Hearty Bean and Pasta Soup

63/70

This is the first soup I have attempted from the Quorn cookbook. It's pretty easy to make but the recipe is not on the Quorn website as yet so I will talk through it in more detail than normal.

The method is the usual one for any soup base, a chopped onion is sweated until soft and then 2 cloves of crushed garlic are added, next 3 tblsp of tomato puree along with a teaspoon each of dried thyme and marjoram and a tbslp of fresh chopped rosemary are added.

Next the wet stuff goes in, a tin of chopped tomatoes, a tin of canellini beans and 1.5litres of veg stock. Give it a good stir, season to taste and bring it to boiling point then turn down the heat and add the quorn pieces (175g) and simmer for 12 minutes (I chucked them in frozen). Lastly add the pasta shells (100g) and simmer for a further 12-14 minutes until the pasta is cooked.

What you end up with is a very hearty and thick stew like soup. The step I have missed out above is that is asks you to remove half of the soup before you add the quorn pieces and blend it until smooth and then add it back to the pan. This seemed like way too much hassle to me so I used a stick blender in the pan itself and just blitzed away until I judged that about half was liquidized.

This is what it looked like during the simmering:

And here it is served:

It was actually very tasty indeed and so thick and substantial that it felt more like a filling meal than a soup usually would. This was a nice way to use the pieces and I would probably use this as a base recipe for creating other soups with whatever I have in the fridge.

In terms of pro-points, if you base this on 4 substantial portions each one works out at 6 - this is broken down as follows: quorn (1), pasta (2), beans (2), oil (1). This is high for a soup but considering how filling this is it makes sense. I do think it is worth 6 points as it leaves you feeling very full!

We would give this a 7 out of 10, it's not the most exciting of recipes but it is easy to make and very tasty. Great on a cold winters day.