Provençal Vegetable Soup

From The Slow Cook Book, Heather Whinney, Dorling Kindersley, 2011.

Everywhere you look lately in the cookery sections of bookstores you find cookery books for slow cooking. They are multiplying rapidly.

For this book of slow cooking recipes the author has sensibly included two versions for each dish: one for slow cooking and one for the traditional method. I chose the slow for this soup.

There was a little traditional cooking to be done before it all went into the cooker however. A chopped onion had to be cooked for a few minutes in a pan before three chopped garlic cloves and a couple of finely diced celery stalks were added. These were cooked for a further few minutes before two diced carrots, a couple of sprigs of rosemary and some dried tarragon (fresh was not available) were added and cooked for a few minutes.

It all went into the slow cooker now and a can of chopped tomatoes was added. The recipe called for them to be puréed but I prefer them lumpy. A litre of stock was added and the cooker turned to slow to cook for eight hours.

In the last half hour three potatoes, cut into bite sizes, were added. Though the recipe suggested this timing I found that the potatoes did not fully cook. I left out the green beans that the recipe suggested.

The soup was served with Parmesan cheese grated over it.

This was a flavoursome soup, very enjoyable. And it came up, like many soups, much better the following day.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