The following post on cooking goes out to all my friends out there who hardly ever cook. Yes, those very same ppl who enjoy watching Jamie Oliver creating some culinary miracorrrrs, but prefer to opt for the quick & dirty solution when it comes to organizing dinner.
Ok now, this is Germany, which means lots of people eating bread. Healthy wholemeal bread and not that kind of white bread the Brits (who can’t cook! yes, I said it!) presumably introduced to a country like Kenya. If there’s one good thing about Germany, then it’s the beer, a wide variety of whole-meal breads and different kinds of sausages.
As for the bread, there are ready mixtures available for as low as EUR 0,35 that just require 320ml of warm water, 2h hours of resting and about 45 minutes of baking in the oven @ ~ 200°C. A simple and quick solution for your own bread that doesn’t come with any preservatives and other fake ingredients. Since you’re the one who bakes it, you know what’s inside. Pefect.
vegetable soup with fresh parsley and home-baked whole-meal bread
And then there’s the vegetaboooool.
The vegetable they are selling here in Germany often comes from some articifial plantations in Spain or the Netherlands – and while it looks great, it often tastes like…nothing. The potatoes I bought, for instance, have come from Israel.
Israel! Now that reminds me of the apples from China we had the other day…
So I went shopping and came across a bunch of more or less cheap vegetables: potatoes, onions, carrots and celery. I added a bunch of parsley and headed home.
“No, I don’t want to eat any carbohydrates in the evening”, I heard this friend of mine complaining the other day. – “Yeah, sure…how about a light soup then?”.
Yes, how about a nice vegetable soup? My initial plan was to slightly cook the vegetable and eat it with some curd cheers, but then I just chopped everything, threw it onto the stove with some (very) salty water and let it boil until the vegetable had this particular “al dente” firmness: ready to bite.
I then pureed everything with my favourite kitchen gadgetimoja and added some nutmeg and fresh parsley and a bit of milk.
This recipe is just so simple and yet healthy as it contains no oils or other evil stuff that makes you think twice about the evening beer. Also, you may want to freeze any extra soup that you can’t finish in one day, which just makes it perfect for those many many singles out there who eat nothing at all in the evenings just because they are too tired to cook a single menu.
(this article is part of the “cooking with Juergen Kamau” series :-)
You make soup just the way I like it – thick. Here, we wouldn’t call it ‘soup’; instead a puree or even stew.
I’m not so against using oil as long as it’s not corn-based or the ambiguous “Vegetable Oil”, as these probably (i.e. very likely) are using GMO products. I use mostly olive oil from Europe, or from US that is explicitly marked as organic.