Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

November 1, 2014

Our veggie box included a couple of heads of broccoli and some silverbeet, so Cindy's recipe radar went off when she came across this soup on My Darling Lemon Thyme. It was perfectly designed to fill our post-Halloween lazy day - a simple soup, easy to whip up and healthy to help our recovery from all the cocktails and over-eating at Smith & Daughters.

Ah, if only. This was basically a disaster - our stick blender blew its motor in the middle of the process, our tahini sauce sank like a stone rather than swirling neatly on top of the soup and I managed to splash the half-blended soup all down my front. Good times. Luckily, there was enough leftover for us to re-blend the soup on Monday with a new stick blender and for me to eat it with less of a grump on and actually enjoy it. The tahini sauce in particular is excellent - tangy and salty and providing some depth to the flavour of the soup. I think I've been scarred enough by this soup not to put it into high rotation, but it's not really fair to blame the recipe for our appliance breakdowns and my clumsiness - go and look at the great photos on My Darling Lemon Thyme to get inspired.

Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

(slightly adapted from a recipe on My Darling Lemon Thyme)

tahini & lemon sauce

1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon pine nuts
4 tablespoons tahini
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
water to thin things out if necessary (the recipe recommends 2 tablespoons, but our mix seemed plenty runny without it).

soup
1 leek (the white parts), roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cumin
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 heads broccoli (stems and florets), roughly chopped
1 litre veggie stock
1 x 400ml can coconut cream
a small bunch of silverbeet leaves, stemmed and roughly chopped

1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 tablespoons dukkah (the original recipe wanted za'atar)

Start with the tahini sauce. Smash up the garlic, salt, allspice and pine nuts in a mortar and pestle until it's a thick paste. Stir it together with the tahini and the olive oil and season and then set it aside.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the leek and garlic with the salt and cumin until it all softens nicely. 

Stir in the broccoli for a minute or two and then pour in the stock and simmer everything for 15 minutes or so. Throw in the silverbeet leaves and cook for another few minutes before adding in the coconut cream. 

Let the mixture cool a bit and then stick-blend until the soup is smooth (or your blender explodes). Serve with a dollop of the lemon-tahini sauce on top and a sprinkling of the pine nuts and the dukkah.