“You need to get something hot inside you – that‘ll warm you up”, my grandmother used to say on cold winter days.   And it’s a fact, hot food does provide central heating for the human body.

And as we’ve needed a little help in cranking up our internal thermometers this week I’ve been making soup.  Well, I call it soup.  It could be classed as a casserole I suppose, or maybe a one-pot stew.  The name doesn’t really matter; it’s been delicious and hearty and warm, served with toasted ciabatta on the side.  We’ve had it for lunch and for dinner in the evening.  It was so good I almost had it for breakfast too.

This soup started out as a massive tray of roasted mixed vegetables in the oven.  I decided to roast veg to go with some salmon I was oven baking but got a little carried away with the quantity I prepared.  This may have been because I was still in Christmas holiday mode when the whole family was here to cook for, or it’s more likely that I was just plain hungry when slicing and chopping and my eyes were bigger than my belly.  So Sunday saw a ridiculously large bowl of leftover roasted vegetables in the fridge.

The whole lot went into the biggest pan we own with a couple of vegetable stock pots and enough water to cover it all.  When I’d got this bubbling nicely, I thought that a few cooked sweet potatoes would serve very well as a thickener.  Once cooked, the sweet potatoes were blended up and added to the pan and mixed in; it was seasoned with salt and pepper, and I added a generous helping each of sweet paprika, cumin and mace, and tasted it.  Yummy.

Day 1 we ate it with bread, day 2 saw me add more stock.  On Day 3 a cupful of risotto rice was chucked in.  And a few peas.

I’m hoping that the weather soon starts to warm up a bit, because as usual I’ve overdone what started out as a good idea.  Without doubt, having something hot inside you is an excellent way to keep warm in the winter, but as variety is the spice of life, I must remember to use a smaller pan in future.