Super-Hippie Eco-Person with a Dragon: Meatless Monday

Well, it's well and truly Winter now, so I thought I would make a nice creamy vegetable soup. The soup I made is completely vegan and the wonderful creamy texture comes from the vegetables themselves.

To me, the best part of vegetable soup is, you can put literally any vegetables in it. Even if you don't like some of them, when you blend it up, it will probably taste just fine. Generic soup taste!

To start, I like to get some onion and celery frying off in the bottom of the saucepan with a little vegetable oil. This time I used one brown onion, one red onion, and about four stems of celery. I put most of the leaves in as well, since my stems were a little thin, being home grown. Sometimes I'll pop about a teaspoon of minced garlic in at this stage as well, but honestly, I forgot...

You can leave the onion and celery (and garlic and carrot if you want to add those) to do their thing for a few minutes, and just come poke it with a wooden spoon every so often to make sure it's not sticking to the pot. When you're home, clothing, hopes and dreams start smelling of onion and it looks sort of like this:

It's time to move on to the next step. You can add either one litre of vegetable stock, or one litre of boiling water and a stock powder or vegetable soup base of your choice. I really like to add a sachet of spring vegetable simmer soup mix.

Give it a little stir through, then add literally any vegetables in the whole world. If you're going to blend it up and make it creamy, you'll need to use some pumpkin, sweet potato or potato. I used pumpkin and sweet potato in mine. When it comes back to the boil, turn the burner down to a simmer.

Gentle stirring should be enough to push all the pieces of vegetable under the water:

Now if you want to, you can add some flavour enhancements, such as herbs and spices. Since the base of my soup is pumpkin, I added some herbs from my garden that go well with pumpkin. I chose rosemary and curry plant leaf. I was going to add a little parsley as well, except I forgot.

Basically now, it's just waiting and occasionally stirring. I let mine simmer at this stage for about twenty minutes. It's ready for the next stage when the vegetables are soft.

I have a stick blender, so I stuck it in and got pulping while it was on the stove. If you have a jug blender, you may need to wait for the soup mix to cool down before you blend it.

Now, if you just want a smooth, creamy soup you can drink, you could put mushrooms in with the other vegetables. I wanted little chewy chunks, so I sliced my mushrooms up and dropped them into my warm pot of soup.

Stick blender away, I brought the soup back to the boil then down to a simmer as I stirred the mushrooms through. I let it infuse together for another fifteen minutes before I got some for myself!

I never claimed to be a food blogger. I can't do the pictures. But here's some in a soup cup, on my lap, when I was wearing a onesie that looks like a fox.