Swiss Chard Soup

Last year I grew swiss chard in the vegetable patch. It did remarkably well and we've been used it as a substitute for spinach, which worked very well. Here is a picture my husband took the last year. 

What I love about the swiss chard is that it matches our house really well, with it's red stalks and green leaves. Maybe I will change the paint in my living room to match it (just joking!). We've tried all kinds of things like eating it as a salad, making what Germans call Rahmspinat, in fried rice, with noodles, in cutlets and in patties. 

Preparation time: 30 minutes; makes 1 litre

Ingredients:

1 medium	Onion
2 tbsp.	Oil
2 cloves	Garlic
500g	Swiss chard
1 L	Milk
1.5 tbsp.	Flour
1/3	Vegtable cube (Knorr)
	Salt and pepper

Method:

Making this soup is really easy. Start by chopping your onions. They can be chopped any way you like because you will blend your soup at the end. Heat a saucepan on medium high heat. When the pan is hot add the oil and then the onions. 

A note here, if you use a stick to blend your soup don't make your soup in a non-stick pan, because your stick will damage the teflon coating. 

While the onions are frying coarsely chop the garlic and add it to the pan. You should stir the onions every now and then to prevent them from burning. While everything is cooking chop your Swiss chard roughly. 

You should chop the stems a bit finer than the leaves. I chopped them in 1 cm pieces. 

Then add the leaves to the pan and stir. Put the lid on the pan and let it cook until the leaves have wilted. You will notice because you'll have a whole lot less of leaves in your pan!

Remove the lid and sprinkle 1.5 tbsp. of flour over the leaves. Stir the flour in and keep stirring until all the flour is incorporated and cook for another minute so that the flour gets cooked. Next add the milk, salt, pepper and vegetable cube. I use a Knorr cube, which is huge so I used about a third. You don't want to add stock to your soup. I don't actually know why, but the only definite piece of advice my mother gave me to making this soup is "do not put any water in it". 

Heat everything through and then puree your soup. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to use a stick blender. If you have a metal one you can just stick it directly into your saucepan and puree the mixture. If you do this be very careful. Make sure that your blade is fully immersed all the time and start out on your lowest speed. Any mistakes here will result in hot soup flying all over your kitchen and possibly all over you. A safer way to do this would be to cool down the soup and then puree it. If you are transferring the soup to a liquidiser you should definitely cool the soup down before liquidising it. 

Once pureed reheat and serve hot. 

Half an Hour Vegetarian Pumpkin and Potato Soup

Well this one was never truly meant to be! My shopping schedule is all off due to the kids vacations and as usual I forgot that on Sunday the shops are closed. Something that I have never quite been able to get used to. The fridge was almost bare except for some butternut squash and a few potatoes. So I decided to throw them "all" together and make a soup. I happened to have half a loaf of bread left over from yesterday and a few cheeses so I figured we could manage.

Oh and I forgot to mention it was day 2 of the girls musical performance so I only had ... yes, you guessed it, 30 minutes to prepare dinner. When we picked up the girls their first question (as always) was "what are we having for dinner?". They were not too happy when I said soup and bread.

I pretty much grew up eating soup. My mum's soup is famous! I remember my aunt, uncle and cousins coming to visit one evening and they joined us for dinner quite sporadically. My mum made soup and my aunt asked my mum what she put in it because it was delicious. The reason that this stuck in my mind was that my mum made the soup from the beans left over from lunch! Actually whatever was left over from lunch went into the pot together with onions, garlic, water and a vegetable cube. It was then boiled, put in the liquidizer and served with bread and butter. Hmmm delicious... if you only knew! Okay that's not to say that my mum didn't make soups from scratch. She did that all the time, with spinach soup being our all time favourite. Always made with organically grown spinach, freshly plucked from the back garden. And in case you are wondering left over soups really do taste good, depending on what was left over of course!

Serves 4; Preparation time 30 mins.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp.	Olive Oil
1 small	Onion
2 cloves	Garlic
500 g	Butternut squash or Pumpkin
250 g	Potatoes
750 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
12 stems	Thyme
	Salt & Pepper

Method:

Soup is ultra easy to make. First peel the pumpkin and potatoes and then cube them. The smaller the better because they will cook quicker and be easier to pulverize at the end. Also dice the onion and the garlic.

Then take a large saucepan and heat it on high. Throw in the oil, onions and garlic and stir fry until soft. Around 1-2 minutes. Then add the pumpkin and potatoes and mix it well. Let it fry for 5 minutes or so, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. 

Add the water, vegetable cube, salt and pepper stir it all up, put the lid on and let it boil. Reduce the heat as necessary. 

Now I have this thyme plant left over from making the caramelized leek quiche so I decided to put some of that in too. But I really could not be bothered with picking the leaves off so I just took around 12 stems of about 7 - 8 cm length and chopped them up. I picked out a few of the harder stems once I was done chopping and threw the rest of the leaves into the bubbling pot.

The vegetables didn't have to boil for more than 10 minutes and they were done. I then pulled out my Kenwood stick mixer (Stab or Bamix depending on where you live and your age!), stuck it in the pot and mashed everything up. If you want a lumpy soup you can just use a potato masher. If you only have a liquidizer your in for bad luck because you can't put hot liquid in a traditional liquidizer. Actually there is a way around it. If you prepare the vegetables with a minimum amount of water you can then add cold water to them once they are cooked. This is usually cool enough to use in a liquidizer. However, afterwards you have to heat it up again. 

The girls just looked at the soup and said "what is it?" After I explained what was in it our oldest agreed to having one soup spoon full and the youngest demanded half a spoon. But half spoons don't exist (according to my husband) so she had to make do with a whole spoon. Then they tried it and couldn't get enough of it! I had to fight to have some left over so that I could pack it up as a school lunch for the next day!!! So it was successful (otherwise I would not be sharing it here, no?).