Nothing beats a hearty soup during winter. It’s an easy weekend lunch for the family and a quick and cheap weekday lunch to bring to work

Here I’ve made use of a leftover roast chicken dinner, miso paste that’s always handy to have in your pantry and some silver beet and parsley from the garden again.

Soup ingredients

500 gram packet of ‘Soup mix’

1 brown onion

1 carrot

1 celery stalk

2 garlic cloves

2 bay leaves

2 sweetcorn cobs

18 grams packet of miso paste

5 large silver beet leaves

First, soak your ‘soup mix’ in cold water. The mix will contain beans, chickpeas, split peas and lentils. Soaking these helps to remove oligosaccharides, the hard to digest complex sugars, from the outer coating of beans and pulses. It will also help  with the cooking time.

Miso and chicken stock

Next, place the roast chicken carcass, bay leaves and 500 ml of water into a large pot. Bring to the boil, then simmer for an hour. Skim any fat and impurities from the surface from time to time.

Turn off heat and remove carcass. Whisk miso paste through the stock and season. Now a broth, this could be used as a soup with some noodles, fresh coriander, tofu and finely chopped ginger and chilli. Mmmm…now that is warming!

Soup base with corn kernels

Prepare the vegetable base for the soup. For this, brown onion, carrot and celery are diced into approximately 1 cm cubes. In culinary terms, this is called a mirepoix.  Remember, the larger the surface area you create, the more flavour that will be extracted. I am also adding raw corn kernels to this base. Season.

Sweat the mirepoix off. The seasoning will help draw out the flavours. Strain the soaking soup mix and give a good rinse. When the onions are translucent, combine the soup mix and vegetables, letting the pulses absorb some of the flavours. Season again.

Add the miso chicken broth, then simmer.

When the pulses and vegetables are just past ‘al dente’, add the fresh chopped silver beet leaves. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

To serve, sprinkle parmesan cheese on top, to add a power packed umami, one-two combination with the miso. Bang!