Sweet Potato Soup with Corn and Red Pepper

Now sweet potato is something that I have always thought of as food eaten when you are fasting. I mean back home in India in the city where I come from, people buy and eat sweet potatoes in all its different forms mostly on days when they are fasting. So Sweet potatoes with corn and peppers ..... unheard of.

But living in a foreign land means you get to experience different tastes and and cook different combination of foods which is so good. Much as I love India and indian food (thanks to my mother, mother-in-law and Tarla Dalal) , being in England and cooking here from different cook books authored by english chefs is so enriching. This recipe is one such new experience for me. I followed this recipe from Sally Mansfield's Cookbook "Potatoes: more than mashed.

Do make it and let me know how you liked it:

Serves 3 to 4

The ingredients are:

1 tblspn oil, (the recipe suggests olive oil but I used vegetable oil and that was fine too)

1/2 onion chopped,

1/2 a medium sized sweet potato diced,

1 clove of garlic crushed,

1 small red chilli deseeded and chopped (alternatively you can use 1/4 tspn of red chilli powder),

3 and a 1/4 cups of vegetable stock (you can prepare stock from scratch or use 2 oxo or maggi stock cubes for that much stock)

1 tspn of cumin powder,

1 tblspn of chopped red pepper,

1 cup sweet corn kernels ,

salt and ground black pepper and lime wedges to serve.

Now what do you do with all these:

1. Heat the oil and fry the onions for 5 mins until softened. Add the garlic and chiili and fry further for a couple of minutes.

2. In the same pan add 1 and 1/2 cups of the stock and simmer for 10 mins.

3. Add the cumin powder now along with the diced sweet potato,stir and simmer for 10 mins again. Season with the salt and pepper.

4. Finally add the red pepper, sweet corn and simmer again for 10 mins.

You can now process half of the soup until smooth and then stir into the rest of the chunky soup or you can simply procees all the soup andjust garnish with few kernels of corn and bits of red pepper the wat I did.

Serve with the lime wedges for squeezing over.

The combination of sweet corn and sweet potato is simply great and gives the soup a fab colour.