Diet soup

January.

Oh, January. The month where we look back on December and regret the over-eating, over-spending and general over-indulgence. And of course, every newspaper and website is promising you a thinner body in  three minutes flat by sticking to the latest miracle diet/superfood/vitamin regime.

So, every January we say no to treats, no to fun and yes to hair shirts, the scratchier the better. At Union of Genius, we try to approach life from a kindlier direction, and we want  to make the hair shirt a little less scratchy and a bit easier to cope with.

What we don't do here is push the latest fad diet (soupy or not) or pretend that some foods are magically good for you. The phrase "super food" is something we think is over-used, and should be approached with caution. That said, we think that soup for lunch offers advantages to those who want to recover from the holiday excesses without too much self-flagellation.



All our standard-sized soups are good for at least two of your "5 a day" vegetables. Some, such as the Winter six-vegetable broth are good for about 3 of your "5 a day" so, throughout January we'll be focusing on soups with increased vegetable content. With the UK butternut season ending, we're putting the six-vegetable broth on as a seasonal soup so you know that you can always come in for a vegan feast. Plus, every day we'll make sure there's at least one other soup rich in nutrients such as the newly developed leek, spinach and bean or old favourites like Lebanese lentil lemon and spinach, carrot and coconut or tomato rasam. All of these are vegan, and so will cut down your overall dairy intake as well.

One of the advantages of soup is that it keeps you feeling full for longer than eating the equivalent meal and adding a glass of water. It manages to do that without the sleepy feeling you get from having a carbohydrate-based lunch. One of the reasons we don't add flour to any of our soups is that it ensures that all the carbohydrates in the bowl are purely from the vegetables. It also ensures that our thicker soups get their consistency from vegetables only - no gloopy thickeners and empty calories here. And because the vegetables are freshly cooked and then kept sealed in a kettle, none of the nutrients gets to escape on the way to your grateful immune system.

If you want to cut down the calories then we've stocked up on rice cakes and oatcakes as a lower calorie alternative to bread or you can simply ask for the soup by itself. It will make us a little sad because it is such gorgeous bread but we won't tell our bakers if you don't.

To help out further we're running several of our recipes through various diet sites such as food.com or myplate.com to get a more accurate breakdown of the nutrition per serving. It's a bit of a slow process as different sites give different values but we'll work out the soup calorie count and carb content per serving, and put the information on the blog.

Finally, we're opening for breakfast from January 16th. Look away now if you don't want to hear about the delights of all-day breakfast soup, after all what could be better than a breakfast in a bowl. It would take a mighty feat to manage one of those soups in our bespoke bread bowls.

OK, it's safe to look now.

For those of you who want a more traditional breakfast we'll be offering our own house mix of porridge with a variety of toppings: some sinful, some saintly. Porridge is a great way to start the day and keep yourself off the mid-morning snacks. And for those of you who have kept their waistlines over Christmas, we'll be offering croissants and pastries from Dough Re Mi - Edinburgh's artisan bakers par excellence.

Between breakfast and lunch, we've got your backs. The rest is up to you.