Description
Fresh, seasonal vegetables from the market, blended with just a pinch of salt. The true flavor of the vegetables is elevated and you get a creamy, nourishing soup, perfect for dipping a crust of French Baguette into. Serve with a wheel of cheese if you fancy.
Ingredients
2 large tomatos
4 carrots
2 large potatoes
2 zucchini
1 turnip
2 Cloves of Garlic
2 teaspoons fleur de sel
2 tbsps olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 sprig of thyme
6 cups of water
Instructions
Drizzle olive oil in the bottom of a soup pot.
Add the garlic to the hot oil. Let sear lightly.
Add in all the veggies at once with the bay leaf, thyme salt & pepper.
Pour enough water to cover. This is KEY! Too much water and the soup is no good. You want to barely cover all the vegetables. If needed you can add more water at the end. Let simmer on medium heat for about a half hour until all the vegetables are cooked through. The potatoes should break apart with your spoon.
Turn off the heat.
Remove the bay leaf and thyme branch (the leaves will have fallen into the soup - that is ok).
Mix with an immersion blender until smooth. Adjust the seasoning if needed.If you don’t have a hand mixer, I recommend the investment. They are much easier to use than blenders when making soup. I have used my kitchen aid immersion blender for over 8 years now for everything from guacamole to baby food to soups.
Serve with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil over the top. I like to make a heart shape for the ones I love.
Notes
Skip the baguette and the cheese and Potage aux Légumes becomes the French woman’s diet trick whenever she is looking to shed a few kilos. The soup is rich and satisfying enough to be a light meal but doesn’t use any other ingredients except water and vegetables with a few herbes. C’est tout!
Mireille Guiliano, author of the book, French Women Don’t Get Fat (I highly recommend!) has a great Basic Vegetable Soup Recipe as well that was passed to her by her mother.
I first started to cook Potage aux Légumes years ago as a knee-jerk reaction to throwing out too many vegetables at the end of the week. I hated to see beautiful, fresh vegetables go to waste at the bottom of my fridge whenever I didn’t have the time or energy to cook as much as I had expected. Since then, making a Potage aux Légumes almost weekly has become a ritual to me.