Easy cheese soup recipe

I hate autumn. I want to eat more then, and it's usually the stuff I shouldn't, being lactose intolerant. But there I go, from one cheese to another, like a butterfly.
It's useless.

So, having in mind a cheese soup from a place not far from our previous apartment, which, unfortunatly, closed down (WHY?), that  served this soup with ham and mind blowing croutons, I wanted this soup.
So I made it.
Suprise suprise- it's easy to make. I swear. By the moon and the stars in the sky... I'll be there..
Name that tune.

Anyways, it's not complicated, I made it from leftover chicken soup for T ( he had a cold).
So I'm going ahead  and thinking you have your chicken soup, or chicken broth, or you make it with stock cubes and all.:) Love you too.

Type of dish: soup, main
Cost: cheap
Difficulty: easy
Serves: 2
Time: 20 min
Preparation time: 5 min
Coking time: 15min

You'll need:
a medium saucepan with lid, veggie peeler, cutting board, sharp knife, hand blender, laddle, spoon, bowls to serve

Ingrdients:

• 1 chicken or vegetable stock cube or 1,5 l broth
• 1 medium carrot, peeled and diced
• 2 cream cheeses ( hochland flavours: ham and creamy)
• 4 frankfurter sausages
• 1 bowl croutons
• pinch of salt
• fresh pepper
• optional: fresh chopped parsley for garnish

How to you do:
Heat up your broth/stock in the saucepan, add the carrot and creamcheese, crumbled. Mix well. Put in the sausages. Plop the lid on, make sure the heat is medium, and go away. Clean up or something for 15 min, just checking if it's not overboiling- if it is, turn down the heat a notch.
After 15 min, prep your blender, remove the pan from heat, remove the sausages and put them on the cutting board to cut in bite-sized pieces . Blend your soup until you see no more carrots and the soup now has a pleasent orangish- yellow color. Taste and season if you need to.
Divide the sausage in two or more bowls, and pour the soup over. Serve with a side bowl of croutons.

Addtional info: This seems like a hearty soup, but in fact, it isn't. So prepare some salad or pasta course later.

Minestrone soup- the good stuff

Ok. I will confess. I hated thinking about minestrone soup. It was a memory of a taste of pure hell, along with a particularily bad memory of some breakfast oatmeal with grits, warm apple slices and cold bananas topped with a shitload of honey. Memories from childhood can be a tragic blocker for kids or grown ups, to eat regular food without the terror coming back in the form of brussel sprouts.  And while I think everybody may have a dislike or distaste for certain things, thanks to some shitty granny or any other stupid grown-up, who force-fed us with "healthy" food, I know how hard it is to overcome this fear later as a grown up. So, forgive me for writing a "healing" post:)

I still haven't completely overcome my fear of certain foods, but I think I'm doing pretty well, considered the amount of trauma I had going on, for like, a long time.
Minestrone soup always brings to mind those nice holiday trips to Bulgaria or Croatia, camping out by the sea, and cooking that god-awful soup out of a bag. It was REALLY  DISGUSTING.
Whenever I'm in a store and I see this one on a shelf, I turn around and run. Looks quite weird. If you ever see somebody doing that in the ready-made soup aisle of a store, you just lost a chance to meet me:)
But, as I'm a sucker for making things at home, making them easy, as you may have noticed, and I know I'm a badass, but I try to give things and people a second chance. Hence my trial with this soup.

I'll tell you how to undo a terrible mind process like hating a specific thing. Food, of course, I'm not a shrink.
Either you hate the whole dish, or you hate just a piece of it, like fish. In a fish main course. Then it's hard to undo it, but still managable. Start out with shrimps:)
If you, or your loved one hates the whole dish, it's good to go through the ingredients. Like looking under the bed or checking the closet for monsters. You see there is nothing to be afraid of. Are you afraid of a can of tomatoes? Or a handful of pasta? Or, maybe you're terrified of broth? Baby spinach? Seriously, baby spinach can't hurt anybody. It's a baby, right? And it's cute. That helps.
So, now we see that the soup/thing is not that scary, you're in control, you're an adult and you know your worth. You rule!
Second option- you don't like broccoli? Oh, you poor thing, thank god we don't have to add it to absolutly everything:) Just take it out of the recipe and subsitute for something else. Green beans are usually stress-free. Hopefully.
Life gets real easy, if somebody just took the time to tell us those things before.

