Soup recipes for picnics

Iced soup for warm days
Hot soup for chilly ones

One of the classic soup recipes for sunny picnics is the French vichyssoise. It's a leek and potato soup, thickened with cream and served cold.

You can play around with this creation and use other vegetables to make up your own soup recipes or vegetable smoothies.

For a lighter version of vichyssoise,for example, try lettuce and rocket to replace some of the potatoes, yoghurt in place of cream, and vegetable stock instead of chicken.

You can use any number of variations of vegetables and other herb and spice flavourings to make your own soup recipes for picnics.

However, bear in mind that if you are going to chill a cooked soup, you should use olive oil and not butter, as butter will solidify when the soup is cold, which is not attractive in a soup recipe for picnics.

Here are a couple of my favourite chilled soup recipes for picnics:

Lettuce and rocket “vichyssoise”

• 200 g potatoes, peeled and diced
• 140 g leeks, chopped
• 120 g rocket leaves
• 140 g lettuce leaves – iceberg, or romaine
• 500 ml chicken or vegetable stock
• 250 ml plain yoghurt
• 20 ml olive oil
• salt to taste

Heat the oil in a large pan and add the chopped leeks. Fry gently until translucent and then add the diced potato and stock and boil until the potato is soft. Leave the mixture to cool.

Meanwhile bring a large pan of water to the boil and prepare a bowl of iced cold water. Immerse the rocket and lettuce in the boiling water just for a few seconds and then drain and immerse in the cold water. This will make the leaves limp but retain their vivid green colour.

Squeeze any excess water out of the leaves and blend in a liquidiser with the leek and potato mixture. Then stir in the yoghurt and season with salt.

This should make enough for six. Chill thoroughly before pouring into a chilled vacuum flask with some ice cubes.

Serve in bowls, mugs or wide tumblers. You can drink it but I think it’s better to offer soup spoons. This soup recipe for picnics is nice with foccacia bread or similar.

Gazpacho

This is a lovely Spanish cold soup, which is one of my favourite soup recipes for picnics, especially when we’re in Spain! I think that’s because the tomatoes have a really great depth of flavour there.

If you grow your own tomatoes then you must add this to your collection of soup recipes for picnics. If you don't grow your own, then make sure you buy really flavoursome tomatoes.

Take the garnish to your picnic in a separate sealed container. You can drink the gazpacho without the garnish – but it isn’t quite the same so I think it’s worth the effort to chop and carry.

This should serve 6 people.

• 700 g of ripe but firm tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons of tomato puree
• half a cucumber
• 3 or 4 spring onions or a small onion
• two cloves of garlic, crushed
• 2 red peppers, deseeded
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 3 tablespoons of wine vinegar
• 2 teaspoons of finely chopped fresh herbs, such as basil, marjoram, or parsley
• salt and pepper

For the garnish chop very finely the following extra ingredients: half a pepper (green or red), a piece of cucumber, a couple of spring onions and some parsley and serve with small croutons of fried bread.

Peel the tomatoes by pouring boiling water over them in a bowl. Leave for a minute or two and then take each one out with a fork and you’ll find the skin will peel off quite easily.

Wash the cucumber and peppers – no need to peel – but take the seeds out of the peppers. Blend in the liquidiser with all the other ingredients.

Add water if you need to but if you add some ice-cubes to the flask, you'll probably find this will thin it down enough.

In fact, you'll find that in many recipes for gazpacho, you add bread or a few tablespoons of ground almonds to thicken it.

Spiced Pumpkin Soup

• 700 g of pumpkin, once peeled and with seeds & stringy bits removed
• a medium onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, diced
• a litre of vegetable stock
• 120 ml of single cream
• 50 g butter
• chilli oil
• a teaspoon of ground tumeric
• half a teaspoon of ground coriander seeds
• quarter teaspoon of ground cumin seeds

Tomato soup is very versatile because it's equally tasty hot or cold.

Or make a Virgin Mary smoothie with tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, a little celery salt and a little or a lot of Tabasco - to taste! However, watch out because a little splash is very hot - don't pour half the bottle in like someone I know!

Another one to add to the versatile range is asparagus soup, which is a really easy one to make when asparagus is in season and plentiful.

And here are some more of my favourites in the "warm-me-up" category:

Stilton soup

Chicken soup

Fish soup with garlic

Artichoke soup

One of my American contacts, Sara, features soup recipes on her website, Easy Appetizer Recipes, so for more inspiration about soup, as well as lots of other appetizers, take a look at Sara's great site.