Healthy cooking and eating.

I love cooking good, healthy food. My garden and my kitchen are two of my happy places. In this day and age where we are faced with preservative laden foods in our supermarkets, I prefer to know where most of the ingredients I use in my cooking come from. I am a home cook, who loves watching any television programme that has anything to do with healthy cooking and beautifully presented food. I confess that I use what I see on these programmes to cook more by taste and sight, rather than from a recipe. I always have basic herbs like flat leaf parsley, thyme, sage, oregano and chives growing in pots amongst the plants in my flowerbeds. Rosemary is used as a decorative plant as well as in my cooking. Mint roams free amongst other plants, which include marigolds as they always add a splash of colour and their smell is supposed to keep away certain insects, however, which insects I have not as yet found out! Today I felt like making a Roasted Butternut Soup so needless to say, I went out to my herb pots and collected thyme, parsley and chives - unfortunately the butternut was the shop-bought variety. I chopped up two butternut squash and drizzled Macadamia Nut Oil over them and roasted the pieces for about an hour at 180 degrees C. About 15 minutes before the end of the roasting process, I added a large chopped onion (also shop-bought I have to confess), to bring out the natural sweetness of the onion. The roasted butternut and onion was then placed in a pot, covered with chicken stock and one cup of orange lentils were added. Bring to the boil and cook until the lentils are soft but not chalky. This is where tasting comes in to play. You can also add salt and black pepper at this stage if you so wish. The roughly chopped parsley and thyme leaves were added and cooked for literally 5 minutes and the soup was slightly cooled. I then poured the soup into my food processor and gave it a good blitz until smooth, or to your own preference. Sprinkle fresh chopped chives on top of your soup to add extra flavour. If you like a bit of a bite to your soup, you can add ginger powder to your soup before blitzing it. I hope you will give this a try.