Soup series 5: Green veggie with homemade croutons

The fifth soup in my six soup series is here! A beautiful green soup, which with every mouthful you just know it is doing your body good. It has that taste which screams healthy and goodness, as well as being bright green! Perfect for a health kick, if you are feeling run down, or as part of a healthy diet! This recipe serves 4 but it keeps well in the fridge so is perfect for taking to work for lunch!

Ingredients

1 head of broccoli

1 large onions (or 2 small)

2 leeks

2 courgettes

100g black kale (or normal)

200g spinach

4 cloves of garlic

10g ginger (thumb size piece)

1L vegetable stock

1 bay leaf

Hinch of pink himalayan salt (or normal salt)
Pepper

Olive oil

Croutons

4 slices of bread (I went for seeded batch)

Olive oil

Serves 4

You can swap the black kale for normal kale if you wish. The only reason I used this was because I had some from a farmers market which needed using up. If you are anything like me, you will like to be organised when cooking, especially if it involves quite a few ingredients. For this recipe, the first thing I did was chop all the vegetables. Don't worry about chopping them up small or precisely, they are only going to be blended eventually anyway!

Into bowl one, add your leeks and onion.

Into bowl two, broccoli and courgette.

And finally bowl three, your spinach and kale.

Roughly chop up your ginger and put aside along with your peeled garlic.

Start by adding some olive oil into a saucepan and fry the bowl one ingredients on a low heat (leeks and onions) for about 5 minutes until soft. Whilst these are cooking, prepare your stock if you have not bought pre-made stock. After 5 minutes, add in the garlic and ginger to the leeks and onion and cook for a further minute. 

Now add in your stock, bowl two ingredients (broccoli and courgette), a bay leaf, some pepper and a pinch of whichever salt you are using. I love using pink Himalayan salt as pictured below, and I just used a pestle and mortar to grind a few crystals up. It is completely fine to use just normal salt though.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 8-10 minutes. Mix in bowl three ingredients (spinach and kale) and cook for a further couple of minutes, until the spinach starts to wilt.

If you are making the croutons, turn your oven on to 200C to heat up whilst you blend the soup. Depending on the size of your blender, you may have to blend this in batches (this took me 3 batches). I prefer to blend each batch, add all into a big bowl, mix and blend again to make sure it is all well mixed and the same consistency. Do whatever works best for you and your blender!

Once you have blended, chop up your slices of bread into 1cm-ish cubes, drizzle with olive oil and place in your oven for about 10 minutes until golden and crispy! I love using seeded bread as it gives your croutons extra flavour and crunch!

When these are almost done, put your soup back on the hob to bring back up to eating temperature. I prefer to serve the croutons in a little side bowl rather than in my soup as I like them to stay crispy rather than get soggy by sitting in the soup! It also gives everyone the option to enjoy their croutons however they wish.

And there we have it! We all know that green usually means healthy and this soup sure is no exception!  It is also a great soup to pack more vegetables into your or your children's diet without them knowing just how many it contains!

Just one soup left to come in my series now which I am yet to decide. I have a few ideas though and I definitely want it to be colourful!