4 Vegetable Soups To Make This Week By Jamie Oliver

I'm going to show you the most delicious recipe for homemade soup. A beautiful bowl of steaming vegetable soup with cracked pasta in there. It's a kind of minestrone. My family absolutely love it. I'm going to show you how to make a very, very quick homemade pesto that is pungent and full of flavour. The two together are sublime. So we've got good recipes here, but I'm going to introduce you to your best friend in the kitchen, the freezer. And I really want to tell you the benefits of using frozen veggies, having them in your freezer and allowing you to really make delicious dishes full of all the good stuff. First up, let's get the veggies. So let's have a little look what we've got here. This is a bag of sofrito. All the supermarkets are selling bags of chopped up carrot, onion, celery, stuff like that. I've actually got some lasagna here. This is fresh lasagna that you can actually freeze as well, but of course you can use dried pasta in this dish. I'll put that to one side. I've got frozen peas, a classic. I've got some frozen stock made from the leftover carcass of roast dinner, roast chicken dinner. Just put it in a pan, cover it with water, any little bits of sort of veggies, some herbs, boil it up for a couple of hours and then put it into bags and you can freeze it for another day. Great for risottos and soups. And then I've got some frozen broccoli here. I've got some broad beans here. I'm going to put the chicken stock to one side. In a pan, let's make a beautiful hearty soup. Put that on a heat. We're going to go in with some olive oil here, like that. I'm going to go in with the sofrito. Sometimes supermarkets call it chef's base as well, but essentially it's the same thing. So we're going to defrost that and start to fry it off and we want to get that caramelisation, that sweetness of flavour coming out of the veggies. So mix in your sofrito. We've got our veggies sort of sitting here ready and raring to go, so they can sit to one side. So while this sofrito starts to fry and caramelise, I want to talk to you about pesto. Now look, the jarred pesto that you get in the supermarkets, super convenient, like you get all kinds of different pestos. So 10 out of 10 for convenience and if I'm being really, really honest, the best ones that you can get are probably a 6 out of 10 on flavour, right. It's impossible to get any higher, right. Why? Because it's all about these fresh herbs. If I want to make something that's truly jaw-droppingly delicious, then I want to show you how utterly simple pesto can be. So this is 100 grams of basil and I'm going to throw it in there with the stalks, everything, okay. I'm going to go in with a handful of nuts. These happen to be pine nuts, right, but it could be almonds, it could be hazelnuts, right, it could be pistachios. I'm going to use one piece of parmesan here. I'm going to use a knife to take the rind off and I'll tell you about this later and I'm just going to break up the parmesan like that into the machine. One clove of garlic, lid on, 40 seconds. So that's 30 seconds. Then I'm going to go in with some olive oil and just give it a little pulse. Homemade pesto done in about 40 seconds. I don't need to season it with salt because the parmesan's got plenty of salt. Also, that story about the freezer being your best friend, it is. Now if you freeze homemade pesto, that is going to always be twice, at least twice as good as anything in a jar. Why? Because the freezer can trap all those perfumes. It really is very, very good. Let's just get a little freezer mould like that, fill it up. You can take like a little cube of frozen pesto and put it on garlic bread. You could put it on a chicken breast that you're roasting or, you know, a lovely piece of grilled fish, salmon, anything like that. You know, you can take a couple of cubes and toss it with some lovely tagliatelle. So this is about having homemade delicious food work hard for you. So if you whack this in the freezer, here's one that I froze. Look, that's what you get. Homemade, fresh and without question going to be better than anything in a jar, right? Because it's frozen, not pasteurised. Okay, so that's a nice little hack that hopefully is getting you thinking. So the rest of this pesto, I'm just going to put into this bowl. Once you make pesto that quickly, you'll never buy the jarred stuff again, I'm telling you. So look, homemade pesto in 40 seconds and also a batch in the freezer for a rainy day, to go on all kinds of different things. So back to the pan here, I can hear we're starting to get some serious frying. Can you hear that? Let's just talk about frozen vegetables. So I think there's a kind of idea out there that frozen veggies are down market, that are not as good, that they're sort of a lower quality. It's an interesting one. As far as nutrition is concerned, it's highly likely that frozen vegetables are more nutritious than fresh. How can frozen veg be more nutritious than fresh? Okay, let me explain. As soon as you pick something that's fresh, the graph of nutrition is starting to wane, right? And if you're thinking about something that's taken a week to get into the supermarket or the market, it's just going down and down and down. It might look fresh, but the nutrition's depleting, right? As soon as veggies for freezing are picked, they're normally, normally frozen within eight hours, right? So it captures and it traps that nutrition. So from a nutrition point of view, frozen veggies are epic. From a waste point of view, they're epic because I can go in