THE SOUP

There is nothing quite like the taste of fresh picked vegetables from your own garden.  Pick them when you want to cook them for the best flavour and highest vitamin and mineral content, the longer your vegetables sit around the more goodness leaves them.

When I first moved to Bruny 20 years ago I was given a bag of parsnip seeds by a friend who had been growing vegetables and collecting her own seed on Bruny for many years, I did not yet have a house or my own garden, never the less, I saved that precious seed.  The parsnips in the above photograph were harvested and cooked yesterday and are from those original seeds that I was given on the first day of my new life on Bruny Island.  I have tried to grow these parsnips in neat garden beds and never have any success, the parsnips like to do their own thing. I have learnt to just let the best one go to seed and let the wind and birds carry the seed around the garden.  I have parsnips in abundance all year round using this method.

 

 

 

 

 

Be creative with your soups, use the freshest ingredients you can and use seasonal vegetables unless you can preserve your own produce. Make lots of stock to use as a base, vegetable, chicken, beef, fish, each stock will lend its own uniqueness to your cooking.  In my old life when I could eat any food I wanted, I always said that cooking without onion and garlic would be like cooking with one hand tied behind my back.  Those flavoursome vegetables were the base of all my savoury recipes. I had to learn how to make delicious food with different ingredients and how to get that ‘something’ that was missing without the onions and garlic. The green tops of spring onions and chives make a fairly good substitute with addition of asafoetida, a common spice used in Indian cooking.

Starting your soup

 

 

 

 

 

Use a good heavy based pot. Into the pot put a table spoon good quality olive oil, heat the pot till the oil is hot and stir in your finely chopped spring onion and chive tops.  As your herbs start to fry, turn the pot to a low heat and sweat the herbs slowly stirring occasionally then add sea or rock salt, fresh ground pepper and a quarter of a teaspoon of asafoetida.  Deglaze with your vegetable stock then add the chopped vegetables of your choice and a few extra fresh herbs and spices. Bring to the boil, place the lid on the pot and simmer slowly for 1 -2 hours.

I will post individual soup recipes over the next week and add them to a new soup section in my recipe pages.