I hope you're all feeling happy and healthy 💚

How do you like your soup? I like all kinds of soup, hot, warm, cold, a light broth, a thick cream. I'm a soup lover. Today I want to share with you my recipe for creamy broccoli soup with a generous dose of homemade coconut milk and some toppings to add textures and make the experience more fun.

This creamy broccoli soup can be eaten hot or warm. I like to serve it with arepas, as is the custom in my town; to give them more crunchiness, I coated them with sesame seeds and gave them a doughnut shape and fried them in very hot oil. In my town, it's also customary to accompany soup with avocado, so I do it whenever I can.

Ingredients

January is a difficult month. Economy is slow and food, scarce. But when February is approaching, we start seeing fresh vegetables and fruits in the stores. I found this beautiful broccoli and a dry coconut that looked good for milk at the store today. I thought, "I'm making soup!" Horacia seemed to agree 🐱

For the soup

• Broccoli stems and leaves (250 gr)
• 1 cup onion
• 1/4 cup sweet chili
• 2 tablespoons garlic
• 2 tablespoons ground garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon dry oregano
• 2 bay leaves
• salt to taste

For the coconut milk

• 1 dry coconut & its water
• pinch of salt
  (I made 450 ml of coconut milk but used only 250 ml approx. for the meal)

Toppings

• broccoli florets (150 gr)
• avocado & lemon
• roasted almonds
• freshly cracked black pepper
• sesame seeds coated arepas, fried

Let's get to work!

This is a simple dish and you'll be done in the blink of an eye.

I started by washing the broccoli and separating the stems and leaves from the florets. The former I'd be using for the soup; the latter I would steam a little and use as toppings.

I washed the stems and florets under the tap and left the latter soaking in water with some drops of vinegar until it was time to steam them.

I chopped the broccoli stems and leaves, peeled and chopped the onion and took the seeds out of the sweet chili pods--I like to leave the seeds if I'm not blending them. Finally, I flattened the garlic cloves.

All went into the cooking pot with a little water and the spices: bay leaves, oregano, ground garlic, ground nutmeg, and salt).

I let it simmer over medium heat until the broccoli stems were tender.

Then all of this went into the blender. I just waited a couple of minutes for it to release some of the heat. Also, I discarded the bay leaves.

The blender did the job. At this point I hadn't added the coconut milk yet.

Homemade Coconut Milk

While the vegetables were cooking, I made the coconut milk.

I made it a little different this time because I wasn't going to use the bagasse. I burned the coconut directly on the stove with the water inside. I let it burn for 3 minutes approx. as I rotated it, holding the hot coconut with my tweezzer tongs. Then I opened the soft pore and took the water out. I broke the coconut and separated the flesh from the shells easily. To brake the coconut I could used a hammer, but I was lazy to look for it, so I put it inside a kitchen towel and hit it against the floor like Lucy (the Australopithecus 🤣).

I chopped the coconut so my blender didn't have to work too hard.

I let the blender go for a couple of minutes.

Then I poured the mixture in my yogurt bag.

...And squeezed it to get the milk.

I added the salt and heated it before pouring it in the blender.

The hot coconut milk would make the soup become creamier this way. I added some.

And then a little more, until it was the way I wanted it 😋

Once the coconut milk had incorporated well, the creamy soup was ready to be served.

At this point, my toppings were ready.

Toppings

I had steamed the florets.

I used half of them and drained the rest to keep in the fridge (raw).

I had made the doughnut shaped arepas. You can see how I make them here.

They were crunchy as needed so they would get soggy inside the soup.

Many sesame seeds come loose from the arepas and remain in the oil. I remove them with a strainer and then use them in salads.

Serving the Soup

Once everything was ready, I served the soup.

I served some extra sides of avocado, coconut milk, and lemon for the avocado slices and broccoli florets.

It was a delicious soup.

The florets were crunchy as I had steamed them just a little to keep all their freshness and benefits: vitamins A, C and K, potassium, iron, glucosinolates (against cancer, also found in other cruciferous vegetables). Gentle steaming make them most nutritious and we can have all their vitamin C to keep us young, haha--so I have read.

I hope you have found this post useful 😁❤️

Bon appetite!

All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.

Thank you so much for your visit :)

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