Roasted red pepper and spinach soup with orzo

I’m baaack! (What’s that? You hadn’t noticed I’d gone anywhere?). If you follow me on Facebook you’ll know where I’ve been – I was off eating far too much ice cream in Rome for a week. And before that… well, honestly, I was just being lazy. But I’m back now, and even after spending a week in the country that invented pasta, I couldn’t resist joining in with this month’s Pasta Please, hosted by We Don’t Eat Anything With A Face and Tinned Tomatoes. I’m cutting it very fine, since entries close tomorrow, but I reckon this soup was worth waiting for.

The theme for this month’s Pasta Please was peppers. A bowl of pasta with peppers stirred through would be delicious, but after eating so many bowls of pasta in Rome, I thought I’d do something a little different to mix it up a bit – hence, soup. I’ve not used orzo (rice-shaped pasta) before, but it was the perfect thing to turn this bowl of soup into a hearty, filling lunch. It definitely didn’t need any bread at the side. Plus, the orzo is so small that it cooks really quickly so this is pretty much hassle-free. If you can’t find orzo, any tiny pasta shapes will work (I saw Hello Kitty pasta shapes in the shop and I was very tempted…).

I’m aware that it’s not been that long since I last posted a roasted pepper recipe (my roasted pepper and goat’s cheese risotto), but they’re so. damn. good. that I don’t care. Take a humble red pepper, the sort you’d find in salads and all sorts of other untempting things, and stick it in the oven for half an hour, and somehow it becomes completely drool-worthy. There must be some sort of magic at work inside my oven, because any vegetable you stick in there to roast comes out infinitely better.

The soup itself is vegan, by the way, but it was insanely good with a bit of cheese stirred through, just like you might do with an actual bowl of pasta. Use vegan cheese if you need to.