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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Knit Knit Hooray!

Hi there Folks,

Today I'm feeling very pleased with myself, as this morning I finished off my first ever knitting project!! It may only be a super basic scarf, but I spent hours getting really annoyed trying to teach myself to knit not so long ago, so for me, this is an achievement.

Here's what the finished project looks like...

It's grey, it's super chunky and its long, just what I wanted for a nice, snuggly scarf to help me face the northern winter.

The pattern I used was really basic, literally two different rows repeated over and over (the original pattern can be found here). But I decided to jazz it up a bit once I'd finished by adding some fringing/tassles. I used 12mm plastic needles and James C. Brett 'Rustic' Mega Chunky wool in the colour CS2 (both needles and wool bought from here, although they don't have the actual wool I used on the website, sorry!)

I know there are plenty of tutorials for how to make tassles etc. on the web, but I thought I'd add onto here how I did them. It was a bit of a process as I'd initially not made them long enough and didn't like them so had to start all over. This means I have lots of lengths of wool that I really don't want to waste that I need to find a use for...I'm thinking pom poms?

Anyway, here's how I did it.

1. I wrapped the wool round a DVD box (in this case - Band of Brothers Bluray Boxset) until I had the right number of loops. I wanted 27 as I chose to do 9 tassles each using three lengths of wool.

2. I then cut the middle of the wrapped up wool and was left with all my ready made lengths.

3. Using an old, clean chopstick I folded the wool in half over the top of it and used this to push the strands through the gaps on the end of my scarf.

4. Finally I pulled through, evens the lengths out and then wrapped the top loop over the tail ends to create a slip knot. I pulled the lengths tight and voila! Was pretty speedy once I got my method down and I found that the box I used gave the perfect length for what I wanted.

And here is me looking all pleased and warm wearing my lovely new scarf :]

Ciao for now,

JB