Oh yeah, it's totally soup season by me. The snow is coming down hard outside my window right now, but at least I have a hearty bowl of soup waiting for me in my fridge! Over the weekend, my friend decided he was in the mood for a hearty bowl of soup. I didn't have much in my kitchen at the time, but sometimes good soup recipes are born out of necessity. Normally, I try to avoid canned goods in my cooking. However, it seemed to make sense with this vegetable soup as it added to the recipe's "hankering down for winter" aura
Serves: 6
Cooking Time: 45 minutes
Ingredients
- 4-5 cups water, broth or stock (I like thick soups, but you can always add more water to thin out the soup)
- 3 potatoes, cubed with the skins on
- 1/2 cup lentils
- 1/2 cup brown rice
- 3 onions, diced
- 1/2 pound dark leafy greens, chopped finely (I used turnip greens but kale or any other dark leafy green would work well here)
- 2 carrots, diced
- 2 cans condensed tomato soup
- 1 can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
- 20 dill pickle slices
- 4 cloves garlic, diced
- Spices of your choice (I used rosemary, thyme, cumin, paprika, red chili flakes and black pepper)
Instructions
- In a large pot, start boiling your water. Once the water starts boiling, turn down the stove top temperature until the water is simmering and add the brown rice, lentils and potatoes.
- After about 10 to 15 minutes, add the greens and carrots and stir.
- Once the greens and carrots have been in for about 5 to 10 minutes, add the condensed soup, artichoke hearts and pickle slices and stir to combine.
- Once the brown rice, lentils and potatoes are almost done, add the garlic and the spices of your choice.
- Serve and enjoy!
So I admit that this is a far cry for most conventional vegetable soup recipes. Frankly, I'm okay with that. I find it very satisfying when I can use all sorts of different things that I have lying around to make something delicious. However, I do feel a need to explain some of my ingredient choices. Recently, I was gifted with a number of canned food items. While I generally avoid canned foods, I'm a sucker for free food. For future vegetable soup recipes, I think I will go with crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce over the condensed soup. I kept the artichoke heart pieces pretty big, which made them the main meat alternative of the soup in terms of texture.
But I think the main ingredient question you might be asking is why I added pickles. I know it's a bit of a left field ingredient choice, but it added great flavor and texture to the final soup. The vinegar from the pickles gave the soup recipe a nice tartness, which I think helped embolden the other flavors. I didn't add any salt to this dish because the pickle slices contributed enough for
my tastes.
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