Baby Bites Nourishing Vegetable Soup

This is a lovely nutritious soup recipe with plenty of flavour despite using just water to make rather than stock – thus removing any salt element immediately. It is particularly good if little one has a cold too as the garlic and ginger are both incredibly restorative.

I serve this with some toast dunked in the soup and allow Bridget to feed herself these while spoon-feeding the rest but this would work equally well with pitta bread or rice cakes.

Equally the beauty of a vegetable soup is that you can use any vegetables you might have lurking in the fridge, parsnips, swede, sweet potato, spinach and cauliflower all work well in this soup.

This makes six portions and this freezes really well too. Just pop out of the freezer in the morning and the small portion will be defrosted in time for lunch or dinner.

1 garlic clove

1 thumb nail size piece of ginger

2 sticks of celery

5 cherry tomatoes

1 carrot

¼ head of broccoli

2 tbsp frozen peas

Drizzle of olive oil

1 bay leaf

1/2 pint water

Firstly crush the garlic and chop the ginger up. Add a drizzle of oil to a saucepan and add both to the pan on a low heat to soften.

Meanwhile peel and dice the carrot and slice the celery (make sure it’s thoroughly washed first) and then add both to the saucepan with the tomatoes.

Allow all to soften and then pour over the half pint of water.

Chop the broccoli into small florrets and add to the soup mixture with the bay leaf and frozen peas and simmer on a low heat for 30 minutes or so.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool for ten minutes, then either use a hand blitzer or place into a blender and liquidise to a thin soup.