Curried apple-ginger soup. You probably already guessed that this was a home-alone meal, because Paulus finds soup to be ‘for peasants’. Without realizing that that is the best thing about it. Peasants probably also don’t feel good about throwing away the last few apples just because they didn’t feel like eating them.

The solution is soup. Just blend it all together and, tadaaaa! Where there were undesired apples before, there is now a completely new dish, and nothing edible was disposed of in the process. Even better, it turns out that apples are actually pretty great in soup, because they thicken the consistency, much like potatoes. Actually, their flavor is also a great addition to (brace yourself now if you’re a conservative American eater) chicken broth, but that’s a story for another time.

The moral of the story is that you can make a nice meal out of a few apples and a snub of ginger. I cut the apples in small pieces, grated the ginger, added a little bit of Madras curry powder, and sautéed everything together for a minute of two. Then I added stock and let it simmer until the apples were very soft.

In the meantime (I couldn’t help myself, I had to add stuff) so I crisped up some cooked quinoa in a little oil in a pan, together with some cayenne. Then I blitzed the soup with the stick blender until it was a smooth puree. And then I added some more stock, because I had been too ambitious and put too many apples in, so the consistency was more like thick baby food than soup. But those apples had to be used up!

The result was a nice, lightly curried soup with spice notes from the ginger and the cayenne, and with some crunch from the fried quinoa. If all the Americans would stop reading now, I could go ahead and recommend it as something to eat when you have a cold. (What! The blasphemy! Trying to oust Chicken Soup like that! Yeah, I told you to stop reading….).