Porcini mushroom soup

Mushroom, mushroom! Ahh, what could ever taste better? The VegHog is a total mushroom fan and today it's making a porcini musroom soup for you. A soup is such a great warming and filling winter meal and a firm VegHog favourite.

Porcini  are lovely mushrooms for soups, risotto etc. The VegHog is slightly biased and claims that the Finnish porcini are the tastiest as the origin is really important. I happened to have a bag of dried Finnish porcini here, so that's what this soup is made of. I appreciate that you probably won't be able to get the Finnish ones but do not worry, your soup will be tasty nevertheless. It's quite handy to have a selection of dried mushrooms in your cupboard.

This is how it's made: Dried porcini are perfectly good for this soup, so put them into water to soak for about 30 minutes. In this case I used a bag of 25g. Chop onions, garlic and potatoes. Prepare a vegetable stock. You can make your own, use dried powder to mix or buy a ready fluid stock. I'm normally too lazy to make my own but in case you make a larger batch, you can even freeze chunks of it which should come in handy. Here is a vegetable stock recipe for you.

Heat oil in a pan, add onions and garlic first and fry them a bit. Then add porcini and potatoes. Fry until potatoes get slightly brown colour and then add a little bit vegetable stock to the hot pan. Let boil and stir occasionally, also add salt, pepper and parsley. Later add the rest of your stock and cook under the lid until potatoes are tender.

Once everything is cooked, puree the soup with a hand mixer and serve hot garnished with parsley. It can be so easy to make a tasty soup.

As you noticed this meal was once again vegan but if you want to add some extra flavour, you can use butter for the frying or add cream to the soup at a later stage.

These notebooks by The Gift Republic make good recipe books. Please note that not all mushrooms depicted are edible! It's best to stick to mushrooms from the shops anyway if you aren't an expert.