What We Ate Wednesday--Sweet Potato, Sour Apple and Mango Soup

Hello lovelies! This soup was an an unexpected throw together after a friend gave us some very tart (and I do mean VERY TART) Bramley apples. The obvious choice was to make them into an apple crumble, but I didn't want to use all that sugar (and you would have needed lots of sugar. Did I mention how sour these apples were???) but I decided to make a soup out of some things I already had on hand.

Let me just preface this by saying  that it is *really* not soup weather yet. It is hot and humid from all the summer rain and I was loathe to put my oven on for fear of spontaneously combustion. If I were still living in Louisiana this wouldn't be an issue as I would just crank on the air conditioning, but we have no AC in Wales (SOB!) so it takes something special to make me heat up the house.

And this is special. The soup was delicious. And if i served it with brown rice it made enough to feed 2 greedy vegans for two nights. The second night I just added a tin of haricot beans and a squeeze of lemon juice to perk it up.

Now...you could use fresh mango in this soup if you can get it or afford it. I happened to have a tin of mango in juice in my cupboard and so i used that. I ended up added it juice and all to the soup as the apples were so tart. (Have I mentioned the apples and their lack of sweetness??) That little bit of sweetness helped balance the tartness and the soup was perfect. The juice in my tin of mangoes was pineapple and passion fruit--it really added a little tropical flavour but if you are opposed to tinned mango in juice then I guess add extra vegetable stock and you will have a slightly more tart soup.

I never heard of Bramley apples until we moved to the UK. They are called cooking apples here as they are not sweet enough to eat on their own. (See, it's not just me!) If I was in the US, I would probably use Granny Smith apples (which are tart, but edible) and skip the juice.

Also i don't peel my sweet potato or my apple. It all gets blended up anyway.

Sweet Potato, Sour Apple and Mango Soup

Preheat you oven to 200C/400F
In your biggest roasting pan add the following:

1 chopped onion
500g chopped sweet potato (which was 3 med/small ones for me)
2-3 sour apples, chopped
1 TB fennel seeds

Roast for 30 minutes without stirring. The sweet potatoes will stay in chunk shapes, but the apples will turn to applesauce if you stir, so there is no point in giving it a stir half way through.

5 cups vegetable stock (add an extra 3/4 cup veg stock if not using the juice)
1 tin of mango in juice or one chopped mango

 Then add all of that roasted goodness to the veg stock and the mango and bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes to let the mango soften then blend til smooth with an immersion/stick blender  (or leave it chunky--this is your soup, do what you want).

Then add salt and pepper to taste. I didn't think it needed any salt. But I do love me a bit of pepper so I put some in.

Add a tin of white beans if you need to feed more people.

This was well worth heating up the house.