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Recently we have been highlighting the huge benefits of eating more vegetables. Some people love lots of vegetables but others not so much. In those instances, how do we manage to get them to eat them? The answer is in home-made soups.
It’s the time of the year when vegetables are plentiful and relatively inexpensive and if we are growing our own, we can find ourselves not knowing what to do with them all! Clearly, using them to make batches of soup and then freezing them in appropriate portions is a fabulous way of keeping all that high-fibre goodness available throughout the year.
It is common knowledge in nutrition circles that eating soup keeps us feeling fuller for longer. Soups are also low in calories, high in nutrition and of course contain loads of fibre which is brilliant for our gut. All of that is on top of the vitamins and minerals contained within the vegetables themselves.
Here are a few tips:
- To achieve the very best flavour in your soups try to use really fresh vegetables as they tend to be tastier.
- When cooking the onions which seem to appear in almost all soup recipes, use Frylight rather than butter in the frying pan as it will save you hundreds of calories.
- When cooking soups we can use more of the vegetable, eg, the stalks from broccoli and cauliflower and there’s no need to peel carrots or parsnips if they are clean. For tomato soup, use all of the tomatoes including the peel and seeds. Just pass through a sieve after cooking. This way you will get more goodness into your soup.
- Vegetable stockpots are brilliant for adding extra flavour to homemade soups.
- Make soup in bulk and freeze it in appropriate portions. Be careful to label the containers with what flavour it is and the date you made it. That's obvious, I know, but when some soups are frozen they can all look confusingly similar - for instance Carrot and Coriander and Spicy Butternut Squash look almost identical when frozen.
- If you have a variety of vegetables but not enough to make a specific flavoured soup, make a tasty mixed vegetable soup.
- Grow your own herbs as they add so much taste to home-made soups, eg. mint with pea; basil with tomato; coriander with carrot soup.
- I love using my soup-maker as it makes the whole process of making relatively small batches of soup so effortless as it cooks and liquidises the content in one receptacle. If you want to make your soups in really big batches, then think about using an extra-large saucepan and liquidising with a stick blender. If need be, you can always finish it off in a separate blender before you freeze it.
- There are lots of recipes for delicious soups on our website. If you have a favourite home-made soup, we would love to add it to our collection. Please send the details to us at office@rosemaryconley.com but, for copyright reasons, please only send your own original recipes.
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 Don't forget you can easily find recipes by using the search facility on the website. Just click on the magnifying glass symbol and type "soup" into the search bar. You can also use the search bar to look for any other topic. eg. books, arthritis, dogs... |
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Serves 4
Per serving: 115 calories, 1.1g fat
Prep time 20 mins
Cook time 20 mins
1kg fresh ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
3 medium onions, finely chopped
Rapeseed oil spray
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 generous tablespoons tomato purée
1 small red chilli, deseeded and chopped (optional)
Handful of fresh basil leaves, washed
200ml hot water with 1 vegetable stock pot
Freshly ground black pepper
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Method using a soup maker
- Fry the onions and crushed garlic in a large non-stick pan sprayed with rapeseed oil and cook until soft, then set aside.
- Roughly chop the tomatoes and remove any hard central cores. Place all the ingredients, except the basil, into the soup-maker and season well with freshly-ground black pepper. Cook for 20 minutes on ‘High’.
- When cooked, pulse for 30 seconds. Add the basil and pulse for another 30 seconds. Season to taste.
- Place a sieve on top of a large jug or bowl and pour the soup, a little at a time, into the sieve and work it through the mesh with the back of a wooden spoon. With a metal spoon, scrape the thick pulp from underneath the sieve allowing it to fall into the soup below. When you have worked every bit of pulp through the mesh that you can, discard the remaining skin and seeds.
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Method using a pan
- Place the chopped onions and crushed garlic in a large non-stick frying pan or saucepan sprayed with rapeseed oil and cook until soft, then set aside.
- Roughly chop the tomatoes and remove any hard central cores. Add the chopped tomatoes to the pan with the onions and garlic and add the stock, tomato puree, and chopped chilli (if using). Cover and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally and season well with freshly-ground black pepper.
- When cooked, allow to cool a little before placing in a liquidiser. Liquidise for 30 seconds. Now add the basil leaves and liquidise for a further 30 seconds or until completely smooth.
- Place a sieve on top of a large jug or bowl and pour the soup a little at a time into the sieve and work it through the mesh with the back of a wooden spoon. With a metal spoon, scrape the thick pulp from underneath the sieve allowing it to fall into the soup below. When you have worked every bit of pulp through the mesh that you can, discard the remaining skin and seeds.
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Fun, Facts & Fitness from Mary Morris MSc.
