Nigella Eats Everything

January is a month of slurping soups.

There are thick parsnip and apple soups, practically white with cream and a brightness of flavour that makes you suddenly sit up and eat your lunch more alertly than usual. A butternut squash soup drizzled with turmeric yoghurt, in an attempt to coerce flavour into this despondent vegetable (the most vibrant of the squashes I’ll add), seafood chowder thick with chunky potato, smoked haddock, salmon and prawns, and a turkey soup speckled with whole grain mustard and full of leftover Christmas bird from the freezer – a bit more fancy and socially acceptable than Christmas dinner in a blender.

The action of gliding my spoon through a bowl of hot liquid and blowing on that laden spoon is all inherent to January for me. It’s the month to eat a hot lunch so you can go back to work comfortable and ready to concentrate, instead of gently shivering at your desk. A liquid lunch, in the wholesome sense.

Today is was a vegan vegetable and pearl barley soup, different to the rest because this one is a broth of chunky vegetables and grains, chewy and satisfying. I only came across the recipe because we had all in the ingredients – parsnips, carrots, leeks and celery – whiling away in the vegetable drawer, gradually softening with each passing day. Although we love soup in this house, I think we have a compulsion to use the stick blender as much as possible – when in doubt, use the stick blender – so soups with a bite are an anomaly.

However, I think we might be converted.

As the base is broth, this vegetable soup requires your own stock, which sounds like a much bigger and daunting task than it is. All you need to do is roughly chop carrots, celery, leeks, mushrooms and onion, add peppercorns and bay leaves, cover with water and set it to simmer merrily for thirty minutes. The finished liquor will be a golden brown and surprisingly sweet in comparison to the salt-laden cubes we buy from supermarkets.

Dice – or roughly dice if you’re not a perfectionist – all your vegetables, sweat until sweet, then add the garlic, thyme, bay leaves, homemade stock and pearl barley. As I stirred, the soup noticeably thickened as the pearl barley cooked and plumped. It gave this delicate, earthy flavoured soup some robust girth to fill our stomachs.

I served the soup with some cheese toasts because – I mean, do I need a reason other than cheese? This soup is too healthy without them. That said, the Cheddar’s saltiness perfectly complemented the sweet broth, and I do have a strange love of scooping up softened, squidgy toast, heavy with soup.

Meanwhile, today, for the first time in my recent memory, the sun beams through the windows, glittering off the frosty lawn which I simply had to crunch my way across in my dressing gown and slippers to take terrible pictures which don’t do justice to the icy sparkly tranquillity. It’s a soup day.