Soup

Neither I nor Liam has ever been a great fan of soup as a main meal. We always thought it a bit bland, boring and unsatisfying. It has always conjured up images of watery offerings force fed to sick people on hospital wards.

We were introduced to the world of modern soups by our narrowboating friends who accompanied us on our trip to West Stockwith in November of last year. They supplied a fantastic brunch of sweet potato and dry cured bacon soup served with bread and butter followed by a lovely walnut cake and coffee. The soup was thick, flavoursome and extremely filling, a complete contrast to our previous encounters with this popular dish.

We have since been experimenting with different flavours of soup and are gradually finding flavours we like. Soup makes a great easy lunchtime meal; most of the supermarkets now offer fresh soup in cartons that take just a few minutes to heat up and are as good as homemade versions in a fraction of the time taken to make your own. One thing to watch though is the salt content. The salt content of supermarket own brand soups tends to be higher than the branded fresh soups.

We have tried the Tesco branded Curried Vegetable soup. This was bursting with flavours and had a lovely thick texture making for an extremely filling lunchtime meal when served with multiseed batch bread and butter. Last weekend it was the turn of Covent Garden’s “Jammin Jamaica” soup, a blend of sweet potato and jerk seasoning. It sounded nice on the shelf and it certainly lived up to our expectations offering a warm and satisfying brunch on a chilly, windy Saturday lunchtime. The perfect mix of flavour, texture and spice in a quick and easy to make package.

We have been genuinely surprised by the range of modern soups on offer. They make for a super simple meal, quick to prepare, great to eat and perfect for rustling up at short notice on cold wintery days. We will certainly be adding cartons of soup to our range of food we eat whilst out and about cruising and look forward to trying many more wide and varied flavours on offer.