Carrot and coriander is one of the simplest soups you can make, and it uses ingredients you can easily grow at home. Even if you don’t have your own, it’s incredibly cheap to buy the necessary vegetables and herbs.

A kilo of value carrots costs around 50p (it’s 99p for a 2kg bag in Sainsbury’s), a large onion will set you back 15p, plus the same for half a head of garlic. You can buy fresh coriander for around £1.50 a bunch, but dried, chopped leaf works just as well in soup, and costs roughly the same for a whole jar, of which you’ll use about a fifth.

The following recipe will make four very large portions of soup when served with crusty bread, costing around 25p a head. Buying the same from Baxters costs around 75p – 80p, depending on store. Sainsburys’ own costs about half that.

This recipe is suitable for freezing, and you can re-heat it from frozen, so long as you keep the temperature low to save from burning it on the bottom of your pan.

Ingredients
1kg carrots
A large onion (preferably red)
Half a large head of garlic
1 litre of vegetable stock
A little oil
1g – 2g dried, chopped coriander leaf

Method
Pour the oil in your largest, heaviest stock pot and heat it. Finely chop the onion and garlic (avoid crushing the garlic) and fry them gently in the oil. Don’t let them catch on the pot, or start to brown – they should just go a little see-through and start to soften.

Peel, top and tail, and slice the carrots and put them into the pan with the onions and garlic and a litre of stock. If you can make this using Marigold Vegetable Bouillon, that’s best, but if you do then use half the recommended quantity of power (two teaspoons to a litre of boiling water rather than four) or else your soup will be too salty.

Bring it all to the boil and then reduce the heat until it reaches a simmer. Put on the lid and keep it simmering for 15 minutes, or until the carrots are tender.

You now need to blend your soup. This is easiest done in a processor, but if you don’t have one you can use a hand blender with a blending cup. Spoon in the carrot, onion, garlic and stock mixture, add the dried coriander leaves and blend until it is smooth, ensuring that you always blend fairly equal amounts of vegetable and stock to save your blender some hard work.

Return it all to the pan and leave to cool. This soup is best used 24 hours after making, by which point the flavours will have had time to mature and infuse. If you plan on bagging and freezing it, therefore, you should leave it somewhere cool for 24 hours (the fridge, if you have room) before putting it into your bags.

When reheating it, stir in a little milk while still in the pan to give it a creamy texture.

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