Ok, enough pschology for free. Time for a recipe!

Type of dish: soup, main
Cost: cheap
Difficulty: easy
Serves: 2-4
Time: 15 min
Preparation time: 5 min
Cooking time: 10 min

You'll need:
a medium saucepan with lid, a teaspoon, a ladle, bowls

Ingredients:

• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 1 can chickpeas
• 1 cups baby spinach
• 1/2 a yellow bell pepper, diced
• 2 cups water
• 1 cube vegetable broth or chicken stock
• 1 cup dry penne or rigatoni pasta
• 1 tsp dried basil or 1 tbsp fresh chopped
• 1 tsp garlic powder 
• for garnish fresh shaved parmesan and a few basil leaves
• optional- half a onion, thinly sliced, or a handfull of green beans
• S&P
• squeeze of lemon juice, pinch of sugar

Drain the chickpeas, rinse them, drain again. Mix all the ingredients in the saucepan, apart from the spinach and S&P , and heat on high heat till it boils. Turn down the heat to medium low and cook covered for 10 min, until pasta is cooked. Add the spinach and mix so it wilts, then taste and season. Spoon in bowls and top with parmesan shavings and fresh basil leaves for extra flavour.

This is nothing like the packet soup, and thank god for that!

Additional info: You can serve this with croutons.

Gosh, another soup: Gazpacho

You probably might be bored with all the tomato soups we have here going on, but this is served as a starter so we really don't care more than we have to. Another classic, served in wine glasses, but if you have more guests, think about shot glasses or regular drinking glasses. It's really good for using leftover pieces from tomatoes, cucumbers and bread. Kind of a trash soup, I guess, best served chilled:)

Type of dish: soup, starter
Cost: medium
Difficulty: easy
Serves: 4-8
Time: 15 min
Preparation time: 10 min
 
What you need to prepare this dish:
hand blender, table spoon, large bowl, cutting board, knife, serving glasses

Ingredients:

• 1 can tinned tomatoes
• 1/2 cucumber/ pealed
• 1/2 bell pepper
• 2 slices of bread
• 2 medium tomatoes
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 5ml olive oil
• 1 cup of water
• Splash of tabasco

How to prepare:

Put everything in the large bowl, except for 1/2 a tomato, and about 1/5 of the cucumber. Cut out the seeds from the tomato and cucumber you set aside and throw it in the bowl. Stirr a bit and turn on your blender. Blend until you see no more big pieces.  Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge to chill. As they say, revenge is a dish best served cold, and the same is with gazpacho. Cut the remaining veggies into small dice and set aside for serving time, as you can put half a spoon in each portion you serve.

Additional information:
If you have some chives you can decorate the gazpacho with a few springs. In France, now very popular are Verrines, which are nothing else but food put in shot glasses. Apparently, very fancy, but in Poland, we have other uses for shot glasses, thats why we use any glases. Wine, or beverage ones. Or, if you're not having a party but just want good food, take a bowl, you don't need our permission to use one:)

Foolproof tomato soup

I know, I know. Another tomato soup. I can bet you it's not going to be the last one either. But We're sharing this one with you because, well, it's foolproof. It never goes wrong. It's fast to make. Easy on the stomache. Good for the soul. You get the picture. Really, try this out.

