Watercress Soup Recipe (With Video)

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a beautiful fresh green soup that’s gonna be based of peas and watercress and I’m gonna put some mints in there for flavour.

Now to get started I have a soup pot over here. You don’t need to use one, quite this large but my other pot is in use so I’m gonna go with this one. Get it heated up to medium high for soothing.

And I’m gonna use some coconut oil for this, because I’m using coconut milk a little bit later but you can also use olive oil if you prefer.

Ok! The thing about coconut oil is it needs just a second to melt as suppose to most other oils which starts as liquid.

Ok! I got a sweet onion diced up here. I like the mild flavour of sweet onion for certain things and in this soup it’s gonna be fantastic because the flavours are so nice and light. I didn’t want to overpower it with the very spicy onion.

So, get those in the pan, the pot and then toss them around in the oil and then cook them until they are nice and soft.

So you’re looking for the onions to soften up a bit here and they look kind of wet at this point so that’s perfect and then what I’m gonna do is put in the peas.

I am using frozen peas which are not quite as tasty or nutritious as fresh peas so if you have access to fresh that is the ultimate but frozen are the next best thing, they don’t lose a whole lot of nutrients, they’re very easy to use because they come in a bag, you can incorporate them into things very easily, they’re just, something very easy to work up to your daily diet so I’m ok with the frozen peas.

Now, water is next. This is a soup after all and you don’t want to use too much water. I’m using four cups here and just give these peas a little bit of time to melt before we add the fresh watercress and mint.

Takes a little bit for your water to get up to a boil because four cups is a little bit of water if you’re in a rush, great tip is to boil the water separately in a kettle while you soothe the onion and then when you put it in it will be already boiling.

Now, next thing were gonna add is some watercress and I’ve waited until this got up to a boil just because greens are very fragile and they will go limp really quickly so they don’t need a whole lot of time in the hot water.

Now watercress is a green and if you can’t find it, you can substitute for any other kind of mustardy flavour green. It’s a little bit, a little bit biting, it has a very, very forceful flavour so if you don’t like that kind of flavour then you can substitute with any colour, any kind of milder green like a spinach or char or something like that.

Substitute for watercress would be maybe some mizuna, maybe some actual mustard greens all though they are very mustardy. I don’t usually like them too much unless they’re taken down a notch but watercress has a really nice flavour, it does bring its own personality but it’s not over bearing.

So, I’m also going to add some fresh mint here, some beautiful mints from the garden, its smells lovely. So, I get those things in here, stir them together and I’m just gonna do a really simple seasoning with salt and pepper.

As always, salt is to bring the flavours together, there’s nothing really to cook here so it’s more for bringing the flavour of the mint and the watercress together with the peas.

So, just cover this up again and let is simmer five – ten minutes and we’ll be ready to move on.

So things have been simmering away here for about ten minutes and the peas looks like they are nice and soft, the greens have wilted so I’m ready to move on and what I’m gonna do next is blend this up and I like to use my hand blender for this because I find it just so simple.

If you want to use a blender if you don’t have one of these guys, these are really cheap. I recommend checking onto them. If you use a blender, you have to let this cool for a little bit and all you do is take the solids out so if you have a slotted spoon something that you can scoop things up and drain the liquid out that’s the best thing to use transferring to a blender.

But like I said this is very simple, just stick it in, blend it up and your good to go. So, I’m gonna turn that off and what you wanna do is when you’re using a hand blender is make sure the opening of the blender gets below the line of the liquid.

Ok! You can see there hopefully that things have blended up fairly smooth here, a blender does make things smoother than this immersion blender and then the final step to really smooth things up is to add a little bit of whatever kind of milk you like to use and I put coconut milk in this recipe because it is just so delicious but braised milk or soy milk will work as well.

Or any kind of omen milk would be lovely, heath milk is nice as well but what it does is it finishes things up so when I am looking in my soup right now I see little chunks of greens, little chunks of pea and when you add the milk it just makes things really nice and smooth.

So you want to give this a little taste, before you served it make sure the seasoning are where you want them. Perfect! There’s just a little bit of pepper but mostly what’s coming through is the pea and the watercress at the background with the mint as well. Yummy!

So, get that syrups into a bowl and then eat it. You know when the soup is green that it’s gonna be good for you right? Not necessarily but if you make it yourself, you know what’s in there, you know it’s healthy.

So, you could find the recipe for our beautiful pea and watercress soup at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.