Autumn is most definitely well established here in France and it's soup weather again.
Vegetables are not cheap here. When we go back to the UK I am always amazed to find that you can still get a bag of parsnips or carrots for less than £1 or a cauliflower for less than £2. In France we now use a lot of frozen veg; onions, mushrooms, leeks, cauliflower, broccoli, green beans. It can be a cheaper way to buy them and helps to avoid waste.
Cauliflowers here can vary enormously in price from one week to the next. They can be 1.90€ one week and 5.50€ the next in the same shop. And often they are huge and already look past their best. When they look nice and fresh and are a sensible price we buy them and they can be a challenge to use up before they go off. With about one third of a cauliflower and a whole head of broccoli looking almost past it in the veg drawer I decided to make soup.
I have never found spring onions as we know them in the UK here; those slender, sweet and not at all sharp ones that are delicious in dips and salads. Here I have found bunches of larger round white onions and much chunkier ones that look like British spring onions' big brothers and they are both stronger in flavour. With half a bunch of those also needing to be used up I included them in this soup.
It was delicious! Smoother than a home made soup often turns out which I wonder might be due to the variety of potato. Who knows, but it's definitely a combination I will use again.
I made it ahead of using it and kept it in the fridge so when reheating it I added a good slurp of Pineau des Charentes (the nearest thing to dry sherry that you can readily buy here) and a swirl of cream when it was in the bowl.
Ingredients
4 small potatoes
2 medium carrots
a large chunk of cauliflower
a large chunk of broccoli, including (discarding the woody bits) the stalk
3 large "spring" onions, or a small bunch of small spring onions (or an ordinary white onion)
2 vegetable stock pots (I used the last of my Tesco garlic and thyme stockpots)
Salt and pepper to taste (or add this at the end of cooking or when reheating)
A splash of dry sherry and a swirl of cream (optional) to add after cooking
Method
Peel, wash and roughly chop as appropriate enough veg to fill the soup maker to the bottom line.
Add the stock pots and water to fill to the top line.
Cook on smooth.
Makes 4 generous lunch servings, or 6 for first course servings.
I was always a bit surprised by veg prices in France. Sometimes in areas where a lot of veg was grown and enough producers turned up at large markets, then I could find really good veg at very reasonable prices, but I also saw sellers in markets allowing veg to go unsold rather than reduce the price. Very curious. As for the spring onions, I really struggled to find equivalents of the young English variety, except in the north of Normandy and the very far south west where you could sometimes find really good young onions from Spain. The lack of sherry just about anywhere in France was also a bit odd, although a drop of Pineau in cooking is rarely a bad thing. Having got that off my chest, I could just do with a bowl of that autumnal soup right now.
ReplyDeleteSherry is one of the things that English friends who live in France full time ask us to bring from our visits to the UK. Other things include suet, baked beans and of course tea bags. Many of these things can be obtained in France either on the "English shelf" in certain supermarkets or online, but at huge prices. I have seen baked beans for 2€ per tin and have occasionally succumbed if we have run out and there are no UK visits planned for a while. I have never seen suet in France. We are gradually learning to live without many of these things but I was pleased to be reminded that you can buy mushy peas in a box, as dried peas which you soak and cook. That will certainly save room in the suitcase on our "flying visits".
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