Chunky vegetable soup.

Apologies for being absent for so long, and I say this to myself as much as anyone else because I have really suffered from the lack of contact with my culinary world! I can tell that my soul suffers when I don't cook! I am pleased to announce that we are now comfortably ensconsed in our new home after a haze of apartment hunting, finding, moving, unpacking, furniture buying and utility set ups. We finally got internet this morning, hence the hasty visit to the blog! Right, that said, lets move on the real reason we are here, food!

The first meal I made in our new place was vegetable soup. I had a fridge full of odds and ends of vegetables that we had dragged around from place to place with us and I had had enough of them! One time solution to odds and ends is soup. You can do this with anything that you have in your fridge, no need to use exactly what I had. I had a couple of onions, a zucchini, some mushrooms, several carrots, some squash (1/2), cabbage (1/4-1/3) and celery. The only things I used that weren't from the crisper in my fridge were a can of diced tomatoes and a chicken stock cube, and water from the tap! And pepper!

I cut up the onions and fried them in the bottom of a pan with some olive oil. I added to this cm cubes of squash and let them fry along too. After they had had a head start I added the can of diced tomatoes and then the rest of the vegetables cut up, a stock cube, a cup of water and some pepper. And I let it cook. Easy. There was enough salt from the stock cube I found. You could use broth if you had any instead of the stock cube. It cooked for maybe 20minutes, check on it and see when your biggest chunks of veg are cooked, which in my case were the squash cubes. It is then ready to eat. My husband put some chilli sauce on it for a kick which was very tasty.

I could have eaten this soup every day! I loved it. So simple, so easy, you know everything in it is good for you! It was a complete lunch, or a good half of any meal. I kept it in the fridge in a container and it would heat up in a bowl in minutes, so handy! I will also add that I made it so thick and chunky that it could really be vegetables with a little bit of liquid rather than a soup., but you can adjust that with how much water you add! It was the perfect starting meal in a home where we lacked all basics in the kitchen.