes.

A word of warning - don't eat them straight away because they WILL contain scalding-hot oil and you WILL end up with blisters on your tongue. Trust me on this. When you take them from the tray, put them on a piece of kitchen roll to soak off the excess oil before you use them.


Ease of cooking and preparation: 5/5 - Almost impossible to get wrong and you don't need any specialist equipment, just a saucepan, a peeler and a sharp knife.

Leftover value: 3/5 - Can't really be eaten cold the next day. However, it will reheat and taste as good as it did the day before. You can keep this on the hob for a couple of days, reheating as necessary. No animal products so it won't go off too quick.

Mess factor: 4/5 - Some veg peelings, and one large saucepan to wash up. A baking tray if you do the croutons. Couldn't get much less messy.