Fridge Soup

Don't you just love soup? For me, it makes me feel instantly - better, home, calmer, loved, warm, full, safe. All these things. Powerful stuff, is soup.

When I was small, I knew when I must be ill because I got fed tomato soup with crustless ham sandwiches on white bread with butter and mustard. Soup is my mother's cure-all. With it you can shift a cold, flu, glandular fever (ok, even she has to admit that last one didn't work).

Whilst we're on the topic, other un-patented maternal cure-all's include (1) having a haircut (you'll feel better) and (b) having a hot bath (you'll feel better). Can you see a pattern here? Not sure I can, but there you go.

So, to soup. It's flexible, forgiving and flavoursome. And now it's my cure-all too. Here's how I generally approach it.

Firstly, I open the fridge and see what's in there. Hmm. I fear, from the odd odour, that something has died somewhere at the back of the vegetable drawer, I think I'll leave investigating that until I've had some restorative soup. Right, we've got some mushrooms of varying ages that could do with eating up. Bingo! Some garlic too. Double Bingo! One remaining potato that isn't too sprouty or squishy. I've also got a small brown onion, butter, chicken oxo cubes and milk.

Here we go - heat butter gently in saucepan, add roughly chopped garlic and onions and sweat gently until transparent. I'm going to blitz it at the end with a hand blender so you don't have to mince things up. Peel potato, chunk up and add to onions and sweat them a bit. You don't want it to brown, but if it gets some goldeny bits in that all just adds to the depth of flavour. Chunk up mushrooms and add, sweat etc.

If you've got some chicken stock squirrelled away in the freezer then use that. Otherwise, put a couple of stock cubes in and add water until its level with the top of the mix. You're going to add some milk later so you don't want it too watery.

Stick on lid and leave to simmer for about twenty minutes until the potatoes are squashable and it's all generally infused together.

Blend the mix - you could use a hand blender like this type of thing or a food processor. Depending on how much potato's in it it should be thick but not too gluey. Thin the soup by adding some milk - I used up some skim milk (urgh!) that had found its way into the fridge. Check seasoning. I put in a spot of pudding wine to give it a bit of ooomph. Vague memories of adding sherry to soups drove that choice.

Here's the result. Looks a bit alarming but this one tastes fab. Mine's the one in the bowl. The Loved One likes his in a cup. To mine I added a dab of sour cream, some pepper and a few coriander leaves. He likes his plain. It's all set off with toast and some sticks of cheddar. Bloody yum.