Keeping on with our theme of mindful eating habits I have made myself a large pot of soup for those evenings (most evenings) when I am very tired after a busy day of uni and Cookie House Food Production and banjo practice. I try very hard to have a large breakfast and lunch, quick food audit, chia seed porridge with berries and rockmelon for breakfast, small scotch fillet with omelette with great swathe of veggies for lunch, snacks today, none, and now, at almost 10pm, I am just sitting down to my uni reading and a light repast. So soup is a good one, and I am so glad that I made it before I went off for my haircut and ran out of petrol in the car and had to run three kilometres to the petrol station and then march back with a jerry can of fuel. Sigh. So I am a tired lady tonight and I cannot be bothered with any energetic chewing.
This soup is a goody, it is a zucchini and mushroom soup, so we are looking at a good nutritional boost of vitamins and minerals here. Mushrooms are high in the B group vitamins, now most of these are water soluble but they are not as sensitive as a C vitamin, by retaining the water we are cooking them in we are going to get most of the benefit of them, mushrooms are also a rare food form of Vitamin D and they also pack a wallop of selenium, lysine, fibre, copper, potassium and are a good prebiotic, so good for our biome.
Zucchini we have spoken of before, you may remember that I think zucchini should be listed as a super food as they are full of important minerals including potassium, manganese and folate, as well as Vitamins A, C and K.
We also have some good beneficial herbs, lots of garlic and onion and some other bibs and bobs. So this Tired Lady Soup is going to do wonderful restorative things to my body while I sleep tonight and I shall wake up perky and ready for more chewing tomorrow.
So let’s get started shall we?
Ingredients
1 large brown onion, chopped
5 large cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon chopped rosemary
1 teaspooon chopped sage
2 teaspoons chopped thyme (I prefer lemon thyme)
zest of one lemon
250g mushrooms sliced
50g celery, sliced
2 potatoes, peeled and roughly cut up
750g zucchini, roughly cut up
1 1/2 litres water or beef stock
1 can light coconut milk
Sauté the onion and garlic gently in the olive oil until translucent, add the herbs and lemon zest and let that all chat gently to itself until fragrant, not too hot, we are cooking this one gently, we want the herbs to shine, not get subsumed by the bitterness of a burned onion. Add the mushrooms, celery and zucchini, keep cooking gently until the mushrooms begin to collapse, like this -
Now toss in your potatoes and stock or water. Simmer until tender, purée with a stick blender and stir in your coconut milk, yes, you do need to add the coconut water in the bottom of the can, otherwise we might as well have used coconut cream, anyway, coconut water is good for you, so pop it in.
Season to taste, serve hot.
I must admit, I prefer my soup in a big cup, I have a couple of big cups that Mr T bought for me that are perfect for soup, I tend to spill less on my computer while I am multitasking that way, but a bowl is good too.
This is going to make quite a lot of soup, but it does freeze well, so if you are not going to eat it within the next four days portion it down and pop it into the freezer for the next time you run out of fuel......