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Slow Cooker Chef: Warming Winter Mushroom Soup Recipe

 

Photo: Warming winter mushroom soup

Photo: Warming winter mushroom soup

Everyone always says that good soup needs a really great stock. Sometimes I simmer bones for stock in the slow cooker and years ago Fred Fitzpatrick used to give me beef bones which I roasted and then bubbled gently for hours to get a good dark tasty stock. But recently I’ve gone back to using stock cubes out of laziness.

This week I decided to experiment with leftovers. We had two meals from the game casserole and were left with a ladle of gravy (about 6 tablespoons) with a few bits of meat and veg. Danny had picked up a large box of mushrooms from Tesco for 30p that needed to be used immediately, so I made this soup. It was wonderful – deep, rich notes – truly a soup to die for.

I can’t wait to try making different sorts of soup using a ladle of leftover steak and kidney as a starter!

Slow Cooker Chef: Warming Winter Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:

I ladle of leftover game casserole
600g of mushrooms (roughly chopped)
600ml of hot stock to just cover the mushrooms – I made this with 2 teaspoons of vegetable stock powder
1 tsp of pesto
1 tsp of garlic granules
An eighth tsp of cayenne pepper
An eighth tsp of ground mace
4 big sprigs of fresh thyme

Method:

Put all the ingredients in the slow cooker. Set the timer to auto and leave to simmer for four hours. Liquidise with a stick blender. Serve with a swirl of cream and a sprinkle of fresh chopped parsley in warmed bowls. Crusty bread went down well with this.


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8 Comments

  1. Yummy mushroom soup! well we live in bulgaria and yesterday 19th October 210, our Bulgarian farmer friend, who is helping us build our home brought us a carrier bag of the largaest mushrooms I have ever seen, bigger than a dinner plate!
    I sort of followed your recipe I added oodles of garlic and Coconut milk! well him indoors worshipped me from across the dining room table whilst he savoured every morsel!
    So thanks alot theres just enough left in the freezer for a deep winter helping!! chow chow! Maria

  2. This sounds tasty. I’ll have to try making it with vegetarian with some white beans.

  3. I make stock all the time. Keep bags of leftovers sorted in the freezer for lamb, chcken, pork, ham, beef, veg stocks. always simmer for hours on the stove. BUT you have given me the great idea to use my crockpot for this!!
    Thanks!

  4. It sounds delicious, I adore mushrooms!

    I’ve been on a complete soup binge recently. I made a delicious soup on Boxing day with the leftovers from our meal, having deliberately cooked excess vegetables. Into the pot went the last of the turkey and madeira gravy, chopped roast potatoes and parsnips, caramelised carrots, turkey stock, plus a shreddded savoy cabbage, and crumbled up stuffing. It was superb, and even the children wolfed it down! ‘Christmas Day Soup’ is firmly on the menu for next year (and there’s some stashed in the freezer).

    Yesterday I made cauliflower cheese soup from a recipe in the You magazine (mail on Sunday). Scrumptious! The recipe is available online, and was even better with a few chunks of ham thrown in.

    I get a veg box from Riverford and have been introduced to onion squash (shaped like and onion and very deep orange). Combined with leeks or onion plus a large bunch of thyme it makes a stunning soup, more flavourful than butternut and incredibly rich – although a spoonful of cream doesn’t go amiss!

    A vegetable I feel is very underused in soup or otherwise is celeriac. Today’s ‘bottom of the fridge’ soup featured a celeriac, half a swede, a few leeks, a can of chopped tomatoes, a couple of potatoes and some chicken stock. I chopped everything, sauteed the leeks and chucked everything into the slow cooker pot which sat in the fridge overnight. Put it on high at 6am and it was perfect by lunchtime. I blended some to thicken the soup,; the celeriac purees beautifully.

    Better stop now! I could ramble about soup all day and this is Fiona and Danny’s blog – sorry!

  5. Sounds fab and a good way to us up that last bit of leftover stew that you always seem to get. Thanks for the tip!

  6. I make ‘Pamela’s Perfect Pumpkin Soup’ from here quite a lot but also chuck in a good handful of parmesan.

    Tasty! 🙂

  7. Toffeeapple

    I want some of that soup please! It looks wonderful, just the thing for this weather.

  8. I had soup yesterday and I’m just making some more. There’s just nothing better on snow days!

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