Sweet Corn Vegetable Soup

On a cold winter's night...
It's quite cold now in Sydney as winter has set in. It has also been raining quite a bit. It's the perfect time and setting to stay indoors, cozy and warm, and gorge on some soulful comfort food. I was totally in the mood for some nice hot soup. 'Tomato? Nah, not tonight, hmmm, pumpkin? Don't think so...how about sweet corn? Yeah!!' - after some self conversation in my head, I decided on sweet corn vegetable soup :) I looked up the net for an easy recipe and found it on www.vahrehvah.com, yup there are some nice 'n' easy recipes there!

sweet corn kernels - 1 cup (the original recipe uses cream corn, but I used the regular canned ones. You could also boil fresh sweet corn at home and slice off the kernels.)

diced carrot - 1/4 cup (I wanted my version of the soup to be chunky, so added quite a bit of veggies, you could decrease the quantity if you wish)

thinly sliced french/string beans - 1/4 cup

vegetable stock - approx 3-4 cups

corn starch - about 2 tbspns, dissolved in about 4 tbspns of water

a dash of vinegar and soy sauce (the original recipes uses rice wine vinegar, I did not have any, so I just used regular white vinegar)

salt & pepper to taste

In a large pot/saucepan, bring together vegetable stock, corn, carrot and beans.

Turn on the heat and bring to the boil. Then, simmer it down and add vinegar and soy sauce.

Let it simmer for a couple of minutes before adding the corn starch paste. This is to thicken the soup, so use according to the consistency you're looking for.

Add salt and pepper to taste. Hold back on the salt until the end as vinegar and soy sauce have some salt content in them and you don't want your soup to be too salty.

Garnish with some chopped spring onion and serve hot with warm, toasted garlic bread.

What could be more comforting than hot home cooked food, a good movie to watch and the company of your beloved? Well, I couldn't have asked for more!