Recipes

My Number One Soup

Winter warmer

Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash

Winter in Melbourne. Cool, cloudy, wet, and this time of year the daylight only lasts for, like, half an hour.

I have a fallback recipe for a good warm spicey meal. Nothing specific but you have to allow an hour or two.

1. Heat up the oven. Reasonably hot, something like 175°.
2. Cut up the following into chunks:
   Roma tomatoes
   Red capsicum
   An onion
3. Add a clove or two of garlic crushed and cut up a bit, a bit of chilli sliced fine, maybe a few strips of sundried tomatoes, capers, salt and pepper to taste, oregano and parsley. Depends how spicey you want it.
4. Add a small roast. A chicken breast, a lamb shank, a tiny cut of oyster blade. Something like that.
5. Whack it all in a roasting dish, glug some oil on, give it a good rub.
6. Put the lid on, slide the dish into the oven, wait half an hour.
7. Take it out, check it, add some stock (and maybe a bit of wine if there’s some left over from the previous night/weekend), put it back in.
8. Keep on checking every twenty minutes or so. Give it a slosh around to keep everything moist. Doesn’t really matter if you get a bit of colour on the capsicum.
9. When it’s done and the meat is cooked through, take out the meat, set aside, and pour the roasted vegetables and stock into a blender.
10. Add more stock — maybe rinse some hot water into the dish to get any last flavour out — until you have the desired quantity of soup.
11. Whiz it up. Not too much: you want some texture left in the soup.
12. Pour it into bowls or mugs, add a swirl of cream and a sprinkle of parsley.
13. Slice the meat, make thick sandwiches with some crusty bread, serve as an accompaniment to the soup.

This is a simple, nourishing meal. Skimp on the stock and you can make it into a chunky sauce to go with a larger cut of meat, or as the basis for a bolognese sauce; just be careful that the vegetables don’t dry out in the dish while roasting.

Britni