Carrot, Cardamon and Coconut soup

Sunday 2.22pm

This is just such a, well there is no other word for it, pretty soup. Pale orange in colour, delicately scented, smooth in texture, just pretty really. I have a recipe for a delicious carrot cake by Madhur Jaffrey that has Indian spices in it and cardamom features heavily, so why not a soup I thought and of course if you are going down the soft creamy route then coconut milk would be an ideal companion.

- start with half an onion and a small clove of garlic, and one or two green cardamom pods gently fried till soft.

- Add in two or three carrots chopped and mix around

- Then a pint and a quarter of half strength vegetable stock

- Simmer until the carrots are soft, half an hour or so

- Fish out the cardamom pods if you like, I left them in, and liquidize it all

This of course gives Carrot and Cardamon soup which is very nice but I went that little bit further and added a small amount of coconut milk, no more than 100ml or so (taste it) – you do not want to overpower with coconut. The rest of the tin I put in a couple of pots and popped in the freezer to see if it will freeze for some other time.

With two pods I thought the cardamom flavour was quite strong and would probably try one pod next time, but Nicola said she could not taste it at all. Mind you she is bunged up with flu at the moment.

We had ours with toast cos there is a lot of bread to eat up but better I think would be some sort of thin, slightly crispy flatbread or potato cake, perhaps next time.