Mushroom and Coconut Soup

Tuesday 7.28pm

Back online again, and back with one of my favourite ingredients - mushrooms. As I have mentioned before Nicola does not eat the stalks of mushrooms, so I am occasionaly left with small boxes of them in the fridge. Using up left overs is a big driving force behind my cookery style, a leftover from my upbringing I think (think of the starving Africans!). So faced with mushroom stalks, what do I do, well make mushroom soup of course. And as my favourite addition at the moment is coconut milk, some of that will go in as well.

- Start with a small onion and a clove of garlic gently cooked in a little olive oil until transparent
- Add in the mushroom stalks, roughly chopped (I had about three handfulls), and leave to cook until all the liquid has evaporated.
- Stir in a dessertspoonfull of flour (plain or wholemeal) and allow to cook for a couple of minutes, stirring so it does not burn
- Add in a pint of vegetable stock and simmer until the mushrooms are cooked, say fifteen or twenty minutes
- Liquidise until smooth, return to the washed out saucepan and add about a third of a tin of coconut milk (100ml), to taste really
- Reheat and check for salt and pepper, I added a little black pepper.

I served mine with some thin strips of ginger root that I quickly fried until golden in a little oil. Carefull though because they can quickly burn.

To be honest the soup was ok, marscapone cheese would have been nicer I think than the coconut. The ginger was certainly a good idea, contrasting nicely with the creamyness of the soup.