Please note - I am not a recipe writer! (Tom is, I, Sophie am not.) This lunch was just too damn pretty not to shoot and share. My style of cooking is - lazy, tasty, pretty. This is a mish mash of recipes, old and googled, to use up some lovely beetroot I had in our Abel and Cole organic veg box last week.
Here's what I used-
For the soup:
8 small/medium beetroots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
Thumb of fresh ginger
Coconut oil, then later butter because i can't resist it
Sea salt and black pepper
About 2 teaspoons of medium madras curry powder
200ml double cream (or more to taste, my soup was HOT!)
About 2 cups of vegetable stock (and a bit more after whizzing to get the consistency/thickness of soup i wanted)
For the chickpeas:
1 tablespoon of coconut oil
1 tin of chickpeas, rinsed and dried
Good pinch of sea salt
Glug of maple syrup, probably 2 tablespoons
2 tablespoons medium madras curry powder (and a bit more added later as it looked a bit runny)
What I did-
First of all put the oven on to 200 degrees C for the chickpeas. Mix them up with all of the ingredients then spread on a baking tray and roast for around 25 minutes (keep checking, the recipe i adapted from said 20 minutes but mine took around 32).
At the same time roughly chop (I have no time for finely slicing anything, especially as this will all be wizzed up later anyway) the onion, garlic and ginger, heat the oil in a pan and soften all of these for a few minutes. Add the curry powder, salt and pepper, stir through. Add the peeled and chopped beets, covering them with the spicy mix.
Cover with veg stock and bring to the boil. Simmer for around 15 minutes until the beetroot is cooked through.
Let this cool for a few minutes (I didn't and it meant i had to wrestle with the Nutribullet lid to get it out again). Shove it all in a Nutribullet (my easiest blending appliance to clean), add salt, pepper, more stock as required.
Stir in some double cream, less to keep the vibrant pink colour or more to take the kick out of the spices.
Get the chickpeas out of the oven, pop on top with some more cream and fresh coriander if you have any (I didn't but it would make the colours pop even more to have some fresh green in there).
Hope you find this as tasty as I did! For 10 minutes prep and 30 minutes to cook I think this is a nice, fresh, warming Autumn lunch.
Written, styled, photographed and eaten by Sophie Purser.
Shot on the Kaiyo background board with a Canon at F3.5.
Any leftover chickpeas make an amaaaaaazing snack.