Category: Recipes

You will find quick and easy, made-from-scratch recipes made from seasonal ingredients. There are some healthy recipes and quite a few treat recipes too. I cook the food that I love so this is not a comprehensive guide to cookery.

My focus is on Baking (particularly Cakes, Muffins and Biscuits and Cookies), Desserts (particularly Ice Cream, Meringue, Roulades and Sweet Tarts), Soups, Salads, Simple Suppers (particularly Pasta and Savoury Tarts) plus a few Snacks, Sauces and Preserves. I also have a few Drink recipes with a particular focus on home-made Gin. These are the kind of goodies that you might get a great local independent cafe or coffee shop – perhaps minus the gin!

All of these dishes are aimed at those who either have basic cooking skills or, like me, just don’t have the time to spend hours in the kitchen but want to produce something tasty and delicious.

Celeriac and Apple Soup

Celeriac and Apple Soup – A tasty, warming vegan soup for a cold winter’s day

This Celeriac and Apple Soup is an easy vegan soup recipe that makes a fantastic lunch or supper on a cold winter’s day. It is easy to make and features the classic celery and apple flavour combination. Think Waldorf Salad but warm and comforting!

Celeriac is not the most popular of root vegetables. Its gnarly exterior, which seems perfectly designed to trap soil puts a lot of people off as it seems hard to prepare. Actually, you just need a confident attitude and a good vegetable peeler. Remove the outer skin, together with all the lumpy, gnarly bits, and you are left with a creamy globe of deliciousness that can be used in a whole range of ways in addition to Celeriac and Apple Soup. It is traditionally used in the classic French salad, Celeriac Remoulade, where it is thinly sliced and mixed in a mustard-flavoured dressing. It can also be boiled and mashed or roasted as a side-dish.

Here at tastebotanical we have lots of other recipes for tasty, warming winter soups. What about Beetroot and Coconut Soup? Or Butternut Squash with Peanut Butter? There is tasty Fennel Soup, with its subtle aniseed flavour, and classic Leek and Potato Soup. Vegetable soups are very easy to make and are a fantastic way to increase the amount of fresh vegetables that you eat each day. They are packed with fibre, nutrients and, of course, taste!

Celeriac and Apple Soup

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Author: Tastebotanical
Prep Time: 15
Cook Time: 35
Total Time: 50 minutes
Yield: Serves 6
Category: Soup
Cuisine: British

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Description

This easy, warming vegan winter soup combines the classic flavours of celeriac and apple.

Ingredients

1 celeriac
1 onion
2 medium-sized potatoes
1 tablespoon of oil
1 clove of garlic (crushed)
500 ml vegetable stock
1 eating apple
Optional garnish: 1 eating apple

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Instructions

Peel the celeriac using a vegetable peeler to remove the rough outer skin. Cut it into 1 cm chunks.
Peel and slice the onion.
Heat the oil in your saucepan. Add the celeriac chunks and sliced onions, season them with salt and pepper, and very gently fry them for around 20 minutes until they are soft and sweet. It is really important to add seasoning at this point and to cook gently to bring out the flavour of the vegetables – it will make a huge difference to the taste of your soup.
Next, peel and chop the potatoes and add them to the saucepan with the celeriac and onions. Cook gently for a few minutes.
Then, peel the apple, remove the core and chop into rough chunks. Add the chunks to the vegetables together with the crushed clove of garlic.
Add the stock to your saucepan and simmer the vegetables gently for about 15 minutes.
Turn off the heat and allow the soup to cool slightly before blending.
If you wish, you can make a dried apple garnish for the soup. Slice an eating apple thinly vertically (so the slices are “apple shaped”). Place on a non-stick baking tray and bake in a preheated oven at 200 C/Gas Mark 6 for 30 minutes. Remove slices and use to decorate the soup. The apple-shaped slices look good on top of the soup and will also have a concentrated apple flavour which will enhance the taste.

Notes

This soup is vegan.

Loved this recipe? You may also like

Vegan Butternut Squash Soup

Vegan Beetroot Soup with Coconut

Fennel Soup

Tomato Soup

Asparagus and Pea Soup with Chervil

Leek and Potato Soup

Asian Cucumber Salad

Asian Cucumber Salad – a five-minute recipe

This easy Asian-style Cucumber Salad is fresh and zesty. The cucumber is dressed with sweetened lime juice, soy sauce and Thai fish sauce flavoured with garlic and chilli.

This salad is exactly what I want to eat in January. Following the culinary excesses of Christmas and the New Year, I am looking for fresh and healthy, flavour-packed dishes which are quick and easy to prepare. This salad takes only five minutes to make and has a fantastic chilli-spiced, sweet and salty dressing to enhance the crunchy cucumber.

Although this Cucumber Salad is Asian-inspired, I quite often use it as an accompaniment to simple grilled fish, such as salmon steaks, but it would also go well with grilled chicken or meat. It is also great as a snack as it has that hit of taste and chilli heat which means that you feel satisfied without taking in lots of calories.

What you need to know about this recipe

This is one of the easiest salads that you can make. It really is just a question of peeling and chopping the cucumber, mixing the dressing and combining.
Make sure that you use a ceramic or glass bowl for this salad. If you use a metal bowl, it may react with the ingredients.
This salad is not vegetarian as the recipe includes Thai fish sauce. If you are a vegetarian, you can substitute the fish sauce with an additional tablespoon of soy sauce. In fact, that will make the recipe vegan.
If you don’t like chilli, you can leave it out.
You can eat this salad immediately. However, I think the flavour improves if it is kept for an hour or two. Don’t leave it longer than that as the salty dressing will draw the liquid out of the cucumber. That will mean that there is a lot of liquid in the salad and the flavours will be diluted.

Other easy salads

I love salads and eat them all the year around – not just in summer. If you like this recipe, you might also like some of my other salad recipes.

Aubergine Salad with Soy and Honey – A great, easy oriental-style salad with a fantastic hit of umami flavour which can be made in 15 minutes.
Broad Bean Salad – An easy salad combining the freshness of the beans with salty feta cheese.
Raw Beetroot and Carrot Salad – This is another quick and easy raw salad which has a zesty citrus dressing.
Red Cabbage Coleslaw – An easy raw salad which includes red cabbage, carrot and apple.
Roasted Pepper Salad – This simple vegan salad can be served either warm or at room temperature.
Spiced Carrot Salad with Honey and Lemon – This salad takes a bit longer to make as the carrots are roasted. It is worth it as the lemon, honey and North African spices work magic on this versatile vegetable.
Roasted Beetroot Salad with Yogurt and Tahini – Again, this salad takes a bit longer to make but it is worth it for the intense flavour of the roasted beetroot.

Asian Cucumber Salad recipe