Living the ZOE way with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Hugh's Ultimate Autumn Soup Recipe

[Applause] [Music] I'm Hugh and I'm delighted to have teamed up with Zoe to bring you a bunch of fantastic seasonal plant- packed recipes to help you nurture your gut microbiome being healthy and feeling good is something we can all be working towards and it's increasing ly clear that our gut health is absolutely Central to this for me eating seasonally and eating healthily are completely aligned what I really like about the Zoey approach is that it's not a kind of restrictive list of dos and don'ts and things you're not supposed to eat it's all about adding in the good stuff just making sure that whatever you're eating there's loads of great plants in there that's what my recipes are based around seasonal plants gathered at their best taken into into the kitchen and made delicious to help you nurture your gut microbiome so I hope you'll join me here at River Cottage with Zoe throughout the seasons for a bunch of plant- packed recipes that are going to make you feel great I love picking veg at this time of year and you know just coming into real Autumn now and although a lot of the summer veg are pretty much over you know we've pulled up the last of the corett and the the beans are gone there's so much exciting stuff coming on uh we got all these beautiful leafy greens the celery's finally ready the kale is just going Bonanza there's beautiful squashes to be had it really is a great harvest time so much bounty to be had in the garden right now and I'm sitting between two different varieties of kale two of my favorites in fact that is so sweet really one of my favorite types of kale but then so is this one this is cavalo Nero which means black kale in Italian it's often just called Tuscan kale you can see it's got a different shaped Leaf different color these leaves are slightly thicker they take a little bit more cooking the stem is quite coarse so I tend to just strip that out that will go on the compost heap or I can feed it to my chickens and then you're left with this beautiful deep Green Leaf a brilliant soup vegetable uh just shredded and thrown into a big vegetable soup that's I think the direction we're heading in today in terms of my plant count two different varieties of kale equals two different plants so that's a plus two these leaks are looking [Applause] fantastic oh I got it up without the roots I'm a big fan of double or triple aliums in my cooking I often put Garlic leaks and onions or garlic leaks and shots into a dish they're such wonderfully flavored vegetables and they just bring that incredible aromatic quality perfect for a soup which is definitely where we're heading these are all vegetables you can find locally you know in your green Grocer's farmers market or even at the supermarket they're all in season right now and you won't have any trouble finding them most of them that is still small not so easy to find in the shops it's called chog and it's actually white with a pink stripe through it so it doesn't turn everything purple and the great thing about picking these fairly baby beetroot is that the leaves are still great these can be added to the soup just like the chard leaves they'll be delicious among the Roses or even almost crowding out the Roses is fantastic crop of nosters the flowers are a fantastic bright splash of orange but they're also really delicious and if you've never eaten one before you're in for a little bit of a shock because after the first couple of bites you get heat I mean they're really peppery little bit sweet as well absolutely delicious and Incredibly easy to grow you can grow them in a container or a pot on a patio and they'll just go mad especially if you give them something to climb up like this I'm also interested in the leaves they're not quite as pungent as the flowers They're milder you can tumble them through a salad which is really really nice they're not going in my soup or a salad I'm going to put them into the thing that goes into the soup all will be revealed I can't pass up on this incredibly abundant time that's such a pungent herb it's almost too much when it's when it's like this a handful in your hand but just a little in so many dishes goes a long way it's brilliant in soups and stews great with meat great with fish and actually really good in a salad dressing too but you don't need a lot of it so I better not get too carried away I was talking about doubling or even tripling your aliums and I've just walk past these chives and they're irresistible so today I'm quadrupling my aliens it's these tender little spikes they really pack an awful lot of Ali and punch I love chiv that'll be [Music] plenty I've been making versions of this soup for oh probably a couple of decades and for a while now I've been calling it half the garden soup that's because I like to put at least half the vegetable garden in and maybe a few things from the store cupboard as well I think by the time this dish is finished we will have racked up a lot of plants 20 plus easy maybe pushing 25 but let's get started because that oil is hot these finely chopped shots are ready for a Sizzle let's go this soup begins in a pretty classic way like so many other soups these are the little sticks of celery that I gathered from the garden I'm just going to chop them while the aliums