Low-Carb Pea, Spinach and Parsley Soup with Bacon Bows

Sequinned with olive oil, swirled with cream and flourished with a bacon bow, this fresh-flavoured soup is quick to make and tastes as lovely as a spring morning. The bacon bow is twee, I admit, but I added it to my soup as a personal reminder a) to have fun with food and b) that a bit o' bacon is SO allowed on my new diabetic regime.

Low-Carb Pea, Spinach and Parsley Soup with a Bacon Bow

What I love about this soup is that a fast cooking time allows its individual flavours - leeks, peas, baby spinach leaves and curly parsley - to sing in clean voices. I hesitated to use frozen peas as a thickener for this soup, believing them to be rather starchy (and thus verboten along with potatoes and cornflour), but was pleased to discover that they are not to be feared, having an average glycaemic index value of 48. All three of the South African frozen-pea brands I checked contain fewer than 6g of carbohydrate per 100 g, which is a piffling amount in the broader scheme of things.  However, as I'm not (yet) an expert on these matters, I advise you to read the nutrition labels on your pack of frozen peas if you're on a low-carb or diabetic diet.  

A dribble of fruity olive oil brings all the flavours to life.

In this recipe I've asked you to use proper chicken or veggie stock, but if you don't have a home-made stash in your freezer, you can feel no shame in using a good-quality jellied stockpot or fond (see my Cook's Notes at the end of the recipe). 

A dobbling of extra-virgin olive oil just before serving takes this soup to a new level, because the residual heat in the bowl releases lovely fruity aromas.  (But you need not stick to olive oil.  I don't want to own up to this for fear of sounding piggy, but today I stirred a big blob of Hellmann's mayonnaise into my mug of left-over soup, and it tasted like Christmas.)

Low-Carb Pea, Spinach and Parsley Soup with Bacon Bows

3 Tbsp (45 ml) olive or sunflower oil

2 large leeks, white parts only, finely sliced

1 plump clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1.5 litres chicken or vegetable stock (see Cook's Notes, below)

4 cups (250 ml x 4) frozen baby peas

1 x 400 g pack baby spinach leaves

a large bunch of curly parsley, de-stalked, well rinsed and coarsely chopped (about 3 cups, loosely packed)

a squeeze of fresh lemon juice

5 Tbsp (75 ml) cream

fruity extra-virgin olive oil, for sprinkling

salt and milled black pepper

For the bacon bows: 

8 rashers streaky bacon

Heat the oil in a large pot and fry the sliced leeks over a medium heat for 5 minutes, or until they are translucent.  Don't allow them to brown or catch.  Stir in the garlic, fry gently for one more minute, then pour in the stock.  Turn up the heat and bring to a rolling boil.  

Add the frozen peas, all in one go. Stir to break up any frozen lumps, and cover the pot with a lid. Turn down the heat and cook at a gentle burble for five minutes, or until all ice crystals have disappeared. Now add the baby spinach leaves and chopped parsley to the pot, pressing them down with a spoon so they're submerged in liquid. Simmer, uncovered, for a further 5-7 minutes, or until the spinach and parsley are tender, but still a lively bright green.

Bacon bows!

Whip the pot off the stove and blitz it to a fairly fine purée, using a stick blender or liquidiser.  Return the soup to the heat, stir in the lemon juice and season to taste with salt and pepper.  Now stir in the cream.  Serve hot, with bacon bows or crisp-fried crumbled bacon.

For the bacon bows: heat the oven to 200 ºC. Trim the bacon rashers so each one is perfectly straight and neat.  Cut off one quarter, crossways, of each rasher, and set aside: these will be the centres of the bows. Place the long strips of bacon on a baking sheet and fold them into bowtie-shapes by bringing their short edges together on the underside. Wrap the reserved short pieces around their middles to form neat bowties, and press out the bow ends using your fingertips.  Place in the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes, or until crisp.  Drain on kitchen paper and keep warm. 

Serves 8 as a starter or snack; 6 as a main course.   

Cook's Notes

An excellent chicken stock will add fine depth of flavour to this soup.  If you're in a hurry, you can use good boxed chicken stock, or boiling water plus a few teaspoonsful of a Nomu fond or a jellied Knorr Stock Pot.

If you can't find baby spinach leaves, you can use well-rinsed, finely chopped fresh chard instead.

Flat-leaf parsley will do for this dish, but I find that old-fashioned curly parsley has a distinctive perky flavour quite lacking in modern parsley hybrids.

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Spicy Chicken, Tomato and Sweetcorn Soup

This is a versatile, nourishing recipe for a family with picky eaters (and another idea for a double dinner).

