I however have brought trouble with my fussy ban on animal food stuffs. There is, however a good simple solution, which so far has been universally approved of by all it has been served to – soup. Quick and easy to prepare, not too filling and almost impossible to mess up. You can even make it the day before, so save yourself that little bit of stress on the big day if you’re the kind of person who gets their knickers in a twist at just the thought of preparing what is really just a fancy Sunday dinner.

Mind you, I suppose we do seem to expect an insane amount of side dishes. Any other day it’s meat and two veg. But come 25th December nothing less than an enormous Turkey (must be big enough to feed at least 25 people) and 17 different vegetables (to include at least 4 different types of potato and things you wouldn’t even consider eating any other day of the year) will do. Crazy really. At least it means a good few days supply of interesting sandwiches and bubble and squeak for breakfast, which is never a bad thing.

So here’s a couple of lovely soup recipes for you, both in my opinion good enough to be served up on Christmas Day. The first just a fairly simple broccoli soup. I’d only ever had broccoli and stilton soup before and was worried this would be a little bland without the blue cheese, but it was anything but. Really creamy, despite not having any cream in and a good rich flavour. I’m definitely going to be making it again. But perhaps on the big day I might treat myself and put that blue cheese in, just to make it that bit more special.

The second recipe is an old favorite from the Covent Garden “Soup and Beyond” book. I made this a few times last year and couldn’t wait for the first frost this year meaning that the sweetest, most Chistmas-wintery of all root vegetables – the parsnip – would be at it’s best. What a treat this soup is! Parsnip, leek and lemon, Yum! It’s such a simple recipe, meaning you really taste each of the individual elements, but at the same time they combine to make something unlike any other soup you’ll taste. Sweet and indulgent it’s just one step on the savoury side away from being a desert. Now that’s an idea. You have carrot cake, why not parsnip and lemon cake? Hmm… We just made this soup today for Ann’s lesson and I’m sure she’d agree it really is a brilliant soup.

Simple Broccoli Soup

• 25g butter
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped, including stalk
• 2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into smallish cubes
• 1 1/2 pints of vegetable stock, or thereabouts
• A little plain flour
• (A bit of cream or blue cheese for more festive soup)

1. In a large pan melt the butter then add the onion and gently cook for around 15 minutes or so until the onions are soft and just beginning to brown.
2. Add the potatoes, stir round then cover and leave to sweat for 5 minutes.
3. Add just less than a tbsp of plain flour, stir round and leave to cook for 1 minute.
4. Add the broccoli and enough stock to just less than cover the veg, bring to the boil, then turn to simmer for about 15 minutes or until the veg are tender.
5. Puree the soup.
6. You could add some crumbled up blue cheese at this point and heat through until it melts, or just serve as it is, maybe with a fancy swirl of cream if you like.

Santa gets ready to leap into the yummy soup

Parsnip, Leek and Lemon Soup

• 25g butter
• 450g parsnips, peeling and sliced
• 3 leeks, washed, trimmed and sliced
• 1 3/4 pints of vegetable stock
• grated rind and juice of half a lemon
• 1 bay leaf
• 150ml single cream

1. Melt the butter in a large pan, then add the parsnips and leeks. Cover and cook gently for 5 minutes.
2. Add the stock, grated lemon rind and bayleaf.
3. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for around 15 minutes or until the veg are tender.
4. Cool a little, remove the bay leaf, add the lemon juice then puree.
5. Add the cream, then reheat gently if necessary.

If anyone has any other ideas for good Christmassy soups I’d love to hear about them!

More soup recipes

More Christmas recipes

The Gurnards Head Near Zennor, St Ives

Erm you can’t really see the cheese on here, I was distracted by the amazing elderflower pudding with gooseberrys that I accidently ordered when we got the cheese. Some how we also accidently ordered main meals aswell. I would recommend doing the same. While the choice for veggies wasn’t huge what there was was lovely, and if you’re not veggie the meals looked amazing. I’m pretty sure they will have sourced a lot of it locally too as there are a lot of great organic farms around here and the owner seemed well involved with the local community. We went on a wild food walk starting from here the day before and the lady who ran it supplied the pub with various wild food she’d foraged that day for their menu including rock and marsh sampire, wood sorrel, seaweed and mallow flowers. Going off on a tangent a bit her walk was great, if you’re ever in the area I would recommend going on one and also she does weekends which look fantastic where you go foraging then cook various wild food dishes. Here’s her  Fat Hen website. Oh the cheese yeah, one blue, one brie, one cheddar, we’ve found it to be the standard arrangement. Should start asking what they all were and taking notes as that’s about all I can remember. Oops. We’ll have to go back. Damn. Anyway I can safely give them about 8 out of ten. More biscuits might have been better, but then I’d always say that.

