Creamy Vegetable Soup

Soup is the ultimate comfort food isn’t it – soothing, warming and easy to eat. It’s also a great way to use up leftovers and excess food too. So when feeling under the weather (a horrid chest infection) and having some left over vegetables, what else can one do but make and eat vast quantities of soup? Guaranteed to make you feel more human in minutes.

The cooking of soup also allows me to get up on my soap box about a topic I feel ever so passionate about – ethical eating. All my fruit and vegetables (as I’ve mentioned before) come by way of an organic scheme and everything else (as far as is humanly possible) comes from local, sustainable sources, aiming for a low carbon footprint at all time. I won’t go on and on here, you most probably will glaze over halfway through reading anyway but please take the time to visit the Why Organic website, it is a most interesting and thought provoking site, and if you’re ethically inclined I’d advise reading Kate Lock’s Confessions of an Eco-Shopper too as she doesn’t just focus on food related items but everything you may encounter in day to day life; it is by the way also a very funny and well written book.

Getting back to the topic in hand, soup! This soup is a creamy mixed vegetable soup, utterly gorgeous but a wee bit calorific. You could simply omit the cream to turn it into a low calorie, healthy soup but I wouldn’t bother, the high nutrient content is a good enough justification for the added cream to me.

I chose to use ham stock for the soup as I was basing it around the idea of bacon & cabbage, the very traditional Irish dish, but in soup form and without all the fuss and washing up. The ham stock lends a resonate salty flavour to the soup, not overly salty mind, just a deep almost earthy note.

If you wanted a vegetarian alternative you could just use vegetable stock and if you omit the cream too, the soup is vegan.