At the tail end of last year I entered the Glorious Soup competition with a few fellow bloggers. The task? Create your own Brazillian inspired soup recipe. The prize? The winners soup would make it into the Glorious range. Pretty cool.

So I set to work on my recipe and after a bit of research had a soup that fit the bill. It consisted of Chicken, Quinoa, Sweet Potato, Coconut Milk and Spices.

The competition itself was fun – I made it down to the final 5 alongside Charlie Nelson (Eat My Nels), Michelle Minnaar (Greedy Gourmet), Carla Spuri (Can be bribed with food) and Danny Kingston (Food Urchin). I was invited to the cook off where our soups were judged by Lee Bennett, Head Chef at Le Pont de la Tour, Karen D’souza (a massive fan of the brand), food writer, broadcaster and photographer Tim Hayward and Matthew Owen from Cool Earth.

We arrived at the kitchens and it felt like a smaller scale Masterchef – our cooking stations were all set out for us, including rather nice Glorious aprons and chefs hats plus our recipe and a name card (Twitter profile picture included!)

We had around an hour and a half to cook and at the end the judges walked around the room, armed with spoons and tasted our creations. 20 minutes later we were told that a decision could not be made easily and that they had to go and test the recipes to see what would best fit in with their existing range.

A few days later an email landed in my inbox with bad news, I hadn’t made it down to the last two. But it was congratulations to Charlie Nelson (Eat My Nels) and Michelle Minnaar (Greedy Gourmet) who were to battle it out for the public vote at Taste of Christmas. We’re still waiting for details on the winner but I’m still wishing them the best of luck.

You can watch footage from the day and find out about Cool Earth’s involvement here.

Recipe:

Ingredients

100g Quinoa
500g Chicken thighs, boneless
1 litre chicken stock
1 can coconut milk
2 red onions
3 garlic cloves
1 green chilli
1 red chilli
1 lime leaf
3 tbsp fresh corriander
1 lime
3 tbsp olive oil
250g (about small) sweet potatoes, cubed
1 teaspoon of tumeric

Method

1. Heat olive oil in a pan and fry onions on a medium heat for 8 minutes or until translucent
2. Add chilli, garlic, turmeric and fry for a further minute
3. Add coconut milk, sweet potato, chicken thighs, chicken stock and lime leaf. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through and sweet potato is soft
4. Meanwhile, place quinoa in a pan with the cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 8-10 minutes (you want the quinoa to have a slight crunch)
5. Drain any remaining water from the quinoa and add to the soup along with coriander and lime juice
6. Serve with fresh chopped red chilli