My Chicken-Free Easter Chick Themed Vegetarian Roast Parsnip and Broccoli And Apple Mint Soups.

Preparation time: three years, one week. 

Method: 1. Buy a house to renovate in a strange town. Live in house while you renovate. Buy a small apple mint plant and try to kill it a few times. Watch it miraculously flourish three years later. 

Broccoli and Apple Mint soup in chicken feet bowls.

2. Eat chocolate all week while watching your well intentioned broccoli pale into jaundiced insipidy in the fridge. Keep it bushy side out on the top shelf of the fridge so you see it every time you open the door and die a little inside. Catch it just in time before it’s definitely too yellow and hack it into bits, stump included, set aside, feel proud of yourself. 

3. Dice some red onions and simmery-fry them gently in a bit of salt and whatever oil you use, after they’ve turned a bit soft add a teaspoon of brown sugar and a teaspoon of butter (or vegan alternative) and stand there forever non-stop-stirring while watching your life drain away and don’t stop stirring, forever. You are caramelising onions. 

[Little Life Coaching Tip - do all your onions in one go and keep them in a jar in the fridge so you’ve got some already done for next time.]

4. Meanwhile, instruct your personal commi chef to peel a potato or three for you, chop em up and boil em. 

5. When your taties are soft and your onions are like golden bubbly toffee, add the broccoli and spuds to the onions, add some veg stock and water and boil all together till the broccoli is softish and hanging onto it’s last bit of green.

6. Pour the lot into a blender and blitz it.

7. Pour that gloop back in the pan and add a bit of milk and warm through gently. 

8. Flounce out into the yard in a linen smock, pick some of that apple mint that you’ve been growing especially, flick the green flies of it, shred it, sprinkle it on top of your soup. Have it with toast. 

Apple Mint.

ROAST PARSNIP SOUP WITH BLACK ONION SEEDS.

This is miles nicer than the broccoli soup, possibly miles nicer than any soup.

1. Take the parsnips out the bag. Chop them into bits. Boil them in salted water. When they’re soft, pour the water away and immediately wish you hadn’t. Fling the parsnip bits on a tray and roast them in oil till they’re roasted.

2. Put some of the ‘aren’t you glad you made extra now’ caramelised onions in the pan, with the roasted ‘snips, add some water coz you’re an idiot and chucked the cooking water out, some veg stock powder, simmer.

3. Hurl it in the blender, chuck it back in the pan, add a bit of milk. Scream some unjustified abuse at someone.

4. Bend over the bowls till your face is licking distance from the food and professionally sprinkle with black onion seeds and serve with buttered toast.

Pre-blended roast parsnip soup.

Finally get to use the ‘Chicken Feet’ soup bowls you bought from that gorgeous Interiors Shop in Milan last year in your ‘No Chickens Died For This’ Easter themed lunch. 

Cry laughing as you imitate Julie Walters in Victoria Wood’s “Two Soups” sketch.

Chicken-free chicken feet bowls.