The Bird in Hand Hayle, Cornwall

I liked this one, lovely sunny day, bench outside, good generous chunks of cheese, bit of fruit. I’d normally go for crackers rather than bread but I guess this was a plougmans, which comes with bread not cheese erm… and the bread was very nice, so it was all ok.  Good pint of lovely 7% farmhouse cider to wash it down with and I left the pub with a sunny cidery smile on my face. 8.5 out of 10.

The feasting started a few weeks ago with the first of 3 Christmas meals we somehow volunteered to make for people. For the main course I’d made a Mushroom Wellington, which was so nice we decided to make the same thing for the other two Christmas meals.

(Image nicked from Yum Blog – hope you don’t mind! )

Mushroom Wellington

• 500g Puff Pastry
• 60ml sunflower oil
• 675g onions, chopped
• 4 garlic clove, crushed
• 450g chestnut mushrooms, left whole
• 2 tbsp chopped tarragon
• 4 tbsp soy sauce
• salt and fresh ground black pepper
• 320g broken cashew pieces
• 175g fine breadcrumbs, freshly made, white or wholemeal
• 320g ground almonds
• 1 egg, beaten

1. Roll out the puff pastry into two rectangles, each 30 x 23 cm, and set aside in the fridge to rest.
2. Meanwhile, make the filling. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-based frying pan. Fry the onion and 2 crushed garlic cloves over a low heat for 20 minutes, stirring now and then. Set the fried onion mixture aside.
3. Add the chestnut mushrooms, remaining garlic and half the tarragon to the frying pan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mushrooms have softened, about 10 minutes.
4. After 5 minutes of frying add in the soy sauce or tamari and Marsala or sherry is using. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Strain the mushrooms and set aside, reserving the mushroom juices.
5. In a food processor, blend the cashews and the reserved liquor to a smooth paste, adding a little water if necessary.
6. Add the fried onions and mushrooms into the food processor and blend until smooth.
7. In a large mixing bowl mix together the cashew paste, onion and mushroom mixture, breadcrumbs, ground almonds and remaining tarragon.
8. Preheat the oven to 220°C/ Gas 7 and remove the pastry from the fridge.
9. Place half the filling mixture onto the middle of one of the rectangles and shape into a sausage with your hands.
10. With a sharp knife, cut the pastry either side of the filling, into strips. Start in the left hand corner and work at a forty-five degree angle towards the filling. Then repeat on the right hand side.
11. Fold in the pastry ends first and then cross over the pastry strips from alternate sides.
12. When the mixture is well-wrapped within the pastry, glaze the pastry parcel with the beaten egg.
13. Repeat the process with the remaining pastry rectangle and filling.
14. Place the parcels on a floured baking sheet and bake for 35-45 minutes until golden brown.

This recipe makes absolutely loads, but it makes two separate wellingtons, so you can either invite lots of people round, drink lots of wine, dance on your chairs and eat both (like we did) or one can be frozen after the pastry wrapping stage, then you can just defrost, glaze and cook another time (very sensible). Yum. 9 out of 10. Although now I’ve eaten this meal 3 times in as many weeks I don’t think I’ll be eating it again until next Christmas. I probably won’t be hungry until then anyway.

Croma in Chorlton was our treat for the holiday. Had a lovely meal, I’d been once before and it was really good, this time it was maybe even better. Garlic bread with tomato to start, which was amazing, really simple, but perfectly cooked, will probably have a go at recreating it at some point. Then for mains we both had pizzas, Andy had Florentina, and I had the Asparagus and Goats Cheese. Very very tasty. Tis a lovely little restaurant- great atmosphere, nice decor etc just round the corner from our house, and pretty cheap. Perfect.

New Years Eve/ Karen’s 30th birthday was more food. In fact probably the most food I’ve ever seen/eaten in one day. Her Mum tends to go a bit crazy when entertaining and the combination of the two events sent her into overdrive. There was a huge table full of sandwiches, dips, salads, then pots of chilli, goulash, bombay potatoes, trifle, cheesecakes, carrot cake,chocolate cake, tiramisu, about 15 different types of cheese and more. I couldn’t move by the time we’d finished.

Should be back to normal now, I hope so anyway, its been very nice doing little apart from sleeping and eating, but if it carried on for much longer I’d soon be the size of a house. Eek.