I have to admit that it has been only fairly recently that I have become a big fan of soups. To the extent that I invested in a soup maker, mainly because I am not a cook that enjoys lots of chopping and slicing! That machine alone has had a significant impact on my vegetable consumption, as I now feel I am nearer to consuming the complete ‘rainbow’ of vegetables because of the vast array of different kinds I use to make soup.
When we discover that our immune system is enhanced by eating a variety of vegetables then soups are certainly the way to go! They are the fertilizer of our gut microbiome.
Understanding that our immune system depends on a variety of fresh ingredients becomes much more important the older we are. Over the weeks in this Newsletter we often refer to what is happening to our body both inside and out as we get older and what we can do to offset the rate at which we age. Having a strong and protective immune system is governed by what we do every single day and that is down to what we eat and how much we move! Forget the term 'life-span', rather think of it as a 'health-span'.
If we eat a lot of highly processed foods such as ready meals, cakes and biscuits that contain very few nutrients, they absorb into our digestive system at a remarkable rate doing very little good in the process. Whereas the path of a vegetable such as broccoli for example can be tracked all the way down the digestive tract leaving different health benefits as it goes as well as increasing that vital good bacteria in our gut. Good news all round.
As we age the need to indulge our diet with really good nutrients becomes more and more necessary. Whilst I have often mentioned that the ageing process cannot be halted, just delayed, it is the same with the immune system. It becomes tired and naturally deteriorates with age. The bone marrow, which is our immune-cell factory, slows down and the thymus gland, responsible for producing the 'master controllers' of the immune system, also turns down the production of new cells. It is no surprise though to find out that all these natural changes to our immune system can be delayed with... EXERCISE!
The consensus is that if we are someone who regularly exercises we definitely improve our chance of living better for longer. Simply doing a moderate-intensity activity, like going for a walk or doing some basic strength exercises (which we recommend every single week in this Newsletter), we reduce inflammation in the body making us less likely to become ill. Keeping our muscles moving through exercise sends out signals to the body to make new white blood cells and this has the capacity to stop the thymus gland shrinking, so it keeps producing those vital cells necessary for a strong immune system. I recommend you read Chapter 6 of The 28-Day Immunity Plan book to remind you of the value of stimulating your lymphatic system to do that job efficiently and effectively.
The good news is that we can start at any age. Many older adults over the age of 65, when asked why they don't move much, declare that it is 'too late'. Well, all the evidence says quite the opposite! At any age we will see enormous improvements in strength, balance, blood pressure, bone density and now you have learned even more... just how much exercise benefits your immune system! Keep it up everybody!
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This Week's Fitness Challenge
- Add a bit of HiiT (High Intensity Interval Training) to your 30-minute daily walks this week. Look for a change of route that pushes you a bit more. It may be a few inclines to push you harder or, if you are walking around a housing estate for example, as you turn each corner ‘up’ the pace a bit then reduce it at the next corner. As well as increasing your fitness, it stops the route being boring!
- Attack your strength workouts with more vigour this week. Use one of our short sessions on the website that are done and dusted quickly but leave their mark because they are so effective! Plan to do 3 sessions this week.
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Did you know...
There are those of us who cannot contemplate growing our own vegetables without a wry smile as we remember "The Good Life"
 The BBC1 sitcom ran for 28 episodes plus a Christmas Special, over four series from 1975 - 1977. The plot revolved around Tom Good (played by Richard Briers) who gave up his unfulfilling job as a draughtsman for a company that made plastic toys for breakfast cereal packets. With their house in The Avenue, Surbiton fully paid for, he and his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendall) quit work and attempted to develop a self-sufficient lifestyle by turning their front and back gardens into allotments and growing their own fruit and vegetables. They introduced chickens, pigs (Pinky and Perky), a goat (Geraldine) and a cockerel (Lenin) and generated their own electricity with methane from the animal waste. Barbara made their own clothes and they sold or bartered surplus crops for essentials they could not make themselves. Not surprisingly, their actions horrified their kindly but conventional and socially aspirational neighbours in the leafy surburb, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter. (Penelope Keith & Paul Eddington)
Nearly 50 years on, the programme seems a little dated but strangely the subject material seems more relevant now than ever!
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And finally...
One of the joys of growing our own produce, apart from the fact that they are so fresh and so good for us, is being able to send visitors away with a few home-grown fruits or vegetables. There’s also something special too about going to a pick-your-own farm and gathering your own fresh fruits off the plants. They just taste better!
Have a lovely week and stay safe.
With love and best wishes,
Rosemary Conley CBE DL
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LIVE LONGER | LIVE HEALTHIER | LIVE HAPPIER
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