Type of dish: soup

Cost: cheap

Difficulty:  easy

Time:  10 min

Serves: 2-4

Cooking time: 10 min

What you need to make this dish:

2 medium saucepans, ladle, spoon, teaspoon, colander, bowls to serve

Ingredients:

• Any kind of small pasta, 1 1/2 cup
• 1 chicken stock cube
• 2 tbsp tomato concentrate (or paste)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 squeeze of lemon juice
• Pepper
• Salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• Creme Fraiche (sour cream)

How to prepare:

Bring water to boil in both pots. In one of them, put in the stock cube and tomato paste and mix around. In the other pot, give a pinch of salt and throw in the pasta to cook the time according to package. In the soup pot, add the butter, salt, pepper, sugar and lemon juice, mix well, taste to see if it needs more salt, or pepper. Don't add any more sugar! Once the pasta is cooked, drain and divide in bowls. Pour in some soup to each bowl, add a spoon of sour cream on top and additionally garnish with fresh basil leaves of fresh cut parsley. Serve!

Additional information: 

You can make the soup more thick, by mixing half a cup of soup with a teaspoon of flour. This was our grannies method for bad times, when cream was scarce. Still, this soup works with flour, and cream. 

AE showed me a cool trick with basil today. Take a basil leaf  in your hand and clap them once. The basil releases it's fragrant aromas, and you can either serve it whole, or slice it. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Soup

And our regular pumpkin soup. Try it out!

Type of dish: soup

Cost: medium

Difficulty:  easy

Time:  45 min

Serves: 6

Preparation time: 20 min

Cooking Time: 25 min

What you need to make this dish:

cutting board, sharp knife, veg peeler, colander, large saucepan, hand blender, spoon

Ingredients:

• 1 kg pumpkin without seeds
• 3 large potatoes
• 300ml cream milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp white pepper
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 0,5 l chicken stock

How to prepare:
Peel the pumpkin and potatoes and cut in small pieces. Fill the saucepan with hot water and bring to boil. Cook the vegetable until soft, around 20-25 min. When cooked, drain oin collander, wash the saucepan and put in back the drained veggies. Add the cream milk, the stock and spices. Using the blender, mix the soup until it's creamy in consistence. Try some if it needs more salt or pepper. Serve hot!

Additional info: We made so much soup it's impossible for us to eat it all. So if you have some ziplock baggies, freeze some cooled down soup in the bags for later. So much goodness around!

Spicy pumpkin soup

We heard about a quest for seasonal products. And this is how we reply to this quest: We made two pumpkin soups today: mild with potatoes and a spicy one with red curry paste. You guess which one we liked better?
As the pictures and the soups look nearly exatcly the same, we're not posting photos of the mild soup. It looked just like this soup. So there.

Let us begin:

Type of dish: soup

Cost: medium

Difficulty:  easy

Time:  1h 10 min

Serves: 6

Preparation time: 55 min

Baking time: 40 min

Cooking Time: 10 min

Oven temp: 180C

What you need to make this dish:

Sharp knife, cutting board, parchment paper, large baking pan, large saucepan, hand blender, spoon

Ingredients:

• 1 kg pumpkin  without seeds
• 1 tbsp red thai curry paste
• 1 can cocnut milk
• 0,5l chicken broth
• 1 tsp salt
• olive oil
• 1 lime

How to prepare:

Heat the oven to 180C. Cut the pumpkin into large chunks. Place the parchment paper in the baking dish and place the pumpkin on it, skin side down. Take the olive oil and drizzle over the pumpkin. sprinkle the salt on it too. Put the dish in the oven and bake for 40 min. After 40 min, the pumpkin should be soft. Take the dish out and cool down to room temperature. When it's cooled down, in a saucepan heat the chicken broth, and cut off the skins from the pumpkins and put the pieces in the saucepan. Remove the pan from heat. Now, add the curry paste to the soup and use the hand blender, mix the soup until it's creamy. Now add the coconut milk and blend again. Try a bit, it might need some more salt. When your're done seasoning, squeeze at the end half the juice from the lime and stir well.

Ready to serve.