and I can take a little handful and just put a bit more veg into a dish and I can leave that in the freezer. So from a waste point of view, epic. Convenience, epic. So look, back to the soup. For fun, actually not for fun, for thoughtfulness, that rind of parmesan, often that goes in the bin, right? So it's hard and it's salty, but what if I put it in here, right? So you can use that as a seasoning flavour bomb. So parmesan has that umami flavour. It's also very salty, very salty on the skin, but when you put it in a soup, you shouldn't have to season much at all, right? And then interestingly, after some nice simmering, that hard, inedible parmesan rind actually softens up and then you can actually slice it up and then you can eat it. You can even sort of fry it and make it crispy. It's very, very cool. Now I'm happy to add the next veggies. So I'm going to go in now with just a load, no specific amount, of broad beans, peas. I'll go in with some broccoli here. I'm going to go in with the chicken stock. Of course you can use stock cubes and boiling water, but homemade chicken stock is always going to be really, really delicious. So in we go and it's all going to start defrosting. This is going to taste delicious in any soup, risotto, stew, curry, like it makes or breaks a dish. So in I go with one and a half litres of lovely stock. So look, let that just melt down, bring it to a boil and then I'll show you what to do next. So this has been simmering for about 15 minutes. Smells beautiful thanks to that incredible chicken stock and that lovely base that we fried down. So look, you can see the colour of the frozen veg is beautiful. So what I want to show you now is the pasta. This is frozen lasagna sheets. I'm just showing you this as a nice little hack. So what's great about this is, because it's fresh when I got it, you can get it on bargain or reduced or whatever you want to call it, just put it in the freezer. It's really good. If you take it out of the freezer, they kind of defrost really quickly. You can use it for your lasagnas. Sometimes you have leftovers. So we're literally just going to break it all up badly like that. Big bits, small bits and it doesn't take much time to cook at all. So that just goes in. You could of course use dried pasta and for me personally when I do this kind of soup, I get all the odds and sods, the random bits, smash them all up and just throw them in there. I like having small bits and I like having some big bits. So just stir that through. So that is looking and smelling very, very good. Nearly ready to go. Of course it's fresh, so it only needs like three, four minutes to cook. So let's get a couple little bowls here. Let's get our lovely homemade pesto. So look, it's coming up. We're pretty much there. A little extra salt and a little bit of black pepper. Stir that through. It's going to be absolutely delicious. This is ready to serve lovely people. Let's do it. A lovely bowl of hot steaming broth. Look there is actually, let's pull that out. There's that parmesan here. Let's just take that out, chop that up and that'll just be a bomb of delicious seasoning and flavour that you can stir through there. So what I love to do is just finish that with a beautiful pesto. So there you go. Because you have to. A little bit of olive oil on top and that is a beautiful dish. I've got one last little freezer hack for you. It's one of my favourite ones actually. When you buy fresh chillies, if you've got too many, it happens to me quite a lot, I just throw it into the freezer right. And if you freeze a chilli hard, you can just grab a grater and you can grate chilli frozen over the top like this. Look at that. Can you see what it's doing? And once you finish doing it, back in the freezer. Enough yapping, time to get slurping. Let's get a bit of pasta, get a bit of pesto, a bit of broth. Oh yeah, it makes me feel really, really happy. Just gorgeous. And look, I've celebrated all things frozen today and I think it's really important to do that. You know, being passionate about food, being a chef can't just be about farmers markets and growing. Like it has to sort of look at the reality of life and convenience and this is a really good one. And if you want to mix and match frozen with fresh, fresh asparagus in there, handful of spinach in there, of course, go for it. Swap out the pasta, go in with rice. Swap out the rice, go in with gnocchi. Swap out the gnocchi, go in with bread. Like you can just make this yours. But one thing is for sure, if you follow the little points of care in this recipe, you will be making some of the best soups of your life. Enjoy. I'm going to make a beautiful English onion soup. None of this French onion soup monarchy. We're going to go English soup. So I've got red onions, white onions, the little sort of Italian sort of banana and cipollini type ones. Slice them up. The quicker the better really, otherwise you end up getting into tears. I've never done a recipe crying before. Onion soup, but with a little bit of help from some of the other Alliums, with the leeks. I'm tempted hardly even to chop the garlic up, just to squash it. Get your pan, add some oil, nice lug of oil, a little bit of butter. First thing that I want to touch this pan is some sage and then I want to put in the garlic. That's a nice start. And then we bring in our onions into there. Mix that up. Always cook onions with a good pinch of salt and pepper. That is fantastic and I'm going to turn this down to a medium. So 25 minutes, just leave that to cook now. Right, have a look at this. You can see how those