top of page

Vegetable Soup

INGREDIENTS:

1 handful of sugar snap peas

1 handful of beans

1 handful of arugula

1 handful of spinach

1 small zucchini (or 1/2 large)

2 carrots

1 can of diced tomatoes

2 c chicken broth (or veggie broth)

1/4 onion (white or yellow)

4 T grapeseed oil

1/8 t chili flakes

1/3 t sea salt

7 cracks of pepper

1/4 t Italian seasoning

1 t Balsamic vinegar

 

 

yield: 4 servings

I reached into my fridge today and noticed that 2 of my carrots had been hidden in the bottom of my veggie drawer. They looked limp and sad, so I decided to make soup. Yesterday I pulled out my sugar snap pea vines because they've stopped producing. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten a lot of peas this season, it was just time for them to go. My beans and zucchinis are also doing really well, so I decided that veggie soup would be the best to utilize all of these ingredients.

Just in case you're a worrisome measurer and you don't know what "a handful of" equals... it's just about a cup.

Gather together all of your ingredients. I prep as I cook for soup. Everything goes into one pot. Not all at once, but why dirty another pot if it's not nessecary. I know I don't like cleaning them, I'm sure you don't either. The best thing about soup is that it's simple.

First, put your oil into the pot (on medium heat). Dice onions and add to the oil. As the onions cook in the oil, cut up the carrots. You want to make nice bite sized pieces that are going to fit on the spoon well. Add the carrots to the onions and oil.

As your carrots and onions cook, open up the can of tomatoes and add to mixture. You can add the broth after the tomatoes.

After you've added the broth you can start cutting up your peas, beans, and zucchini. You want them all to be roughly the same size as the carrots.

After adding the other vegetables (excluding the spinach and arugula, leave those for the last minute of cooking) add the salt, pepper, chili flakes and vinegar.

Give the mixture a little stir, cover and cook on low heat for 30 minutes.

You can prep the greens as the soup cooks. Spinach and arugula take hardly any time to cook, I add them at the very end. This way they're bright green instead of having a brownish tint from being overcooked. And if you don't have spinach and arugula you can easily substitute kale. If you cook kale though it's a little hardier and can be thrown into the soup with the rest of the veggies.

Since these pieces of spinach are so small I just bunched them up in my hand to slice, if you have larger pieces though you could wrap them around the smaller pieces holding them in place while you cut. I keep the stems on the aurgula as well. You can remove them if you don't like them, it's really just my preference to use them.

After 30 minutes your soup will be ready for the greens. (If the carrots are still a little firm you can cook them longer if you like them soft.)

It will take less than a minute for the greens cook.

For a more polished presentation I like to scoop out the veggies first and then pour the broth around them, but ladling it straight out of the pot will also do just fine.

I love to eat this soup with Pan Marino, from Big River. It's great for this soup because of the rosemary that's baked into it, any hearty bread will do really, or no bread if you're not a fan. But taking delicious bread and soaking it in delicious soup makes me happy. Enjoy.

bottom of page