Lets Cook - Sweet Potato & Garlic Soup.

Hi there Folks,

Today I'm going to share a recipe for Sweet Potato and Garlic soup that I tried out over the weekend. It turned out really yummy, although not as thick and wintery as I initially imagined, but super tasty none the less!

The recipe was taken from my new 100 Calorie Cookbook which I bought from Marks and Spencers (it was £5 if you're wondering, you can have a better look at it here).

The book has some really tasty looking recipes in it that are allegedly 100 calories or less per serving. Now I'm not so sure if I entirely believe this, plus the servings look pretty small, so I'm thinking that even with my "on the larger side of life" servings they'll still be fairly healthy and lower calorie (which is always a bonus, plus means more calories for chocolate!)

So anyway, back to the soup. I used pretty much the exact weights that it asked for in the recipe just to see how it turned out. In my opinion, this amount wouldn't make enough for 4 of my servings, I did manage to get three decent bowlfuls though.

Ingredients

1 garlic bulb - cloves separated but skins left on

Small 'glug' of oil (I use canola oil, but olive is fine)

1 onion - peeled and chopped

2 medium sized sweet potatoes - peeled and cubed

1 litre vegetable stock

120g french beans - trimmed and finely chopped

salt and pepper to taste

3 tbsp low fat natural yoghurt

Recipe

1. Assemble and prepare your ingredients. Set the oven to 190°C, place the separated garlic cloves onto a small baking tray and place in the hot oven for around 20 minutes (or until they're nice and soft). Once done set aside to cool slightly.

2. Heat some oil in a pan and gently cook off your onion until translucent with no colour. Once the onion is done add the sweet potato to the pan and cook gently for about 5 minutes, being careful not add any colour. 

3. Prepare your stock (I used stock cubes but real stock is great), add to the pan, place the lid on and simmer for around 10 minutes.

4. Squeeze the garlic flesh from their skins. Add this to the pan along with the finely chopped green beans and simmer with the lid on for a further 10 minutes, or until the sweet potato is softened. Remove the pan from the heat and leave to cool slightly. 

Now, once the cooking was finished, the recipe in the book asked that you remove two tablespoons of the green beans from the pan which will be added to the soup once its been processed to give texture. I found that this was more effort than it was worth so left this step out, but by all means you can do this if you have more patience than me.

So now the final task is to blend the soup, season and serve.

I used my food processor but a hand held blender would work just as well. As I mentioned earlier, the soup wasn't as thick as I had anticipated, although I did follow the weights to the letter.  But it still turned out lovely :]

As a finishing touch swirl a tablespoon of natural yoghurt into your soup to add a bit of creamyness and to make it look pretty. The recipe said to garnish with chopped chives - I had none so improvised with some freshly ground pepper.

This soup was a definite hit, as well as being really easy to make, I will definitely be giving it a go again, although I think I'll add a bit more sweet potato next time to thicken it up slightly.

Ciao for now,

JB

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