Quick minestrone barley soup

Quick minestrone barley soup

Today I felt like having soup for lunch, so I found this recipe on the ThermOMG blog recipe site. A quick minestrone barley soup. It looked lovely and thick and chunky and had all the vegetables that I usually have in the crisper, so its great to make when you can't be bothered doing anything fiddly. I didn't have any borlotti beans, so I just used butter beans instead. Cannelini beans would work well too.

The vegetables in the dish just need to be cut up into thermomix-manageable chunks, since the blades do most of the work. Chopping vegetables was what I found most tedious pre-thermie, so I love this bit! The fact that the vegetables are chopped in 2 seconds, what could be easier than that?!

The bacon was optional - I happened to have some in the fridge for the meatloaf I am making later in the week. I used full sized rashers, so I only used 2 of them. This was sautéed with the garlic before adding in the rest of the ingredients. I generally find it is better to leave the MC off the lid when sautéing so the contents don't end up sweating too much in the steam that is created.

Once the rest of the ingredients were added, it just gets left alone to cook away. I took the MC off about halfway through and put the simmering basket on top of the lid to prevent splatters. At the end of the cooking time specified in the recipe, the soup had thickened up nicely.

I served the soup with the rustic bread I had made today. It was still warm, lovely and fresh with some of the spreadable butter I made last week. Yum!

One thing I might do differently next time is use a little less stock. I used 2 tablespoons of stock paste, so the soup ended up being quite salty, but not so salty it wasn't edible. I might just use one tablespoon of stock paste next time.

Happy thermomixing!