My Number One Soup

Winter in Melbourne. Cool, cloudy, wet, and this time of year the daylight only lasts for, like, half an hour. Salads are out and soups are in. Something hot and hearty, a bit of heat in the seasoning, something to stick to the ribs.

I have a fallback recipe for a good warm spicy meal. Nothing specific but you have to allow an hour or two.

1. Heat up the oven. Reasonably hot, something like 175°.
2. Cut up the following into chunks: Roma tomatoes. red capsicum, an onion
3. Add a clove or two of garlic crushed and cut up a bit, a bit of chilli sliced fine, maybe a few strips of sundried tomatoes, capers, salt and pepper to taste, oregano and parsley. Depends how spicey you want it.
4. Add a small roast. A chicken breast, a lamb shank, a tiny cut of oyster blade. Something like that.
5. Whack it all in a roasting dish, glug some oil on, give it a good rub.
6. Put the lid on, slide the dish into the oven, wait half an hour.
7. Take it out, check it, add some stock (and maybe a bit of wine if there’s some left over from the previous night/weekend), put it back in.
8. Keep on checking every twenty minutes or so. Give it a slosh around to keep everything moist. Doesn’t really matter if you get a bit of colour on the capsicum.
9. When it’s done and the meat is cooked through, take out the meat, set aside, and pour the roasted vegetables and stock into a blender.
10. Add more stock — maybe rinse some hot water into the dish to get any last flavour out — until you have the desired quantity of soup.
11. Whiz it up. Not too much: you want some texture left in the soup.
12. Pour it into bowls or mugs, add a swirl of cream and a sprinkle of parsley.
13. Slice the meat, make thick sandwiches with some crusty bread, serve as an accompaniment to the soup.

This is a simple, nourishing meal. Skimp on the stock and you can make it into a chunky sauce to go with a larger cut of meat, or as the basis for a bolognese sauce; just be careful that the vegetables don’t dry out in the dish while roasting.

Capsicum, for those not in Australia, is what other lands call bell peppers. Usually red, though green and yellow varieties are around and often sold as a set of three, called traffic lights. Ha ha.

Temperatures are in Celsius. If you want that in Fahrenheit you'll have to whip it into a blender and apply mathematics, that sort of nonsense went out with pounds, shillings and pence a long time ago. It's all decimal nowadays, money and measurements.

Makes a lot more sense. 0° is freezing and 100° is boiling. Can't get much simpler than that!

Shiraz is a good wine to pair this with, especially if it's red meat you are cooking as the roast. Maybe something heavier, a cab sav is good, if it's a solid slab of cow. Chicken or turkey, maybe a rosé would be the go.

I buy the bread from a local bakery. None of this anaemic white sliced stuff. Ancient grain sourdough in an artisanal form, shaped by hand and cooked with care, is my preference. Baked fresh, sliced thick, whack a wodge of meat and some sort of sauce between buttered slices. Dark rye is going a bit over the top, I think, but good grains in the already tasty loaf hits the spot nicely.

Some vintage cheddar if you want to add more oomph to the tucker.

Enjoy!

Britni