Celery Soup With Blue Cheese

This is another leftover dish. Stews and stocks often need the odd stick of celery but, of course, you can't just buy two sticks. So what to do with the rest of it. Well, I usually treat myself to a stick with salad cream. Then I made this soup with the rest. It's based on Delia recipe but I had a little blue cheese leftover in the fridge from lunch with my parents the other week. It takes 2-3 hours to cook but the best thing about it is that you don't need to fry anything. Just chop everything up, put it in a pot, stick it in the oven and forget about it for a few hours.

Celery Soup With Blue Cheese (Serves 4)
1 head of celery
1 small celeriac
1 onion
1.5 litres stock
2 bay leaves
80g any blue cheese (I used Norbury Blue from Norbury Farm near Dorking)
Handful of flatleaf parsley, chopped

1) Heat the oven to 140 then prepare the veg. Start by choping the celery into large chunks. Then peel and chop the celeriac into large chunks and do the same with the onion. Season with salt and pepper. Put it in the casserole dish with the stock and bay leaves. Bring to a gentle simmer on the hob and place in the oven for 2 1/2 hours.
2) Remove the soup from the oven, remove the bay leaves and blend it until smooth. You might need to do this in batches.
3) Pour the soup back into the casserole dish, bring it to a gentle simmer and crumble in the blue cheese. Then throw in the parsley at the last minute.

I'm not a big fan of cream in soup as while it makes for a smoother soup it usually takes something away from the flavour of the vegetables. Here though, the blue cheese does add the touch of creamyness to a robust soup. I continued the cheese them by having it with one slice of cheese on toast.