are sizzling this is such a classic way to start a soup sizzling onions celery and carrots but the Italians have a word for it they call it Sofrito sometimes Tomatoes go in as well I've got them standing by but in my case they're going in in the end you can Sizzle f fairly hard you do have to keep an eye on the veg cuz essentially you want it just uh golden and tender not browned or burnt carrots in so my Sofrito is underway time for alium number three garlic chopped and why not alium number four leaks so we've got onions shalots garlic and leaks all in the same soup all related but in each case those oniony garlicky flavors are subtly different and what they do for your health is subtly different too they're all going to have different phytonutrients different amounts of fiber and what we know about this multiplant approach to eating is that it isn't just the individual qualities of the plants it's the interaction between them that counts for a lot whack up the heat a bit now all the tougher more fibrous vegetables go in first the things that going to take a little bit more cooking but it's interesting to think about not just a sheer number of plants but the different groups of plants we've got here I've mentioned the four aliums We've Got Roots in the form of carrots and beetroot we've got leafy greens the chard both the leaf and the stem the two types of kale we've got beans I've got two tins of beans that are going to go in canoli beans and borot beans these are store covered Staples but they're are great great addition to a big soup like this and I've got some frozen peas but these are not processed either they're literally Frozen within an hour or two of being picked so these are good quality ingredients just because they're store cupboard Staples or they come from the freezer it doesn't mean they're not whole natural unprocessed ingredients very happy putting them in my soup remember the chard that we picked in the garden here are the stems they need to go in fairly early cuz they're quite tough and fibrous but delicious and here are the leaves which I'll add right at the end next up charred stems probably a good time to get the beetroot in too and remember this is the stripy beetroot it's a beautiful pink but it's not going to turn the whole soup pink or purple a late breaking ingredient one of the first of our Autumn squashes look at the color of that I've just trimmed the skin off the edge cut myself a nice wedge and I'm going to chop it up and stick it in the pot look at those colors isn't that just [Music] fantastic in go the runner beans and now to make sure that these harder more fibrous ingredients get tender it's time to add a little liquid to our soup you could get away with plain water because there's so much flavor in the veg but I'm going to add just a tiny bit of our River Cottage organic vegetable stock this has got garlic and herbs in it's also got fennel seeds bazle and bay leaf that's three extra ingredients we could add to our count but that might be considered a little bit cheeky so just a smidge of the organic stock paste into the hot water and that's just going to give it a little bit of umami backbone along with all the other glorious veg flavors in goes the stock just enough to almost cover the V veg brings up those colors beautifully now we want to bring it up to a gentle simmer to get those veg tender and then we're really starting to think about finishing the soup we've definitely got 10 veg in there so far by my count and we've got at least another six to go and they won't take long at all so they just go in for the last few minutes the two kales which I'll shred in a minute the peas the two beans and tomatoes they've been skinned deeded and chopped they're just going to bring a beautiful sweetness and richness to finish this dish I've been putting plants more and more at the center of my cooking for getting on for a decade now but it's it's an everlasting Journey which I'm really enjoying and one thing that's changed a lot in the last few years is I'm eating a lot more pulses tins of beans like this feature in my cooking at least a couple of times a week or otherwise lentils and other great source of fiber and I think this is one thing where most of us have got a lot of room to to get busy with the beans when I'm shredding kale I just scrunch it into a big ball now we know that kale and all the other brassicas are really good for us uh and of course part of that is the fiber they've also got some really amazing uh nutrients one of which is called sulforaphane cabbage is famous for if it's if it gets overboiled it smells a bit sort of sulfury FY dare I say um actually that sulfurane is a really good key ingredient that gives our biome a real boost so for me this kale is just going to have the last 5 minutes of the soup's cooking time and not not it won't be boiling away for an hour so you won't be smelling or tasting that sulfur of Fame but it will be there doing your biome a whole load of good the kale goes in the tusken kale goes in that's the one that's slightly tougher and more fibrous will'll take a tiny bit longer I think we could do with a a splash more stock it's only taken 20 minutes for this whole soup to come together and we're nearly done last two leafy greens going in the Russian kale and the charred leaves remember the stalks are already in there and I think we can pop these