Crunchy Cook Recipe: Sunshine Soup (Sweet Potato, Carrot, Coconut & Ginger)

This is a family favourite for its sweetness, its shining nutritional excellence and its glorious colour. A really simple soup of carrot, sweet potato, coconut, ginger and turmeric, it is sunshine in a bowl!

We’ve made it as easy as possible for you to make this dish by packing the ingredients into a Crunchy Cook meal kit bag: we weigh everything out for you, include a recipe sheet and have filmed a step-by-step video showing you how to make it: How to Make Our Sunshine Soup Video. Crunchy Cook bags save you time, cost almost the same as buying the ingredients separately in-store (we add 50p to cover packaging and packing), and cut food waste because you buy exactly what you need.

Find out more about the bags, including how to order them, here.

Tips:

• If you don’t have a blender to whizz this soup at the end, chop the sweet potato and carrot into small cubes of about 1.5cm.

• Coconut milk is often solid at the top of the tin – it quickly melts into a liquid when heated.

• Beware: turmeric stains! Hands, fabric and some utensils.

Serves 4

Ingredients

Basic recipe, ingredients included in the bag:
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
Thumb of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped or grated
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
1 large sweet potato, chopped into chunks (don’t bother to peel it)
2 carrots, chopped into chunks
Tin coconut milk
500ml vegetable stock, made up from a stock cube 

Not included in the bag:
1 tablespoon oil or butter
Salt and pepper

Possible additions:
1 finely chopped fresh chilli

Method

1.      Heat a tablespoon of oil or butter in a large saucepan with a lid. Turn the heat right down, add the diced onion, pop on the lid and sweat until soft but not browned – between 8 – 10 minutes.

2.      Add the crushed garlic, chopped or grated ginger and turmeric and stir for another minute or two. Don’t let the garlic brown or it can go bitter.

3.      Add in the chopped sweet potato and carrot then tip in the coconut milk and stock. Give it a good stir until the coconut cream has all melted, add a pinch of pepper and bring to the boil.

4.      Simmer for 20 minutes or until the sweet potato and carrot are soft.

5.      Whizz the soup until smooth – add a splash more water or milk if it’s a bit thick – and serve.

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Cooking Techniques Explained

Sweat: cooking vegetables gently in oil or butter so they soften without browning too much. For example, to sweat onion means to gently cook it over a low heat until it turns translucent without browning. Putting a lid on the pan helps this process by causing condensation to drop back into the pan and stop the veg drying out.

Boil: Heating a liquid until it bubbles vigorously.

Simmer: Heating until bubbles gently break the surface, below boiling point.

Dice: Cutting food into small cube shapes, about 0.5cm wide.

Crush: Usually used when preparing garlic: once you’ve chopped it as small as you can, crush it into a paste using the edge of your knife or a spoon to get as much flavour out as possible.

Sauté: quickly frying in a hot pan, in oil or butter.