If your kids don't like spicy or strong flavours, or 'floaty bits', leave out the chilli, the pepper, the cayenne pepper, the cumin and the paprika. When the soup's ready, put half of it into a blender, blitz until thick and smooth, and serve topped with grated cheese and crunchy little croutons.

To the other half, add all the zingy ingredients you left out (but half the quantity specified below) and simmer for a further 10 minutes.

I usually use tinned, drained sweetcorn kernels (not the creamed variety) because they are so convenient, but you could as easily use frozen kernels, or fresh ones cut from the cob.

Spicy Chicken, Tomato and Sweetcorn Soup

For the stock:
1 whole free-range chicken, trimmed of excess fat
3 ripe tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1 carrot, peeled and roughly chopped
a few stalks of parsley
a stalk of celery
a large bay leaf
a few peppercorns
2 whole cloves
enough cold water to cover (about 2 litres)

Place all the ingredients for the stock into a big pot and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, then turn down the and simmer gently for an hour and a half, skimming any foam that rises to the top. Remove the chicken and set aside to cool. Strain the stock into a large bowl and discard the flavourings. When the chicken has cooled, pull the cooked flesh from the bones, discarding any fat or skin. Tear it into small shreds with your fingers, cover and set aside. At this point you can, if you are planning ahead, put both the stock and the chicken shreds into the fridge for a few hours, or overnight.

For the soup:
3 tablespoons (45 ml) olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
2 carrots, peeled and diced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
2 large potatoes, peeled and diced into 1-cm cubes
1 red chilli, finely minced [optional]
1 tin Italian tomatoes, chopped
3 tablespoons (45 ml) tomato paste
2 cups (500 ml) corn kernels (frozen, tinned or fresh)
1 cup (250 ml) split orange lentils
3 teaspoons (15 ml) ground cumin
1 teaspoon (5 ml) sweet paprika
1 teaspoon (5 ml) cayenne pepper or chilli powder, to taste
2 teaspoons (10 ml) dried oregano
salt and milled black pepper
a handful of fresh chopped parsley, or fresh coriander

To serve:
chopped spring onions
sour cream or plain Greek yoghurt

Heat the olive oil in a large pot. Add the onion, celery, carrots, garlic, potato cubes and chilli and fry over a medium heat for five minutes. Remove any fat from the top of the cooled stock, and pour the stock over the vegetables. Bring to the boil. Add all the remaining soup ingredients and season well.

Turn down the heat and simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the lentils are cooked through and the potato pieces are quite tender. Tip in the shredded chicken. Cook gently for a further ten minutes. Check the seasoning, stir in the chopped parsley and serve at once, topped with chopped spring onions and a blob of sour cream or yoghurt.

Serves 6 Print Friendly

Lettuce, Cucumber, Spring Onion and Pea Soup

A paradox in a bowl: this soup has a lovely, clean, delicate flavour, even though it's sinfully enriched with cream, and thickened with egg yolks. If you like a fresh-tasting soup, as I do, you'll love this one.

This recipe is adapted from Robert Carrier's recipe for Potage à la Bonne Femme, from Great Starters, a little gem of a book first published in 1965.

Of the nine soups Carrier included in this book, no less than three feature lettuce as the main ingredient. Having tasted this soup, I can see why: when softly stewed in butter and stock, the humble and unfashionable iceberg lettuce has an ethereal yet distinctive taste, as does cucumber, that most gentle of flavours.

Carrier's original recipe suggested chervil, sorrel or tarragon as a flavouring herb, but I used fresh parsley (I couldn't find any fresh chervil or sorrel, and I thought tarragon would overpower the dish).

This soup is a bit tricky to make, because the eggs have a tendency to curdle in the blinking of an eye. If you're not confident about adding eggs to hot soup, I suggest you add a little cornflour (see recipe) and only two egg yolks to the mixture, which will greatly minimise (but not eliminate) the chances of the soup splitting. If it does curdle, for whatever reason, strain the whole lot into a liquidiser and blitz until smooth - it will still taste lovely.

Lettuce, Cucumber, Spring Onion and Pea Soup

5 t (25 ml/25 g) butter
1 small iceberg lettuce, finely shredded
6 spring onions [scallions], white and pale-green parts only, finely sliced
250 g frozen peas
half a large cucumber, peeled, deseeded and cut into matchstick-sized pieces
salt and freshly ground pepper
6 cups (1.5 l) good chicken stock, heated
3 egg yolks (or two egg yolks, plus 1 ½ t [7.5 ml) cornflour/cornstarch]
200 ml single cream
3 T (45 ml) very finely chopped fresh parsley or chervil

Heat the butter in a large pot and add the lettuce, spring onions, frozen peas and cucumber. Season with salt and pepper, stir well and cook gently for five minutes. Add the hot chicken stock and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the vegetables are quite tender, but not mushy. Put the egg yolks and cream into a little bowl and whisk together until well combined. [Alternatively, see above, slake the cornflour with a few teaspoons of cream. Whisk in the remaining cream and two egg yolks.)

