mutteringhousewife

I pay attention to my little blog project, you know, and I get a lot of quiet enjoyment reading the search terms that bring it to people’s attention. Today’s favourite search term was “thick housewife”, so someone’s profiling me. One that comes up surprisingly often is “Thermomix vegetable soup”. It is one of the things the Thermomix does effortlessly, but I find it hard to get excited about vegetable soup and am still working my way through many permutations of it. Here’s today’s one.

One of the first things I made in the Thermomix was a curry paste. It wasn’t anything fancy, just zapped together chillies, lemongrass, ginger and garlic with some fish sauce and cumin and coriander powder. From memory I don’t think I cooked it at all. I later made a much fancier paste for Adam Liaw’s laksa, but that’s nestling in the freezer, waiting for the next laksa to happen along. I chucked a tablespoon of that in the jug, along with three large button mushrooms, a wilted stick of celery, the white bit of a leek and a chunk of garlic butter that I’d whipped up earlier in the week because the Horror from Outer Space has decided that this weeks lunch shall be garlic bread. That makes it non vegan, but you could use a splash of oil instead. I also added some stalks of my new favourite vegetable, fennel. The smell of raw fennel makes me feel a bit nauseous, but I’m finding that it adds a complex, slightly earthy note to my usual mirepoix blend. Zapped it for a few seconds, scraped down the walls then cooked it on Varoma temperature and speed two for four minutes.

I then added in a chopped carrot and about two handfuls of chopped pumpkin, also a tin of chickpeas. I lifted out a teaspoon of the cooked mixture and decided to add a little more oomph with some salt and a tablespoon of black Chinese vinegar. I cooked it at one hundred degrees for eighteen minutes on reverse and speed one. I’m not going to show you a photo because it looks like sick, but I think I’m getting there. You can cook quite a thick mixture in the Thermomix, it doesn’t have to be soupy at all.

The thing with vegetable soup is it can taste pretty boring and a lot like diet food. I always think that it would be better with a ham hock in it. But I’m setting myself the test to make it vegetarian and make it flavoursome, and the curry paste helped a lot with that. Actually, fish sauce makes it non vegetarian, I might have to make a vegetarian curry paste. Not that I’m vegetarian, I just think that kind of limit presents an interesting challenge. You need that Thai thing of a balance of sweet, sour, salty and something else that escapes my mind. Bitter? Crunchy? Umami? Hot? You get the sweet from carrots and onions. A bit of salt, herbs and spices and chillies help. I like to keep some texture in the soup, so chickpeas are good for that, barley would also work well. Don’t suggest lentils! Those things are lethal. Maybe I should go searching for Thermomix vegetable soup.