King’s Day Soup
Today it’s King’s Day in The Netherlands. We cooked up a delicious orange soup to celebrate our National Day!
Time
30-35 minutes
Utensils
Soup pot
Immersion blender
Water cooker (not necessary, but quicker)
Ingredients
2 garlic gloves
1 or 2 onions
1 red pepper (remove the seeds for less spiciness)
1 can of coconut milk (400 ml)
Handful of fresh coriander (if you like it)
Anything orange like sweet potatoes, carrots or pumpkin (for example: half a pumpkin, 2 sweet potatoes and one big carrot)
Side notes
- You can put the soup in the freezer so you can make quite a bit if you want.
- Depending on how much soup you want to make or how thick you like it add some more veggies/potatoes, water and/or coconut milk.
- The recipe is super-forgiving and easy to correct, open for experiments and you almost can’t mess it up!
Preparation
First cut your sweet potatoes and carrot into rough, 2cm-sized chunks – you can leave the potato-skin on it is actually full of fibers, vitamins, beta-carotene, potassium and iron, which is awesome if you don’t eat (much) meat! Do give it a good rub and wash before cutting. If you’re watching your weight a bit or want to be extra-healthy you can soak the potato cuts in cold water for +/-10 minutes and dry them afterwards with some kitchen paper, this extracts any excess starch.
For the pumpkin, remove all the seeds as well as the skin and cut them in roughly same sized pieces as the potatoes, since they cook around the same time. Getting the skin of can be a tough job especially if the pumpkin is still fresh but there are some brilliant videos online to assist you throughout the process. This is also a perfect job for a guy, if you’re not a man and there’s one near you, do ask him.
Skin and cut the onions and garlic gloves. You don’t have to be precise since it gets blended up later anyways. Remove the top and bottom end of the pepper and slice into small rings. Put everything in the pan with a good portion of coconut- or olive oil (you want it to fry a bit so be generous) and put on semi-high temperature gas. Let it fry for around 3-4 minutes as delicious smells start to fill your kitchen and you can see the onions and garlic get glazy-transparent-golden-brownish.
Simply throw in all the vegetables/potatoes and add some extra oil. Put on a full water cooker while heating your veggies but do keep an eye on them. Let them cook for around 5 to 10 minutes and lower the gas towards the end while stirring regularly. This is mainly for the flavor the real cooking part happens in the water so don’t be scared if they don’t seem “done” yet!
Add the boiling water until it levels about 1-2 cm under the vegetables (they should be almost covered but not completely) and let them boil for around 15 to 20 minutes, in the meantime you can cut up your coriander and relax a bit, but your kitchen will start to smell even better so you probably won’t want to leave. Do stir every once in a while. The vegetables/potatoes are ready when they get a bit “mushy” and you can poke a fork into them without too much force.
Now, add the coconut milk and bring it back to boiling point. Preferably keep it just below boiling point since you will lose nutrients from the coconut milk otherwise. Keep it like this for another couple of minutes or so and turn off the gas. Add some salt (Himalayan please!) and pepper or whatever herbs you want to your liking but if you feel insecure about this first use the immersion blender and season after you’ve tasted. Mush the whole thing up, make sure you don’t miss a pepper piece or you’ll be in for a surprise later. You can add the coriander at this point or put it fresh in while serving.
I like the consistence of the soup quite thick, since I often eat it as a dinner-meal, but as said before you can just add some water/coconut oil until it’s to your preference. If necessary heat up once more but keep below boiling point. All done! Now put the deliciousness in some nice bowls, top off with the coriander and enjoy!
