Cooking Easy Food

Soups are very forgiving, you can use meat, poultry or fish all of which go with a variety of vegetables - they soup wonderfully together. You can make your soup simple or carefully add flavours to enhance the soup. Try not to overload it with seasoning and spices; ideally you should be able to taste the individual ingredients in your soup - spices and extra flavours should add a little kick, little something extra or to add a little warmth in the winter.

Get into the habit of collecting and using fridge leftovers - needless to say the food should be edible and not going off. It's OK to use veg and salad stuff that look a bit lonely in the fridge but they should not be 'past it'. Don't use lettuce as it goes watery.

Put leftovers in pan of boiling water, only to halfway up the ingredients is an easy measure - it's better to put in less and add more later rather than have watery soup. When everything is soft to fork, blend to the required consistency, add flavours, sea salt and black pepper etc. Use this soup the same day as you make it.

The consistency of soup is a personal thing, some soups are better slightly watery and others like chunky winter root vegetable soups are thicker. Watercress and spinach soup is very nice with a (table) spoonful of double cream added to the stock when heating the soup ready to eat.

Your unique soups will add to your five-a-day, taste how you want them to and help you to prevent waste. You'll be surprised how quick and easy it is to collect up those sad little ingredients in the bottom of the fridge and get into the habit of turning them into tasty soup.

Your fishmonger is only too happy to get rid of some of the fish waste - i.e. heads, bones and tails of fresh fish (not organs). They don't usually charge for these because they are normally thrown away. Add boiling water to about halfway up the fish bits, add sea salt, black pepper and simmer slowly (with lid on pot) for about an hour. Use a fine nylon sieve to drain the fish stock from the pot. Throw away the fish bits. This will be a concentrated fish stock and if you wish, you can either eat the fish soup as it is or you can add a few pieces of chopped, cooked carrots/fennel, cooked white fish to swim in your bowl of soup or you can ladel enough to be a fish base to a different fish soup recipe; according to what taste you want. I wouldn't over crowd this soup with vegetables because one of the lovely things about this clearer soup is it's delicious fish taste. Enjoy.