Digital Soup
Please excuse the recent radio silence, but we’ve been very busy. Some great new projects are bubbling under, our mailbox is full of recipes from Greenwich Market (in English, Mandarin and Italian), and we’ve been working away on our first eBook – a digital edition of Fraser’s Seasonal Soups.
We’ve grappled with digitising our books before but have always shied away from it for two reasons – firstly, from an old-fashioned love of having print cookbooks to get dirty in the kitchen, and secondly (and more importantly) because of the design limitations of epub formats – especially for hand illustrated projects. We needed to get our heads around it though, and the publication of Fraser’s Seasonal Soups last year was a good opportunity to start thinking how we’d like an eBook to look and feel. Thanks to the talents of Stuart Cockburn at I Love Grids, we now have a version that captures the hand-drawn feel of the print book while having the convenience and functionality of an eBook.
Fraser’s Seasonal Soups by Fraser Reid is available for kindle on Amazon right here, and will be on sale in our own shop and on other platforms very soon. Please do take a look and let us know what you think, and what you prefer to cook from – print or digital? Print cookbooks, more than any other genre of books, have held their own in the digital revolution, but as more and more people use the internet to find things to cook, the notion of using your kindle or iPad or laptop in the kitchen is becoming the norm. And anything that gets people cooking is ok by us.
To whet your appetite and in recognition of the fact that soup is not just for the winter months, here’s a seasonal March recipe for you from the soup genius himself.
Smoky Sweet Potato & Butter Bean
Serves 4
Hands down this is one of my favourite soup recipes and it always goes down well with customers. The creamy butter beans are the perfect balance for the smoky paprika and sweetness of the potatoes.
- 1 tablespoon olive oil or butter
- 1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 sweet potato, peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 or 2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 x 400g tin butter beans, drained
- 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
- 2 stock cubes
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Heat a pot on a medium heat and add the oil or butter. Fry the onion and garlic for 5–10 minutes until they soften slightly.
Add the sweet potato, carrots, drained butter beans and smoked paprika to the pot, mixing everything together.
Pour in 1.2 litres of boiling water, crumble in the stock cubes, and then bring it all to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
Blend the soup and season to taste.
Buy Fraser’s Seasonal Soups by Fraser Reid print edition here or as a kindle book here.
