Cheryl’s Recipes: Raw Soup / Winter Smoothie
Today I devised a ‘raw soup’ or ‘winter smoothie’ that both will help Chris when he starts to come off his 92 day juice feast, and help me go some way towards providing exceptionally nutritious raw food during the winter months.
The following ingredients serves 2 and of course they can be substituted for your favourite vegetables – or simply those that you have in stock.
Ingredients
1.5 pints vegetable stock (see below) If you do not have any vegetable stock you could just as readily use water, although I haven’t tried this.
- 1 large clove of garlic
- 1 small beetroot
- ½ small onion
- small bunch fresh parsley
- 4 fleurettes broccoli
- 4 fleurettes cauliflower
- small amount cilantro (about ½ as much cilantro to parsley)
Method
- Bring the vegetable stock to the boil and remove from the heat, keeping the lid on to keep temperature up.
- Meanwhile prepare all the vegetables and cut into chunks ready for chopping
- Add the vegetables, except the cilantro, to the pan of boiled stock
- Chop using hand held stick blender. Alternatively all ingredients can be chopped in your regular blender.
- After blending, scoop off the foam and discard.
- Add the cilantro and blend loosely into the soup. Blending the cilantro in separately seems to give deeper flavour.
- The soup is now ready to serve. It will not be as hot as soup usually is, but it won’t be as cold as a smoothie either.
Note – although the stock is cooked and is therefore not technically raw, I consider this to be acceptable because it has more nutritional content than the alternative which is water.
Vegetable Stock
I make this regularly and keep it in the freezer so that I always have some to hand. I use it as a soup base or instead of water, when it is normally required in dishes. I also use it to cook rice or pasta.
I keep the parts of vegetables, that are normally discarded, in a covered container in the fridge. This may include herb stems, spinach stems, carrot peelings, broccoli or cauliflower trimmings and celery leaves.
When I have plenty, I put them in a pan and fill to the brim with water. Sometimes I might add an onion and / or carrot. I then cover the pan, bring it to the boil and simmer for a few hours (although one hour may be sufficient). After straining the juice off, I discard the ‘pulp’ and there I have my stock.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