peas in we are going to need the rest of that stock just to cover all the veg Twist of pepper I'll taste it for salt right at the end but our stock has a little bit of salt in it tomatoes dced and chopped lovely bit of sweetness going to go in there this is going to be full to the brim but it's not quite going to Bubble over look at that look at those colors into the soup to jog my mou memory about the plants we've got in there four aliums carrots celery chard two KES beetroot squash peas runner beans let's not forget the extra virgin rapes seed oil that I sizzled the shalots in that is a natural cold pressed oil it's not refined and it's not processed and it counts as a plant the pepper counts as a plant too herbs and spices definitely count so that brings us to 15 Botti beans 16 calini beans 17 we've got 17 plants in that soup and everyone a winner good time to just go down to the bottom and bring everything up to the top and make sure everything's really well mixed together it's when I make big plant packed soups like this for myself and my family that I feel really confident that I'm doing my body a load of good it's boosting my gut biome that in turn is boosting my immune system and with the weather getting colder and the day is getting shorter that's a really good way to protect yourself from the winter viruses and colds to come there's so many plants in this soup but guess what we're not going to stop there so if you're wondering what this glorious Greenery in front of me and these beautiful seeds nuts and kernels are for they're going to be part of my pest Omega loads of natural Omega oils in my hemp kernels walnuts and pumpkin seeds yeah three different nuts and seeds going into my pesto no Basel because that's pretty much finished in our garden but I have got beautiful flat leaf parley and those last things I picked in the garden the Nerium leaves the fresh thyme and the chives they're all going in my pesto but I better get on with it chop chop chop cuz the soup is very nearly ready if you're keeping your Zoe score as I know many of you are you'll probably already have picked up the tip that adding nuts and seeds to your cooking is a brilliant way to boost your score I'm going to start by chopping together a handful of walnuts and a handful of pumpkin seeds what I'm looking for in the end is a mixture of seeds that are quite well chopped and others that are almost whole but I'm just going to put a bit of garlic on the side there and a Sprinkle of coarse salt and just Mash that together with the side of my knife and then chop it through the walnuts and the pumpkin seeds a little bit of raw garlic goes a long way in a pesto probably don't need all this parsley but once again scrunching it all together and then I'm going to get my Nerium leaves there that's good for me parsley and aums go in for the last couple of minutes of the soup I'm going to Pro a bit of thyme right down into the middle just stripping the soft thyme leaves of the finally these jives let's not forget these hemp kernels they don't need chopping at all they're already a lovely fine texture we can sprinkle them in quite generously because we're doubling up on almost everything today I'm going to make this a two oil pesto so I'm doing extra virgin olive oil and cold pressed rap seed oil mustn't forget the pepper go back with the oil the soup is pretty much done just going to turn it off and it can keep its heat the pesto is almost done one last thing just a little squeeze of lemon I don't want the Pips in but just a few drops of lemon in a pesto just takes that r nness the edge of the oiliness of it freshens it up beautifully so we've got a 17 plant soup and a 12 plant pesto that's 29 plants it leaves us one short of the magic 30 plants a week which is what Tim and others say is a really good thing to aim for it's just a sort of peak of all the benefits from eating a lot of plants do we count the asterium flour as a separate plant I think I just did right let's go and have a 30 plant Feast you'll find the recipes for my half thee Garden soup and pest Oma on the Zoe website and app and that's not all there's a little bonus for you this is my seed alond cake a multiplant treat in itself even more so when you serve it with these gorgeous Autumn berries golden raspberries Autumn Bliss raspberries and alpine strawberries look I'm not the only one who's been grafting here this afternoon everybody has been so brilliant come on round who's for a bowl of soup or is anyone going to go straight for cake someone's straight for cake there Georgia bowl of soup thank you blob of pesto definitely I'll tell you what why don't you dish up the soup and I'll slice some cake and we'll get things moving Holly straight for the cake is it yes please there you go five plants wow this is amazing yeah four seeds uh three seeds ground almonds and of course some whole wheat flour which counts plenty of berries yeah would you like a blob of yogurt abolutely come on now there we go uh I think there are some Forks over there for me being healthy isn't about fad diets or Pumping Iron down at the gym it's about enjoying life eating good food being out in nature but it is definitely about looking after your gut health [Music] too

Channel: ZOE

Views: 244,053

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Id: rRxJDuvUk0g

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023