Add a soup ladle of the hot soup to the egg and cream mixture and stir well. Remove the soup pot from the heat and strain the egg and cream mixture, through a sieve, into the soup. Put the pot back on a very gentle heat and simmer, stirring constantly, until the soup thickens ever so slightly. Don't, whatever you do, allow the soup to come anywhere near boiling point, at which point it will curdle. Stir in the finely chopped parsley or chervil.

Check the seasoning and serve hot. Robert Carrier suggests croutons as a garnish, but I liked it just as it was.

Serves 4 - 6. Print Friendly

Umami Tomato Soup: passion in a bowl

The deepest, cleanest fix I can get is from a bowl of hot tomato soup. Look, everyone has a crazy food-monkey, and my particular monkey has a wild craving for tomato soup. It started year or so ago, when I developed an insatiable taste for hot, spicy soup.

For a while, this instant curried soup, made in jiffy, with canned chickpeas, tomatoes, coconut milk, and so on, satisfied me. Then, when the tomato bug hit hard, I experimented with various tomato soups, including my grandmother's famous tomato soup, which was very good, but not quite intense enough. Several soups later, I came up with Roast Red Pepper and Tomato Soup, which seemed to hit the spot for a few months.

But, the nature of an addiction is that it is insatiable, and I needed a more intense taste, so I experimented once again, and came up with this soup, which has a deep, lip-smacking, cheek-slapping flavour.

I was inspired to hotfoot it into the kitchen for soup experimentation after I watched an episode of Heston Blumenthal's cookery programme In Search of Perfection. Blumenthal, a culinary genius and ground-breaker in the field of taste and flavour, recently discovered - and scientifically proved - that the pulp and seeds of tomatoes are a rich source of the elusive umami flavour, also known as the 'fifth flavour'. More about umami here.

So that's why I've called this soup Umami Soup. This is quite a rough, textured soup: if you are looking for posh haute soup, you will need to peel the tomatoes before you add them to the pot, and sieve the soup after liquidising it. I can't be bothered and, besides, I like tomato skin. This soup feeds eight to ten, but is easily halved.

Umami Tomato Soup

4 T [60 ml] olive oil
2 large, ripe red peppers [bell peppers or capsicums], seeded and roughly chopped
2 kg very ripe, sweet red tomatoes, roughly chopped, skins, pips and all
2 tins canned Italian tomatoes
2 T [30 ml] concentrated tomato paste
4 fat cloves of fresh garlic, skinned and chopped
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda*
a pinch of good-quality mixed dried herbs [for example, Herbs de Provence. Don't use fresh herbs, which will distract from the tomato taste]
1 t [5 ml] Tabasco sauce
1 t [5 ml] sugar
enough fresh chicken or vegetable stock to cover the tomatoes [if you don't have stock, use a good stock cube]
salt and freshly ground black pepper
300 ml thin cream

Turn your hot plate or gas ring on to its hottest setting and place a large, deep soup pot over the heat. When the pan is very hot, add the olive oil, wait for a minute until it is spitting, and then throw in the chopped red pepper. Toss the chunks in the hot oil until they just begin to blacken in spots. Now turn down the heat to medium and tip in all the chopped tomatoes, the tinned tomatoes, the tomato paste, half the garlic and the bicarbonate of soda. Cook for 30 minutes over a medium heat, stirring occasionally, and breaking up any tomato chunks with the back of a spoon. Add the herbs, the Tabasco sauce, the sugar and the remaining garlic. Pour over just enough stock or water to cover the tomatoes. Allow to bubble fairly briskly for another ten to fifteen minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Tip the mixture into a liquidizer or or food processor fitted with a sharp blade, and whizz until smooth. [You can also use a stick blender]. If want a perfectly silken soup, sieve the mixture into a deep bowl by pressing it through a sieve or strainer with the back of a soup ladle. Return the soup to the pot. Gently reheat the soup, and gradually dribble in the cream. Don't be tempted to add the cream in a gush, as it may curdle, and don't allow the soup to boil. Check the seasoning - this soup needs lots salt - and serve hot, with a swirl of olive oil and perhaps a dot or two of Tabasco sauce.

Serves eight to ten.

* Don't ask me why this recipe needs bicarb, but it does, and this was an important component of my Granny's tomato soup. Oh duh, I get it: the bicarb reduces the tomatoes' acidity. Print Friendly