I have an old cookbook — as in, it’s from 1980 and I found it in an opshop — called, with brisk disregard for tautology, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Fascinatingly, it lists milk, cheese, and eggs as three of the most important ingredients for an economical kitchen; meanwhile I remember butter and cheese quadrupling in cost overnight somewhere around the beginning of the recession in 2007 and never, ever lowering or even settling in price ever again. When the consumer cannot control the rapidly-shifting sands underneath our feet nor the repellant deciders who dictate the prices of ingredients, it makes me wary of claiming a recipe to be cheap or budget-friendly. But if you can’t guarantee cost-of-living-crisis-amenability — and it’s hard to guarantee much of anything at all in these trying times — I can at least promise a certain versatility that can meet you where you’re at, in this Butternut, Chickpea, and Peanut Soup.

Think of this as a recipe that wants to support you — I’ve listed most of the ways in which you can make it work for your current pantry context in the recipe itself, but it really is remarkably forgiving. It doesn’t matter too much how large your onion is, if you want to throw in an extra carrot or just use half, you can add more or fewer spices, the beans are quite replaceable, and so on. You could stir in the tail end of a bag of spinach, or thin it out with coconut milk and add noodles and chunks of firm tofu. I drew some inspiration from Rachel Ama’s African Peanut Stew and also from working out how I could cram significant protein and fibre into a bowl as — relatively — cheaply as possible.

Without getting too hung up on what it’s not, or could be, let’s talk about what it is — which is delicious. The golden sweetness of the butternut and the earthy, almost-bitter nuttiness of the peanut butter entirely overtake and lap the chickpeas, flavourwise, although there is a fulsome, hummus-y backdrop to everything (and the soup set so solidly for me in the fridge that this COULD actually do double duty as a dip — as if it weren’t versatile enough already). The flavour of turmeric always evokes carrots to me — freshly, lightly vegetal — which works beautifully with the actual carrots, and cumin’s richness could not possibly be more welcome here, as I’ve noted in the recipe, if you can only get one spice into this, make it the cumin. The other thing you absolutely can’t leave out is the enlivening and generous squeeze of lemon juice, its sourness both balances and brings out the saltiness, and perks up every ingredient that it touches. If lemon juice isn’t available, I’d add a careful splash of red wine, balsamic, or chinkiang vinegar, or whatever you might have, teaspoon at a time, and tasting as you go.

Importantly, despite the relative humility of its ingredients and haste of its assembly, this soup tastes luscious and filled with care, two things you deserve both in food and in life — and since food is life, this is a good start.

For more soups, though none are quite so versatile as this one, I recommend this shorbat jarjir; my four-bean soup with kewpie aioli, this lemon halloumi angel hair soup, and this tomato and bread soup with fried carrot pesto.

Novel watch: I am actually this close to pressing go on a form for people to fill out if they want to pierce the veil and find stuff out regularly, I know if I tried to get it finished right this second that I would be awake till 4am finishing this instead of getting to bed at a cool, matronly midnight, but next time, I promise — things are moving briskly behind the scenes and I want those who want to know, to know. Y’know? With this blisteringly succinct syntax you can really see how I got the publishing deal, can’t you.

Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup

A robust and exuberant soup that — at last check, though who knows these days — shouldn’t cost you too much to make, but which tastes like a cumin-scented dream, can withstand a number of alterations, lasts for ages, is sturdily filling, and genuinely is pretty straightforward and fast to make. Recipe by myself, though it’s tangentially inspired by Rachel Ama’s African Peanut Stew.

• 1 large onion
• 1 large carrot
• 700g butternut — around 1/2 a large butternut
• 1 tablespoon olive oil, or rice bran, canola, peanut — whatever you’ve got
• salt and pepper to season
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 2 stock cubes of your chosen flavour, such as vegetable or chicken
• 1L (4 cups) water
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 x 400g tin chickpeas
• 100g peanut butter — around 1/2 a cup
• 1 lemon
• To serve — chilli sauce, plain yoghurt, flat-leaf parsley, salted peanuts

1: First, some chopping, though the good news is you can be fairly rough about it because it’s all getting blended up later. Peel your onion and chop it into chunks, then trim the end off the carrot and chop said carrot into similar rough chunks of about 2-3cm. I don’t bother to peel the carrot, but give it a wash if you like. Then, using a large knife, do your best to slice off the outer skin of the butternut — though it doesn’t matter if a little remains, because of the aforementioned blending — and chop the flesh into rough chunks of a similar size to the other two vegetables.