onions have sort of shrunk in size and to make this into a soup we need stock now. Chicken stock is brilliant. It's about four pints of stock to a kilo of onions, garlic and leek. Simmer that for about sort of 10-15 minutes. While that's cooking I'm going to get my bread and I want to cut that in half. Just get yourself a grater and grate a whole load of cheese. Bring this over here to get a nice mixture of sort of stock and onions and then straight into that bowl. So I've got my soups done. I'm going to get my little toasties and just ram them in like that. Worcestershire sauce, just a swig. I don't want this to ruin or wreck or overtake but just a few little dribbles. Sage leaves here and there you go. From here under a grill and let it all melt and it literally only takes a minute. Look at that. That is a proper English onion soup. Beautiful. That is the real deal. That is English onion soup. Look at that. Hi it's Jules here. Today I'm going to make a really nice chunky, not going to say winter because it can be used at any season, really nice hearty warm vegetable bean soup which actually I do for my children every week or not necessarily this one but I kind of vary up the soups weekly and my husband loves it, thank god. It's such a good soup. I've got two leeks that look like four but they've been cut into two, washed and a good tip from Jamie, this is what he told me to do, is to wash downwards so you get all the dirt out and use it a bit like a little river. So this will probably feed about four to six so just chop. You can do smaller if you prefer but my children quite like a bit of chunk so we're not really smooth soup family so I have to do it like this. Two sticks of celery, washed, three carrots which I'm just going to chop and two cloves of garlic thinly sliced. You could always use a garlic crusher if you fancy. So that's all my veg done so I'm just going to do some bacon. I've got just two rashers, just chop that. You don't have to use bacon but it does add a really nice flavour and if you were doing this for a baby obviously you wouldn't be doing the seasoning and you can just take that out and just have a really nice vegetable soup and then blend it. So now I'm going to start cooking, just put my my really mad oven on. A lug of olive oil. First we're going to do the bacon with some rosemary, just a sprig of rosemary is all you need, gets all the strong flavours going. So now I can hear the sizzle, that's when you know all the flavours are coming up the rosemary and they're all kind of intermingling together. You can smell it now, it's so delicious. So this should take about a couple of minutes just so it goes nice and brown. Right it's definitely brown and crispy so I'm going to add all the veg. You know it's going to be great for children and it is one way of getting everything in all at once and I always feel so good when I see they've eaten this, I feel like it's been really a really healthy dinner and just mix it around. You need to use about 10 to 15 minutes just to make sure the leeks get really sweet, nice and soft and tender. I'm going to put the lid on, sweat them down and leave it for 10-15 minutes to get all the jobs. So I reckon this is done, they look yeah, they look really nice and they smell pretty good as well so they're definitely ready. Now I'm going to add blotchy beans but you can actually use any canned beans you like, my children like these so that's quite nice. Normally when I do this is a normal ballet day or athletics day so I really worry they've got enough energy to kind of do what they have to do and those beans will definitely help that. So I'm going to add my stock, you can do chicken or veg and I've got a litre of stock there. Also to make it a bit quicker I use the hot stock so it keeps everything going and boiling at the same time. Put it back to simmer for about half an hour. I reckon this is done now, yeah it looks nice and soft. I'm going to add a handful of frozen peas and then two handfuls of kale. The girls like kale but you can do spinach or courgettes or anything that doesn't need a lot of cooking time so it stays really nice bright and green. So I'll just mix it in, put the lid on for a couple of minutes and then prepare the bowls and we're ready. And because actually this soup hasn't got really much carbohydrates in so I sometimes add pasta or I've got some bread here, we could even add potatoes, sweet potatoes, just to get that bit more chunkier feeling. I do especially for my children because if they've been busy at school I think it's kind of quite healthy to do that. There you go, some nice hunks of bread which they really like. So that's my carb. So you can see the leeks are sweated off, I can smell actually all the lovely smells of the bacon and the rosemary and the fresh greens have given it a really nice kind of fresh feel and they're not too ever cooked at all so they'll be nice and crunchy still and the stocks will reduce so I'm going to portion it up. So I've got one for Buds and one for myself because it's such a good soup and it's really quick. Actually I normally cook my soup the day before but if you're going to do a good batch and freeze it, perhaps don't add the green vegetables like the kale or the courgette because it'll keep its vibrancy. If you defrost it, put it on the hob then just the same as you did before, add the greens at the end and then they're really fresh and lovely and they kind of keep the crunch. There you go guys, it's all done, my lovely chunky hearty soup and please enjoy it, well I hope you enjoy it and give it a go and I can't wait