Healthy, Hot & Homemade: Tomato Soup!

Happy Saturday!

Since last time, I waxed lyrical about diets that (in my opinion) are dreadful ideas, let me share with you a cheeky little food knowledge...

Years ago, I heard about an experiment whereby one group of people were given a healthy meal with good proportions of meat and vegetables, and another group were given the same meal, but in soup form. Hours later, scans were taken of the participants' stomachs - the 'solid food' group's stomachs were empty, but the 'liquid food' group's stomachs were still half full, meaning that it was a much longer time before they felt inclined to snack!

I honestly can't tell you the details of this - I have tried to find a website or a source to confirm the story, but I am REALLY struggling. If I ever DO find one, I will update this post with the link!

Anyway, at the time, I was a) intrigued and b) newly enrolled with Weightwatchers, as I had put on a lot of weight in University, and still had about a stone left to lose. I decided to have a crack at making soup.

This turned out to be a pretty awesome idea for several reasons...

• Soup is easy to make in bulk, and portion out for the week ahead.
• It's a great way to include vegetables that you may not usually like. For instance, I really REALLY don't like carrots, but I use them in this! I find that they neutralise the sharpness of the tomatoes. I also don't hugely enjoy raw tomatoes, but I LOVE tomato soup :)
• Depending on the veg, it's pretty easy to keep the calories low!
• For me, it turned out that it really did help to stave off hunger pangs.
• YOU CAN PUT ALMOST ANYTHING IN SOUP!

For a few weeks, I had my soup for lunch almost every day, sometimes for dinner when I got home too. Within those few weeks, I got down to my target weight. I lost most of it in the first 3-4 weeks, and after that it was a little slower and steadier. I changed almost nothing else about my diet, other than using a little bit more willpower when I wanted chocolate, and sometimes having a fruit smoothie for breakfast.

At this point, I'll mention that I basically invented this recipe from scratch, and I always change it up a little bit every time I revisit, so it's never been exactly the same twice! Also, never forget my little mantra with almost all one-pot hot food: when in doubt- paprika. This is basically tomato soup with a bit of a kick!

This is today's soup:

You may have noticed it's not perfectly smooth- I actually really like that little bit of bite, but you can always just blend, blend, blend away the lumpy bits! You may also have noticed that it appears to be tomato soup- which it is- but it's chocka with lots of other loveliness too! 

Right, so- this is how today's batch (approximately 4-5 servings) was made...

First, a good slosh of extra virgin olive oil (you could use a little bit of butter if you prefer, I have done before, and it's YUMMY), 2 chopped garlic cloves and a dusting of paprika & black pepper in a pan, on low heat.

I chopped:

• 1 large sweet potato (try to keep the chunks relatively small and similarly-sized, but it's all getting blended at the end, so it doesn't matter if they don't look pretty!)
• 2 medium-sized carrots

Sweet potatoes and carrots go in first, as they'll take the longest to cook and soften up. Throw in half a cup of water, then we're onto some more chopping...

• 1 large red pepper
• 1 medium/large red onion

These are next in, with another half-cup of water -I basically top up the water a little bit at a time as I go along- and THEN (first time I've tried this) I added a Knorr vegetable stock pot. If you've never seen them, it's stock in a sort of jelly form. I usually use the dried, powder-consistency stock, with boiled water, but I decided to give one of these a go (mostly because they were on offer in Tesco) and it's handy, because you just fling it in the pan, and it melts into everything else, spreading the lovely flavours all over everything. Mmmmmmmmm.....

I also added another sprinkling of pepper and paprika, and turned the heat up to (approximately) the halfway mark. THEN I chopped up...

• 2-3 large vine tomatoes (don't all tomatoes grow on a vine? Why do they call them that?)

I say 2-3 because a) the size obviously varies and b) I have three left over, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I bought 5 or 6...

At this point, our pan's starting to get pretty full, but there's always room for more! I added...

•  2 tins of chopped tomatoes (you could use peeled tomatoes, or you could just use more fresh, "vine" tomatoes- I just prefer the chopped)

This bit might seem a bit weird, depending on your cooking experience, but I recently heard a cooking tip I'd never thought of, to add sugar to carrots when you're boiling them, so I (somewhat warily) added about half a level teaspoon of sugar... and then a little pinch more. FINALLY, I threw in a couple of dashes of -you guessed it- pepper and paprika, before giving the whole thing a good stir, popping the lid on the pan, and turning the heat back down to let it all simmer for 10-15 minutes.

After this, it's basically a waiting game. My not-exactly-a-technique is to go back every few minutes to stir (and sniff) the soup, and try to judge whether or not the veg has softened up enough to be blended. When it has, obviously it goes in the blender! 

Depending on your blender/smoothie maker/food processor, you MAY have to let the whole thing cool down before whizzing it. I used to use a smoothie maker for this, but you couldn't put hot food in the model I had, so I had to wait. You might also need to do it a little bit at a time, depending on the capacity of the blender.

After it's all been whizzed up into a lovely soupy soup, I like to give it another little stir and a blast on the heat before serving.

After that, all you have to do is EAT! YUM!

Total list of ingredients (including incredibly vague quantities):

• A few tablespoons/slosh of extra virgin olive oil
• 1 x large sweet potato
• 2 x medium carrots 
• 1 x large red pepper
• 1 x medium/large red onion
• 2-3 large vine tomatoes (At this stage, I don't even know why I'm including the word "vine")
• 2 cloves of garlic 
• Various pinches of paprika, ground black pepper & sugar
• Intermittent half-cups of water
• Knorr vegetable stock pot

(serves approximately 4-5)

I realise that this isn't the most well-organised, professional-looking recipe. I am a little bit sorry for that, but there is a reason! Throughout this whole post, I've really tried to highlight that for me, cooking is just like makeup for me, it's fun and it's flexible! Like I said, none of this set in stone, some of these ingredients have never been in my soup before, but it still tasted AWESOME! You can change up absolutely anything you like (or don't like) in this list! White onion works just as well as red, although I use a smaller one because the taste is stronger. Previously I've included yellow peppers, butternut squash, mushrooms, chillies (SPARINGLY) or even courgette, and it always tastes great! The only things that have never been changed in this for me are the tomatoes, carrots, garlic and vegetable stock.

I hope you try this, if you do, let me know what you thought! 

What's your favourite winter-warmer, or tasty one-pot wonder? 

Tweet me your faves, or let me know if you tried my recipe at @CharleyShadow or leave your comments below!

Thanks for popping along, Lovelies! 

Have a beautiful day!

Charley xx