iSoup (mas o menos)

Belgians are famous for the amount of beer they drink.

They should also be famous for the amount of soup they consume.

They'll eat soup until it comes out of their ears. All kinds of soup, on a daily basis. The eating habits of the Belgians seems to be based on the evaluation of something edible as gezond or niet gezond (good for you or not good for you). It's all nonsense, for Belgians also devour huge amounts of red meat in the form of steak, accompanied by piles of chips (they make the best in the world), though they are careful to accompany these elements by lettuce, thereby making the whole gezond (ignoring the mayonnaise, of course).

Anyway SWMBO is Belgian, of course, and subscribes to the theory that there's nothing quite so gezond as a good old bowl of soup. Well, to be more accurate, a good freshly prepared bowl of soup.

None of your tinned or packet soups for Belgians: soup is only soup when it is made with fresh ingredients.

You can imagine SWMBO's excitement, then, when she read about a relatively new piece of kitchen robotery, called Soup&CO (yes, all one word), made by Moulinex (sold in some countries under the Tefal label), and promising to make piping hot, but above all healthy soup in just about half an hour, using fresh ingredients.

Muggins had to do the research, of course, looking for and checking reviews on hte Web, before the inevitable decision was reached that life simply wasn't worth continuing without a Soup&Co.

Well, it's quite an impressive machine, seemingly strongly built, with plenty of brushed stainless steel, interspcaed with white plastic. The goblet to hold the ingredients is large, and can prepare almost 2 litres (1.8 litres, in fact) of soup at a go. The machine can be used for other things other than soup, including almost anything than requires blending, so it is more versatile than might at first seem.

SWMBO's first attempt was a courgette velouté soup, prepared just as described in the handbook and coming out perfectly.

Left-overs of courgette velouté, saved for later

I am not the world's greatest soup-eater, despite my thirty-five years of exposure to that particular activity in Belgium. For me, soup comes in three basic more or less edible flavours, green, red, and brown, and one inedible, fishy. Nevertheless, the velouté was quite impressive, though I dare not say so out loud for fear of having soup served up even more often than it has been up to now…