I’ve been having a bit of a nightmare with this particular recipe for cauliflower and courgette soup – not the cooking of it you understand but the producing of it for this website.  This is the fourth time of trying to type this up.  I did save it each time but that doesn’t seem to have mattered as on each occasion when I hit the “publish” tab, I end up with a few lines of rubbish and nothing resembling a soup recipe!  I have therefore confined the original attempts to the bin and gone back to the drawing board in Word.  Let’s hope this gets us there!  

I’ve made this lots of times before so I can’t pretend it’s one I just came up with for the current situation – it was the first thing that I thought of though when I looked at the courgettes in the bottom of the fridge drawer that were beginning to look a little sad.

I think that this recipe originally came from a lovely French, chef, friend, Yvon.  If I get the chance at some point during this lockdown, I will also share his version of bouillabaisse too which is absolutely the best version of that dish on the planet but clearly not really a store cupboard thing, unless you happen to live by the sea and have a couple of long fishing rods!

I didn’t have fresh cauliflower this time round so used a bag of frozen which worked just fine. As with most of my recipes involving vegetables, I don’t weigh them, I just use up what I have on hand.  Carrot cake is obviously an exception to that rule!

If you haven’t got white wine vinegar, a splash of white wine would work or vermouth but the vinegar is best.  I haven’t tried it with cider or red wine vinegar but I can’t see why they wouldn’t.

I had a lot of chicken stock I wanted to use up to make space in the freezer so used homemade but you could easily make this recipe vegetarian/vegan using vegetable stock.

Ingredients

1kg bag frozen cauliflower, or 1 head of cauliflower cut into florets

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

2 litres chicken stock

3 large courgettes roughly chopped 

1 large onion, chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil (doesn’t need to be extra virgin)

3 fat garlic cloves

2 good sized stalks of celery, chopped

2 teaspoons ground white pepper

Method

• Bring the chicken stock to a boil, add the cauliflower and the vinegar and bring back to the boil for five minutes
• Whilst that is boiling, sweat the onion and celery in the olive oil in a large pan, adding in the garlic after a minute or so
• Remove the cauliflower florets from the stock with a slotted spoon and add to the pot
• Add in the courgettes too, cover and keep it all sweating together for about ten minutes
• Pour the stock in with the vegetables and bring back to a gentle rolling boil
• Using a stick blender, puree the soup until smooth, season and serve