Carrot and Coriander Soup

I found these bad boys down at the organic shop during a trip to (the packed and awful)  Dubai Mall yesterday and they just screamed carrot and coriander soup. Well, carrots don't scream and if they did it would probably be something along the lines of 'don't eat me' but you know what I mean. The flavour is out of this world and the consequent soup is made brilliant by the sheer 'pow' of organic ingredients.

So please don't try and make this with those little orange sticky things that Spinneys et al sell. Make this with unpeeled, organic carrots and oranges. You'll never look back.

Ingredients

• 800g organic carrots
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 medium (200g or so) potato, chopped
• 2 oranges, grated zest and juice
• 1.2 litres good, light stock
• 1/2 tsp salt
• A pinch of sugar
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp coriander seeds

Wash the carrots with a stiff vegetable brush and chop 'em. Throw the chopped carrot in a pan along with the chopped onion, potato and olive oil. Sweat these over a medium heat for 10 minutes or so, giving the occasional stir. Add the pinch of sugar. Meanwhile toast the coriander seeds in a frying pan, you want them starting to brown and giving off that rich, slightly burned orangey coriander seed smell. Add the stock to the vegetables, remembering to congratulate yourself on using a light home-made vegetable stock or a mixture of 1/2 chicken stock and 1/2 water rather than being a lazy bum and spoiling everything by using that gross mixture of salt, msg and celery flavoids that commercial stock cubes are packed with.

Cook the vegetables for a further 10-15 minutes until they have softened, adding salt to taste at the end of cooking. Pitch in the orange juice, coriander seeds and the orange zest and stir these in, cooking for a further couple of minutes before removing from the heat and whizzing comprehensively using whatever whizzy solution you prefer.

Serve with crusty french bread, laced with cream or perhaps even a chopped coriander-leaf laced drizzle of olive oil. This soup is also stunning served cold with, may I suggest, a cheeky little quenelle of sour cream floating in it.