Gizmos and gadgets

I got a Morphy Richards soup maker for Christmas. Don't worry, it was on my Christmas list. I am already the proud owner of quite  a few gizmos and gadgets in my kitchen at home. They weren't whim buys either and I genuinely use these things a lot to help out with my healthy cooking and make it fit around my busy life. If any one of the following were to break, I'd be straight out to buy  replacement asap!

1. My Morphy Richards digital scales...another Christmas gift but also something I desperately needed as they are far mor accurate than my original scales. Please don't' judge me...!

 2.  My spiralizer- something I first read about in the Hemsley Hemsley Art of Eating well book. Mine is by Basily and cost me about a tenner from Amazon.  This nifty gadget allows you to turn vegetables into either spaghetti or noodles, depending on which end you stick your piece of veg into (I can't quite tell the difference). I often use courgettes as an alternative to spaghetti  in spag bol, or instead of noodles with a stir fry.

 3.  My slow cooker- I bought this in the Tesco January sale last year for £20 and I use it at least once a week. It means I can leave healthy food to cook (all in one pot) whilst I'm out of the house.

 4.  My new, beloved soup maker! I used to spend hours boiling and then blending my own soup but this does everything for you in about 20 minutes- just add your stock and chopped vegetables.

You've probably noticed on my photos that I have eaten lot of soup this week. I love the home made stuff which is healthy, comforting, filling and really cheap to make your  own. You can squeeze in as many vegetables as possible into a batch but minus the massive quantities of salt that goes into manufactured, tinned soup. Mainly this week, I've been adapting and tweaking my own soup recipes to produce the best result from my soup maker.

Two awesome soup recipes to get you started though would be sweet potato and leek, and also butternut squash and sweet potato. I've used sweet potatoes where original recipes have stated white potatoes, but sweet potatoes are delicious and keep you fuller for longer rather than the white ones do. I serve my soup with rye bread which is gluten free and also a low GI food that will keep you fuller for even longer than brown bread, which is still always a healthy alternative if you don't like the taste/ texture of the rye bread. No white bread please! It's nutritionally pointless.

Sweet potato and leek soup

Ingredients

2 onions, chopped.

2 cloves of garlic, crushed.

2-3 leeks, sliced.

450g sweet potato, sliced.

2 carrots, sliced.

2 sticks of celery, diced

1 and a half pints of vegetable stock (usually two stock cubes made up according to the packet instructions. Aldi stock cubes are the best).

To make this in a pan, fry your onions and garlic with a splash of olive oil for about 10 minutes, until the onion has softened. Add the rest of the veg and fry for a further 10 minutes. Next, add the stock, bring to the boil and simmer for about half an hour or until the vegetables are soft. Finally, blend the soup and pour into foil or plastic cartons for freezing. If the soup is too thick for you after you've blended it, you can always add a touch more stock or a splash of milk to get the consistency you prefer.

To make the same recipe in a soup maker, I've found that the magic weight you need is 900g of vegetables, along with your pint and a half of stock. You might find that when using a soup maker for this recipe, that you need to cook your soup in two batches. Simply throw in 900g of your chopped ingredients, add the pint and a half of stock, select the 'smooth' setting and let the soup maker do the rest of the work for you! If your second batch of vegetables is slightly short of the 900g, throw in some spare carrots, leeks or whatever else to make up the extra weight. Again, cook this second batch of vegetables using the 1 and a half pints of stock. This recipe will give you 5 very generous servings, so it's a week's worth of lunches for me! This soup freezes brilliantly too, so stock up your freezer!

Sweet potato and butternut squash soup

Ingredients

One butter nut squash (or more if you like)

Some sweet potatoes

1 and a half pints of vegetable stock (usually 2 stock cubes made up according to their instructions).

Chop up your butter nut squash and check its weight. Make up the remaining weight with sweet potatoes (you need around 450g to make a thicker soup) so that you have 900g of butternut squash and sweet potato in total. Pop it into the soup maker with the stock and select the 'smooth' setting again, job done! If cooking this in a pan, fry your veg first in a little olive oil, add your stock and simmer until the veg is soft. Blend and serve.

Hope you like these recipes, more to follow. Forget fasting diets, juice diets, get some real food into you!