It snowed here again last week (in April!) so we’re still cooking wintery food and dreaming of fresh tomatoes and summer berries. On the stove are hearty soups like this one made of tomato, fennel, beans, leeks and wholewheat noodles providing a complete meal in a bowl.

There are two types of soup in the world, the sort that needs a good chunk of bread and the sort that is a complete meal in itself.  This soup is the latter type with at least 3 servings of veg per portion, wholegrain carbohydrate and plant-based protein from the cannellini beans.  As well as covering everything I look for in a balanced meal the combination of fibre, fluid and protein mean that the soup is really filling.

The recipe is completely inspired by a much loved ‘Chickpea and spinach soup’ from the 1st edition of An honest kitchen, a genius recipe which is much brightened by shoyu sauce and a handful of fresh mint.

It’s a very well though out recipe:

• minimal pans are used, the noodles are just cooked by pouring hot water over and leaving them
• shoyu sauce provides a complex salty note but with less sodium overall than adding salt
• all of the ingredients are ones that we usually have in
• You can swap in different fresh veg (I always try to include one from the allium family)

My version here keeps all of the cleverness of the original recipe but with ingredients well suited to a UK winter pantry, including parsley, the only soft herb to grow in my garden right the way through the Winter. Recipe étiquette is a tricky thing, but having just read Kathryn’s post on the Honest Kitchen blog on how much she enjoys seeing her and Lucy’s recipes tweaked and adapted, I think she will be more than happy to see her ideas put to good use.

This soup was inspired by one that I had a new local restaurant Florio on my last visit there, a simple butternut squash soup topped with greek yogurt and almonds. A pretty straightforward soup, but much more enjoyable than expected because of the deep lemon flavour and the clever garnishes. This is not a fancy soup by any means but the combined tang of citrus juice and the sweeter zest really lift the soup and the yogurt and almonds mean that each mouthful is slightly different, right the way to the bottom of the bowl.  Happily for once my experiments at home turned out pleasingly similar first time.

Early in the Autumn a soup can be a simple thing like this.  I’m sure that come February our collective taste in soup will become more demanding and we’ll be looking for full nutrition-in-a-bowl, rejuvenating solutions complete with protein and whole grains and fresh asian flavours.  But for now this little squash and citrus number will do just fine.

p.s if you’re after a spicier,more robust squash soup this one arrived in my inbox while I was writing up my recipe

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get me back in the kitchen it’s a brand spanking newly turned Autumn. All those lovely warm, cosy soups, stews and roasts.  And this seasons vegetables are just the best; pumpkins, squash, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, beetroot, celeriac. All the real sweeties and perfect for roasting. 

People tell themselves funny stories when they’re faced with the everyday work of eating well. One of my favourites of that I hear often is this one: “it’s so easy to eat well in the summer – salads are so healthy”.  Roasted vegetables are the perfect ‘salad’ for Autumn and Winter.  Yes, there is ten minutes of chopping involved, but that’s pretty much it. Same as a salad. 

A tub of roasted vegetables have become of a staple in our fridge again this month.  These are my three favourite ways to prepare roasted autumn vegetables.

Three easy flavour additions for roasted vegetables
(take it as read that all three involve copious armfuls of veg, olive oil and a good grind of pepper)

• scatter with finely chopped red chillis and tuck very thin, deseeded slices of lemon among the veg (my current obsession, from Sarah Raven’s Food for Friends and Family book)

• chuck in a few sprigs of rosemary and a handful of garlic cloves (separated but unpeeled).  Once cooked, squeeze the garlic straight from their skins into the veg

• coat with maple syrup and generous amounts of grated ginger (as inspired by Eat Me, Delicious)

The trick to successful vegetable roasting is similar to that for drama-free stir-frying.  Cut your different veggetables to different sizes according to how long they will take to cook; smaller pieces for those that take longer to roast. It’s also helpful to give them a stir occasionally during cooking to avoid the tops of the vegetable pieces becoming overly charred.

It’s always worth making a big batch of roasted veggies.  Once you’ve got ‘em, there are endless ways to use them.

• add a protein source such as meat, fish or tofu for an easy meal
• cook up a wholegrain to serve along side and top with a small amount of feta, chopped nuts or a poached egg
• Add vegetable stock or hot water and blitz to a soup
• Stir through wholemeal pasta, add a handful of spinach and top with a little grated cheese

Soup is the perfect food for this time of year; suitably healthy if you ate a few too many mince pies but comforting enough to pacify those of you stuck with snow blizzards or malingering colds. This recipe is for my new favourite, a soup made with roast parsnips, chestnuts and finished off with fresh orange juice and a dollop of zesty, spiced yogurt.

Full bodied is the most fitting description I can conjure for this soup. My other half (the triathlete) raved about it for its deep, near meaty flavour and for myself, well I can’t resist a roast parsnip and the nutmeg, orange zest and yogurt topping adds that bit of freshness that I can’t help looking around for now that autumnal roasts and stews are starting to seem “so last year”.

