Is everybody sneezing and coughing around you? Do you feel a flu coming on or are you already one down in a fight against it? Then this recipe might help you getting back on track. Take yourself to the supermarket, or send someone, to buy the following ingredients for a flu fighting soup with 3 – 4 servings:

– a tin or glass with 400 grams  tomato pulp
– a tin with cherry tomatoes (ca. 250 grams)
– 1 onion
– 2 – 3 garlic toes
– 1 piece of ginger (thumbnail size)
– 1 lime
– Mediterranean herbs (loads), fresh or dried
– chili powder (or fresh chili, or dried, whatever you have available)
– sea salt (a good amount)
– a big tea-spoon of honey
– olive oil
Optional: 200 grams of salmon (fresh or unfrozen) OR Wiener sausages (or other tasty sausages, whatever you fancy)

Then you throw the ingredients together as follows. However, before you start, you have to understand that the soup works through its components “hot/spicy, salty, sour and sweet”. Bearing this in mind, it helps you finding the dose of ingredients you want. It is free to experiment, and let’s face it, if you don’t taste anything due to having a cold, the hotter the soup, the better.

Here we go:
Take a sauce pan of a decent size and put 2 table spoons of olive oil into it, and put it on middle to high heat.
Chop the onion, the ginger and the garlic and stew it in the hot oil, a bit of brown colour is totally desirable. If you use fresh chilies, add these now as well and let them stew with the onions. Chopped chilies of course, and do take out the seeds, and do not forget to wash your hands after handling these. Otherwise your hands will get hot, and eyes, if you rub them with unwashed hands, you probably know what I mean.
If you decided for Salmon or sausage, then these should be cut into pieces and added to the onion/ginger/garlic mixture now, so that even these get a bit of colour on the outside.
Once things in the pan got a bit of colour, add the tomato pulp, and the cherry tomatoes.
Then add the herbs, the chili powder/ dried chilis (if you did not take fresh chilis).
Add as well a generous amount of sea salt and a big spoon of honey. Honey will balance the saltiness and sourness of the soup in a nice way, and it will do wonders for your throat. So don’t be shy.

Now that everything is in the sauce pan, take down the heat to the lower level and let it simmer for about 7 minutes.
The rest should have taken about 10 minutes to fix.

Now you have a great hot soup to enjoy. You can also freeze it and have it next day, so you can really just stay in bed and sleep off whatever decided to hit your poor body.

Get better soon!

And no, there is no picture of the soup, just get creative with the ingredients! Should you find other variations, please do share them in the comment section below, thank you.