Ludwig Van Beethoven once said “Only the pure in heart can make a good soup” and with January being National Soup Month, it’s a great time to create a delicious, comforting and nutritional hug in a bowl. With Christmas just over and the summer a little further away than we would like, a bowl of warming soup by the fire puts our hearts at ease, lessens our hunger and delights the senses. Soup is a tasty, quick, nutritious meal anyone can prepare with very basic ingredients brought together in a delicious stock.

I’m typing this out as my favourite orange pot (the one with the little chip out strategically placed to the back!) sits on my stove holding a delicious bubbling concoction of tomatoes, a few handfuls of split red lentils, spiked with dried chilli flakes and the earthy, warmth of cumin seeds brought together with a simple vegetable stock. This will be my lunch, my Monday promise to eat well for the week ahead and hopefully to satisfy the frequent hunger pangs of my hungry teenagers when I can convince them to eat something healthy.

My own memories came from my Granny’s soup which was the best I have ever tasted. It wasn’t just the soup, it was the love and care the soup represented in the form of its soothing, flavoursome, aromatic heat as I cradled the bowl in my hands. It was the wonderful taste combination of the freshly grown vegetables and herbs tended lovingly by my Grandfather in his garden turned into a delicious meal by my Granny using her simple recipes.

Today my Granny might be celebrated as a culinary genious in her minimal approach to cooking, using wonderful, mostly organic ingredients with the pure heart, as Beethoven talks of, to just create something nutritious and delicious for her family. But back then it was normal life, before the dawn of convenience food. Thankfully I believe more and more of us are getting back into the kitchen, inspired by the influx of the celebrity chefs and cookery programmes who are making cooking sexy again! For myself I see cooking as giving and with my own cookery school I want to inspire people to create something delicious for themselves using my very simple recipes, so they too can give the simplest gift of food to their family, friends and loved ones… even if it’s just a bowl of soup.