Chestnuts are a funny old thing aren’t they? Delicious, but very different from your average nut and I couldn’t help but be intrigued about their composition. Chestnuts don’t have the typical nut benefits of high protein and heart healthy monounsaturated fat, but they do have plenty of fibre, and with hardly any fat (good or bad) they have massively less calories than your conventional nut. Pretty good for you, but strangely much closer in make-up to a parsnip than an almond.

I haven’t mustered up the courage/time to prepare my own chestnuts yet. Vacuum packed chestnuts work supremely well in this soup, though I am sure that freshly prepared would be even better. The tinned, whole chestnuts I tried in the second batch had less flavour and I have stuck to vacuum packed since. The soup is hearty enough to make a lunch without accompaniment but goes really well with walnut bread for a more substantial meal.

There isn’t too much you can do to make a soup unhealthy, just skip the butter and cream and go easy on any oil or cheese. Stock is potentially loaded with salt so use a low sodium stock if you can get a good one. If there are plenty of strong flavours going into the soup then it will do it no great harm to dilute the stock much more than the packet suggests. If you have your own tasty healthy soup recipe then blog it and send it to Joanna for her Heart of the Matter round-up of heart healthy soups (deadline 24th January).

How do you sum up a Laksa for somebody who hasn’t tried it before? On the one hand it ticks lots of boxes that somehow bring to mind healthy thoughts: spicy; fresh-flavours; crunchy veg and soup. On the other hand it has that essential comfort-food ingredient carbohydrate (in the form of noodles), and is bathed in luscious, creamy coconut milk.

There is an interesting wikipedia page on laksa for those who like to know more about culinary traditions and history; apparently there are actually two types of laksa, curry laksa and assam laksa. I must admit that my recipe is a complete culinary hybrid with the coconut milk base of curry laksa and the sour notes of an assam laksa. The main inspiration for my recipe is in Jo Pratt’s lovely new (and surprisingly pink and girly) book, In the Mood for Food, with a few twists of my own inspired by health and storecupboard. It comes out just creamy enough to feel like a treat and has a great mix of textures. Sometimes I think it is just the small things that really make a difference, for example I’ve followed Jo’s tip to slice the prawns in half lengthways which means that you get a bit of prawn in nearly every mouthful.

Noodle soup dishes like Laksa and Miso soups are fantastic places to use up bits of leftover veg from the fridge (within reason, I suspect parsnip wouldn’t go well here). The original recipe had a couple of spring onions in it per person but given that all you have to do is chop them up and throw them in it’s a good opportunity to eat a bit more veg. You can put in as much or as little as you want but for this dish to count as one of your ‘five a day’ you want to include at least 80g of veg per person.

Something that this post made me think about that I’ve never really considered before is whether or not coconut counts towards your fruit and veg quota. The whole ‘what counts’ thing is essentially based on scientific consensus so there isn’t a definitive answer, but my hunch is that counting coconut flesh or coconut milk as a portion would be considered counter-productive because of its very high saturated fat content. There isn’t an official fruit and veg portions expert group to give a verdict on the matter but I did see that Sam, the Food Standards Agency’s nutritionist agrees with me on this (coconut apparently is considered more akin to a nut than a fruit). In this laksa the effects of the saturated fat in the coconut milk are tempered by diluting it with stock and adding some richness back in the form of peanut butter. The final result is not low-fat but the balance of fats in the dish are improved by these two adjustments. Nuts are full of monounsatured fats and replacing saturated fat with these monounsaturates can help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.

This laksa is prawn-based but feel free to change this around, perhaps swopping for some tofu or cooked chicken. Shopping for seafood and prawns in particular seems to be an ethical minefield these days. The trawling method of catching prawns causes damage to the sea bed and causes a shocking amount of extra sea life to be trawled up with the prawns then discarded. Sadly the alternative, prawn farming (generally happening in developing countries such as Honduras, Indonesia and Guatemala), is causing the destruction of huge tracts of mangrove forest (a vital part of the earth’s ecosystem) and is generally reliant on pesticides and antibiotics. In reality the situation is even more complicated than this when you try to take into account all of the human, health and environmental concerns (it takes me ages to decide which prawns to buy in the supermarket!). In terms of sensible suggestions for what to buy in the UK Rose Prince in her Savvy Shopper column suggests looking out for North Atlantic prawns or for those produced as part of the Ethical Trade Initiative.

Enough of the serious stuff. For me this recipe is a perfect supper for staying in at the weekend and watching a movie. Beware though, for a TV dinner this is supremely messy to eat (if you are as inept with chopsticks as I am you’ll miss half the movie chasing the noodles). It’s not cheating to have a spoon to hand for the soupy bits at the end.