H isn’t well at the moment – a high temperature that Calpol and Nurofen are barely containing – so I’ve been making sure she has plenty of good food to eat which is nice and tasty too. Tonight I asked her what she fancied for tea, she opted for a vegetable stew.

I get my weekly food delivery on a Tuesday, so by Wednesday anything that’s left from last week needs to be used – and this is a good recipe for doing just that; plus my trusty Morphy Richards Soup Maker means I can leave it to cook with minimal preparation beforehand.

So, I used… (Weight Watchers PPV in brackets)

3 sweet potatoes – diced (356g – 9 points)
one red onion (for flavour) (0 points)
frozen peas (1 point’s worth – I weighed until it went to 2, then took back each pea until it was at 1)
frozen sweetcorn (1 point’s worth – same as before)
one red pepper (0 points)
one teaspoon of Marmite Gold (I’d have used Aussiemite but we’ve almost run out – I think this would work too with the onion) (0.5 point)
one vegetable stock cube (we’ve run out of bouillon) (0 points)

Serves two adults – generous portions – plus one three-year old.

I chopped everything up into cubes and added to the soup maker. After that, water was added to the minimum line (I wanted to get plenty of onion in the juice as I knew H would pick those bits out) and I set it to the chunky setting, which takes a bit longer – 28 minutes.

While the soup is cooking I measured a good-sized portion of whole grain rice (250g – 7 points) and had that cooking (as it takes about 25 minutes). I hadn’t eaten a lot today being at home and H losing her appetite, so I needed filling up!

Once the rice was cooked I drained it and put it at the bottom of our bowls. When the stew was ready I added that on top, making sure the liquid came out first, then evenly putting the vegetables on top of each serving.

Weight Watchers points for an adult serving come in at 14 points which sounds a lot, and I have gone over my daily allowance (but I had activity points stored up). Yesterday I had 8 points left, so while I can’t get them back, I figure going into my activity allowance isn’t the end of the world. A lower point version would be to switch sweet potato for butternut squash which I think would work really well too.

The taste verdict? It worked pretty well – the onion helped give it a bit of a kick without being too overpowering (and H picked them all out)! It feels quite wintery, some ginger would have worked as well although might be better in a smooth soup. Give it a try – let me know how you get on!

We love soup, and I love my Soup Maker, and tonight I wanted to try something special for the Gourmet Garden challenge via Mumsnet.

The best thing about a soup maker is the random things you can throw in to make a very tasty soup – tonight was no different – so I hastily cobbled together lovingly prepared the following….

One sweet potato, peeled and chopped
Half a butternut squash
one red onion
One stray potato chopped and peeled
some old broccoli
some old green beans
three heaped teaspoons of bouillon

to that concoction I then got my Gourmet Garden tubes, a bit of chilli for some tongue tingliness, a bit of garlic as I figured that would work well with the bouillon and onion, some ginger as it’s a cold day and you can’t beat ginger – plus it works well with chilli and a splash of basil as why the heck not. Twenty two minutes later and the soup was ready – and oooh, it was good. I added some fromage frais to it, and a couple more tiny dollops of basil, stirred it around and it was divine!

In fact, I’d go as far as to say it was a proper winter warmer – everything tasted just right, not too overbearing and you could still taste each bit (especially the chilli!).

Yum!

Look at this soup – it’s smiling at YOU as it knows it tastes THAT good.

We were provided with tubes from the Gourmet Garden range for the purpose of this challenge. All opinions are our own and all our food is tasty!