Lucy Tweed Shares Recipes for Classic Soups
Cookbook author and food stylist Lucy Tweed offers a selection of comforting soup recipes perfect for the colder months. Her recipes for minestrone, avgolemono, and Greek white bean soups highlight simple ingredients and traditional techniques to create hearty, flavorful dishes.
Minestrone Soup with Homemade Pesto
This minestrone recipe features vegetables, beans, and pasta cut to similar sizes, ensuring a satisfying texture in every spoonful. The soup is enriched with a garlicky homemade basil pesto, adding depth to the broth.
- Ingredients include: olive oil, brown onion, celery, carrots, garlic, zucchini, red capsicum, potato, vegetable or chicken stock, diced tomatoes, cannellini and borlotti beans, small pasta, frozen peas, and green beans.
- Pesto: basil leaves, toasted pine nuts, grated parmesan, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice.
To prepare, the vegetables are sautéed before adding stock and tomatoes to simmer until tender. Beans, pasta, and other vegetables are then added and cooked until the pasta is al dente. The soup is finished with pesto stirred through and served with garlic-rubbed toasted sourdough. It can be stored in the fridge for up to three days or frozen for three months.
Greek White Bean Soup (Fasolatha)
This traditional Greek fasolatha is a simple white bean soup that emphasizes the natural flavors of the ingredients without extra spices or herbs. For a creamier texture, some beans can be mashed during cooking.
- Ingredients include: dried or canned white beans, olive oil, brown onion, carrots, celery, garlic, diced tomatoes, bay leaf, sweet paprika, flat-leaf parsley, and vegetable stock or water.
The beans are soaked if dried, then cooked with vegetables, tomatoes, and seasonings until tender and slightly thickened. The soup is served hot with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and pairs well with olives, pickled vegetables, and sourdough bread.
Avgolemono: Greek Chicken and Rice Soup
Lucy Tweed’s avgolemono is a Greek chicken soup known for its comforting qualities and slightly milky texture from the addition of egg and lemon juice. It includes swollen rice and fresh herbs, making it a nourishing option when feeling under the weather.
- Ingredients include: olive oil, whole chicken, brown onion, carrots, celery, chicken stock powder, short-grain white rice or pasta, eggs, lemon juice, dill, and flat-leaf parsley.
The chicken is browned and then poached with vegetables to create a flavorful broth. After shredding the chicken, the broth is simmered with stock powder and strained. Rice is cooked in the broth, and a mixture of whisked eggs and lemon juice is tempered with hot broth before being stirred back into the soup off the heat to prevent curdling. The shredded chicken is added back in, and the soup is garnished with fresh herbs.
These recipes are adapted from Lucy Tweed’s cookbook Tender, available through Murdoch Books.