Spice up your soup

It was the Tuesday after bank holiday, I'd taken a walk to the local park to relive scenes of my teenage years, reflect on my direction in life and think about the exciting and rewarding but (slightly) sad summer I'd had. It had comprised of entertaining nights out with my mates, weddings, a trip to Scotland, helping my great uncle get over his wife's death , a top drawer birthday meal, the illness and then loss of my dog to cancer, the arrival of a new puppy, visiting the Olympics and plenty of games of cricket at higher level than the season before.

There were some scraps of brown and rusty red creeping onto the leaves of the trees at the edge of the park and only two further fixtures in the cricket program. I knew that summer was on its way out and autumn was soon to be with me.

When I have a lot think about I like to disappear into the kitchen and on this occasion it was to make a spicy parsnip soup. This is a soup I've made many times and I promised a good mate of mine I'd put in the blog as it's one of his favourites and he wanted me to show him how to do it.

The album of choice for cooking was Talk Talk's first album the Party's Over which is a synthesizer-driven, written to order piece of work that is noteworthy for containing some strong singles and for the fact that it sold enough to contribute towards the funding of the production of later masterpieces Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.

I first poured enough olive oil into my Le Cresceut dish to cover the bottom of it and heated the oil gently. I then diced a red onion, a garlic clove and four pieces of celery before adding them to the dish with half a tablespoon of ground ginger.

After these ingredients had cooked for a touch over five minutes I added dried cumin seeds and ginger root from the collection of spices, which I had received as part of my birthday present, together with half a tablespoon of curry powder. I mixed the curry powder and spices together and while they cooked I diced up around five hundred grams of parsnips and two hundred and fifty grams worth of carrots.

After another five minutes I added the carrots and parsnips to dish after first stirring the curry powder and spices into the onions, garlic, celery and ginger. I then poured a litre of vegetable stock into the mixture and left it to cook in the dish on a low light for about forty-five minutes. I always like to cook soups of this type for reasonable length of time to be sure the ingredients have all the time they need to fuse together prior to blending.

After the soup had cooked for the allotted forty-five minutes I took off the heat and let it cool for half an hour. I then blended it, returned it to the le cresceut dish and added a quarter of a pint of unsweetened soya milk to it. After reheating it through I poured it into bowls for serving.

The results were first rate and a taste of soups to come this autumn and winter. The soup was exceptionally thick and the use of small amounts of several different kinds of spices meant that it was thankfully not strong enough to make my eyes water. However it still retained a distinctive enough taste to stop it being too bland.

Warmed through with the addition of unsweetened soya milk and ready to eat