Ham and Vegetable Soup
To make this ham and vegetable soup, you need to have made my slow cooked gammon ham as you need the stock which is left over from cooking.
This is a warming and filling soup which can be adapted to what you have at home and is a great way of getting more meals out of your joint of meat.
This recipe is for ham and vegetable soup, but it can easily be changed to chicken and vegetable soup or any other meat depending on the meat and stock made.
Just like with anything blitzed, pureed, or mashed, soups have been cooked down and often blended. This means that your body has to do less work to break down soup and glucose will be released faster into the bloodstream.
To help this, when making soup it’s better to eat it chunky and increase the protein and fat in the soup to help slow down the release of glucose.
It’s tempting to pack your soup with lots of heart healthy ingredients such as grains, beans, lentils, chickpeas and other pulses. Although these foods are good nutritionally and some contain good amounts of protein, they also contain carbs and so many ladies still find soups bulked with these things harder to tolerate.
Ham and Vegetable Soup
Ingredients
- 2 litres ham stock (leftover from slow cooking a gammon joint)
- 400 grams butter beans (tinned)
- 1 tbsp cornflour
- 1 tbsp cold water
- 100 ml double cream (optional)
- 1 handful cooked gammon ham pieces
- leftover cooked vegetables from the cooking stock
Instructions
- Skim the fat from the top of the cooking stock. Strain the leftover cooking stock into a large pan on a medium-high heat to bring to a rolling simmer
- Drain the butter beans and pour into the pan
- Discard the onion skin, peppercorns and bay leaves. Chop up the nice pieces of onion, carrot and celery into bite size pieces and place into the stock
- Dice or shred some of the leftover cooked gammon ham and add into the stock
- Mix the cornflour with cold water until dissolved, then pour into the pan and stir through. Continue to simmer until the soup thickens
- Pour in the cream and stir. Taste and season with salt & pepper to your liking
- Serve the soup on it's own or with 1 small slice of buttered well tolerated GD bread
