GINGER CARROT SOUP WITH GARLIC BUTTER & CRISPY SERRANO

Sick of me posting soup recipes?

I would be too if they didn’t taste so damn good, give me a break.

I feel confused when I don’t have a ziplock bag of frozen soup in my freezer. I make big ass batches, eat what I need that night, have another bowl for lunch the next day and then freeze the rest.

Ignore women’s magazines. Leftovers are nice the next day but another after that is a lie. Like hangovers, they only need to last one day. After that? Man up.

So I make soup at least once a week – I lie to you not. It’s mostly a way of using up whatever vegetables I have sulking in my fridge, but mainly it is just a convenient way of getting vegetables in my body. And then my fat ass slathers them in butter and pig meat. Neither here nor there.

Now a bowl of soup never LOOKS inviting to me. It’s the smell and the knowing, familiar comfort of it. But a bowl (or teacup here, don’t judge me) of soup never screams DELICIOUS but you just got to trust me on this one.

Yes the main ingredient here is carrots, which is of no real joy to nobody, but with a supporting back up singer of ginger (puree for my sins) and a very, very easy garlic butter and crispy morsels of Serrano ham, the creamy delight of this soup is undeniable.

Use the recipe as a blueprint. You can follow it to the letter if you want but you could easily swap out items for what you have and I won’t judge you.

You can use any cured ham for the crisp topping, prosciutto would be great! The crumbly, salty shards of baked cured ham is absolutely like none other. I almost ate the whole damn thing just there and then with my fingers. It makes the PERFECT crunchy crumble to top a soup with, I can’t cope.

Don’t skip this part. Even if the garlic butter isn’t your thing, don’t skip the ham!

Preheat the oven to 180c and boil a kettle.

Get yourself 1.5kg of carrots. Peel them – annoying, I know – and roughly chop.

Heat a little olive oil in a deep pan and throw in the carrot bits. Now fling in two garlic cloves and a small handful of spring onions. I barely chopped them.

Add some salt and pepper.

Now grate in a thumb size piece of ginger but I’ll be honest, I didn’t have any so I used a teaspoon of already pureed ginger and it turned out great for me.

Fry everything until the carrots begin to soften.

Grate in the zest of one orange and add the juice too. Stir everything together.

Crumble in a vegetable stock cube and pour in the boiled water until everything is covered. Bring it to a boil and drop to a simmer.

Keep it simmering for like 20 minutes.

During this twenty minutes, put some baking paper on a baking tray and line out 2 or 3 slices of Serrano ham. Put them, dry, in the oven.

After the vegetables 20 minutes simmering, take the ham out of the oven and leave to one side. They will harden as they sit.

Now using a hand blender – or a freestanding blender, your call – blitz the carroty contents of the pan to a silky, velvety orange soup.

For the butter, literally just put a tablespoon of butter in a small bowl and microwave for 10/15 seconds and no more. While the butter froths and bubbles in the bowl, grate in a garlic clove and stir into the butter.

Using the back of a spoon or something, gently break up the Serrano ham into shards.

Pour soup into bowl, spoon over the garlic butter and crown with crumbles of the ham.