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Low-fat vegetable soup

Written by Catherine Saxelby on Sunday, 24 May 2009.
Tagged: healthy cooking, low fat, soup, vegetables, vegetarian

Ready In: 1 hour 15 minutes
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cooking Time: 60 minutes
Serves: 2 litres or 8 cups

A great high-fibre filler for dieters in cold weather - heat a bowl or microwave a mug whenever you're hungry. This is the sort of soup that gets promoted in Kickstart Diets or various Detox regimes (not that I'm a fan of either). But this soup is low in kilojoules/calories, high in veggies, high in and fibre with huge filling power, so it's a dieter's best friend.

Read how soup can help your diet efforts

Read one of my favourite published articles - why a bowl of soup has emerged as a fat-fighting food. Given soup's high water and fibre content, it's not surprising that soup has a high satiety (satisfaction value) yet is low in kilojoule-density. This means it only packs in few kilojoules/calories into a given volume. Interesting!

Ingredients

1 tablespoon oil
1 leek, sliced (white part only) or use 1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
1 carrot sliced
2 sticks celery sliced
1 zucchini (courgette), sliced
1/4 cabbage, shredded
440g can diced tomato
1 litre vegetable or chicken stock (ideally make your own)
2 cups water
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Nutrition per serve

Each cup contains 207 kJ ( 50 calories), 3g fat (including 0g saturated fat), 4g carbohydrate (including 4g sugars), 3g fibre and 54mg sodium. Read our nutrition rating system.

Directions

1. Heat oil in a large soup pot and cook leek and garlic over low heat for 3-5 minutes.

2. Prepare vegetables and add to pot with tomato, stock and water.

3. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour or until vegetables are tender. Add parsley.

4. Add more water if it's too thick.

Variations

Delete the stock and add a beef soup bone or lamb shank with the onions. Brown in the oil and continue with the recipe. This makes a good salt-free recipe if you need to cut out the salt.