2: Now, warm the tablespoon of oil in a large, high-sided pan and throw in your chopped vegetables and a generous scattering of salt and pepper. Gently fry everything, stirring, for about five minutes until the onion has softened a little, without letting it brown. Add your spices — the two teaspoons of cumin and the teaspoon each of turmeric and allspice — and let them warm through in the oil to open up their flavours.

3: Crumble in the two stock cubes, pour in the 1L water, and add the three cloves of garlic — peeled, but no need to chop at least, since they’ll get blended up later. Lightly drain the tin of chickpeas and tip them into the pan, then roughly stir in the 100g peanut butter. Bring the water to the boil, then lower to a simmer and let gently bubble away until the butternut and carrots are tender enough to easily spear with a knife. Butternut cooks so quickly that this could be as soon as ten minutes, if not less, but carrots can take a little longer to break down, so I’d allow time for 20 minutes of simmering just in case.

4: At this point, you can either remove the pan from the heat and use a stick blender to puree it, or use a food processor or blender to thoroughly blitz the soup into a puree, being very careful for the steam as you remove the lid. Note — if you are using one of those small, high-speed nutri-bullet type blenders without a steam vent you’ll need to let the soup cool significantly first before blending, otherwise the steam pressure will build up under the tightly sealed lid, leaving you in major danger of a steam burn or soup explosion or both.

5: Once your soup is pureed — and if you’ve had to let it cool first, quickly warm it through again in the same, unwashed pan — squeeze the juice from the lemon in and, after stirring, taste to see if it needs more salt. I found that it did. Spoon into bowls and garnish with drips of chilli sauce, plain yoghurt, and a scattering of flat-leaf parsley and salted peanuts, but plain and unadorned is absolutely fine. That being said I know this would be so good with a glowing spoonful of chilli crisp lowered into it.

Makes around 1.5 litres of soup, which keeps well in the fridge for about five days. I found that upon refrigeration the soup solidified as if set with gelatin, so added a little extra water as I reheated it in a saucepan.

Notes, variations, and substitutions: 

• You can be a bit loose with the quantity of butternut, depending on how much you have — this soup can handle anywhere between 500g and 1kg comfortably, though add another 250ml water if you’re using the latter quantity.
• You could use cannellini beans, butter beans, or borlotti beans in place of the chickpeas, and if you really want, you could double the quantity of the legumes — as above, simply add another 250ml water.
• If you can only spring for one spice, the cumin will give most flavour bang for buck. On the other hand, you could also consider adding in smoked paprika, ground coriander, or a pinch of cinnamon, and it goes without saying that some fresh ginger would go immensely hard here.
• You could replace the butternut with similar quantities of pumpkin or kūmara, bearing in mind that these will take longer than the butternut to cook. You could even try replacing the butternut altogether with a larger number of carrots, which are almost always super cheap — they have a comparable water content and though I haven’t tested this variation, I am confident that the combination will work more than fine.
• This is the perfect quantity of peanut butter — and it’s really more like two or three large, heaped spoonfuls, though 100g sounds like a lot — but if you’ve only got one spoonful left in the jar, don’t let that hold you back. Similarly, if you’re up against peanut allergies, you could replace the peanut butter with almond or sunflower seed butter, or leave it out (bearing in mind the effect this will have on the texture) and add a few drops of sesame oil to provide that nutty flavour.

music lately:

Rat Soup by Boredoms. Topical! And just when you think the song is leaving you for dead, that jaunty little riff raises its head…

Spiritual Eternal by Alice Coltrane, the way this sounds like it’s been composed on instruments that we haven’t even invented yet, conjuring up colours our eyes haven’t evolved enough photoreceptors yet to perceive!

Bluebird by Lana Del Rey, oh it’s so warm — how is she so prolific and yet every song of hers feels like you’ve been stumbling through the snow for weeks only to discover a single, nourishing plate of spaghetti on the ground with absolutely no sign of more spaghetti as far as the eye can see?

PS: As we enjoy our food we can’t forget those going violently without it. Though the people of Gaza are existing under barbaric cruelty with aid continually blocked, NZ-based humanitarian org ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal continues to work to deliver water sourced and treated from within Gaza so give it if you’ve got it. I also recommend checking out BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Aotearoa and Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa for straightforward, targeted ways to use your lack of dollars, consumer-wise, to take action as well.