Soup shows up in my Kitchen menu at least once a week.
Health benefits? Being resourceful and using up ingredients? Wanting to feel comforted, all that ‘hug in a bowl’ crap food bloggers lean on?
Possibly.
But mostly I just can’t be arsed for anything else and I’m a Capricorn to the core and like routine and repetition, so bowl to mouth eating of the same consistency just feels great.
That’s it.
Even when I was in Uni and the concept of chopping a damn thing was beyond me, a can of creamed nonsense was just my go-to. I love soups. Oprah style, fist in the air, I LOVE SOUPS.
All you need is vegetables, some seasoning, a pot and some water. Anything more than that is just being fancy, which I’m not enough, but the bare bones of a soup is just that.
I’m sure if I served this up to anybody but myself they’d be annoyed because there is a small slither of the population (an evil slither) that do not class soup a whole meal.
I do.
The star here really is the artichokes because it gives a really silky, rich texture to the soup but also has that sweetness to it that gives the butterbeans some body. And I’m a sucker for that pale creaminess of the soup. Yeah the loudness and technicolor food has it’s place, but much like brown food, when the food is embracing the nature of it’s organic hue, it will be all the better for it.
Melt a little butter in a deep pot and throw in a chopped leek as well as a roughly chopped garlic clove.
Cook these in the melted butter, adding a little salt, until the leeks begin to soften.
Take a jar of artichokes, bust it open and fork in about 6 or 7 (call it half) of the jar. Just the artichokes, not the oil. Blend the rest with cooked spinach and soft cheese for a banging dip.
Boil a kettle and during this time, drain a can of butterbeans and fling them in but hold back a small handful. Cook everything for about 5 or 10 minutes.
Throw in a vegetable stock cube and pour the hot water from the kettle. Roughly 600ml, just enough to cover everything.
Bring it to a boil, drop it to a simmer and let it gently blip away for about 15 minutes until the butterbeans are soft and you can burst them to creamy nothingness with the back of your spoon.
Take off the heat and carefully blitz everything until it’s smooth – either with a hand or free standing blender.
Technically it’s good to go now, but put in the handful of butterbeans you held back so that the soup has some extra texture.
But I do like to add a drizzle of Parsley Butter to this, and how you do this is… well… you melt some butter in a pan and once it starts frothing, throw in a ahndful of very finely chopped parsley.
Stir, spoon over and serve.
MIKEY AND THE KITCHEN. 