to hear what you think. Which bit do you want to try? My cheesy onion soup is a perfect way to celebrate autumn as the days draw in. This is a homage to the French onion soup but there's a few things that we do in this country that are so good, I'm really proud of bread and cheese and a few little kind of hacks for flavour. So slice up two kilos of onions, red or white it doesn't matter, without being kind of too boring or geeky. If you slice an onion it tastes different when you cook it to if you chop an onion and if you chop it coarse it tastes different than if you chop it small and if you roast it whole in the skin it tastes different to if you roast it whole without the skin. So like that's cool right? So we cut it this way, it's just sweeter and more delicious. So I'm gonna use a lovely casserole style pan, medium high heat, go in with some olive oil, a couple of tablespoons. I'll take a knob of butter, this looks generous but I'm making quite a lot of soup right? This is going to be enough for like eight maybe even ten portions and then garlic. Take six cloves, we'll slice these up. As soon as this lovely butter is sizzling away, get the garlic in there. I don't want any colour on this garlic, you just want to bring out those sweet flavours and then I'm going to go in with the onions and lots of them. It's going to look like too much but you have to trust me, we need to access the natural sugars in this incredible vegetable and that requires a little time right? So we want to soften these and then as the moisture starts to cook away we start to fry and then we start to caramelise. I'm going to turn the heat up now, season it with some salt and some pepper fairly generously and then I want to take another little bit of inspiration from the French and have a bouquet garni which is like a little bunch of herbs. So take a little bit of sage, thyme, rosemary, you could have a little bay leaf in there, grab some string and tie it up or you can buy them like this. That little bunch of herbs is going to give incredible fragrance and flavour. Turn the heat down to medium and I am going to cook this down for about 40 minutes but instead of losing all of this moisture, you can see the steam right, I want to keep it. So I'm going to make a little lid, this is what the French would call a cartouche. So this bit of paper is folded in half and then folded in half again and then again measure up to the centre of your pan, slice off the end, take the tip of your knife and just do a little cross like that and let a little bit of steam come through. So if I put our little cartouche on top or if you don't want to do that, use a lid, a jar. So what's that going to do? It's going to keep it wetter for longer, we're going to release more sugars, get more caramelisation, more colour, more flavour. So that's how you cheat out epic flavour. So I'm going to cook this for 20 minutes with the cartouche paper on top and then I'll rip it off and then I'll caramelise it for 20 minutes and then I'll show you what to do next. I've just given it a little stir every now and again. If you look in the bottom of the pan, it's actually those brownings that are going to give this broth, this soup, the most beautiful dark colour. So to help get all those sticky bits off the bottom, add a little beer. A British IPA 300ml, not too much. And I'm going to turn the heat up now and cook all that beer away. Now we're going to go in with the stock. I'm going to use a chicken stock. Two and a half litres goes in. Let that simmer for like five or ten minutes and then let's get on to the bread. I'm going to go for quite brave kind of two centimetre slices. When I say brave, I mean like chunky, rustic. I find that if I toast it, I get deeper flavours and this is not a garnish, this is part of the ingredients. That little bouquet garni on a leash has done its work. We'll get loads of lovely fragrance from that. You all right Conker? Mate, sadly you're not going to be able to enjoy this. Sorry dude, next time. And hopefully I haven't burnt my toast. I'm going to take a little bit of butter for deliciousness. I'm then going to bring in another friend, English mustard. And then amazing British farmhouse cheeses. You can use any one or two or three that you like. Things that are going to ooze really nicely. You want just enough cheese to sort of generously top your toast. Just use what you love. Use your little toasty barges to float on this beautiful sea of onion. And you want to submerge the bread and you want them to be soft but you want the top to kind of gratinate and go beautiful. I didn't think I had enough cheese so I added just a little bit more and then last but not least a little Worcestershire sauce. And now turn it off and get this under the grill for like five maybe ten minutes until it's just golden, crispy, oozy and delicious. Heaven. Just look at that. Oh it's gorgeous. A homage to the fine humble onion. Banging season right now. Let's have a little portion up. I am very very excited about this. Amazing colour. A beautiful oozy slice of that good stuff. Extra virgin olive oil over the top. Let's have a little try. A nice wodge of those onions. Just so soft. Effortless to eat. So good. Even though that bread's been toasted and it's quite robust, when it sits in that lovely broth it absorbs it all and it just softens. This is a brilliant soup to kick off the beginning of autumn. Whether you're growing onions or just down the markets and supermarkets where there will be onions like you wouldn't believe, it's nice to shine a little spotlight on that lovely vegetable.