Many years ago I was introduced to two special recipes, both of which owe their magic to garlic. The first is a pureed vegetable soup, pure de verduras, Continue reading
Category Archives: Soups
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Mushroom Potato Stew (gf, vegan)
A dear friend of mine, a great cook, recommended this recipe to me a couple of weeks ago. She made it, her daughter made it, and now I’ve made it. A triple play! It was not originally gluten free, but I made it gluten-free by substituting tamari and oat flour for the soy sauce and wheat flour in the prior version. Easy peasy.
Try serving this with a plate of sliced oranges, maybe sprinkled with a few berries. Nothing specific, just use whatever you can find in the fridge. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Liquid Sunshine Soup in November
Please enjoy this recipe, an earlier version of which I posted in November 2011:
This past week I found myself the proud possessor of a lovely hubbard squash. Add to that the butternut squash that came in a CSA box last month, and the bags of carrots that continue to come every week, and which are piling up in the refrigerator, and, as my dad used to say: “It’s time to get choppin’!” Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Lentils & Collards Soup
I’ve posted this recipe in these pages once before, but it’s so unusual and delicious that it’s definitely worth repeating. Plus I have a lot of collards in the fridge at the moment. I love how the aromatics supplied by the cumin and cinnamon and lemon in this soup yield a result whose flavors are so different from the spice combinations I normally tend to reach for. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Lemon-Chickpea Soup
I found this recipe recently, and decided to make it for dear friends who were coming to dinner to celebrate the completion of our new kitchen. And was I happy I did! I had no idea how fabulous this soup would turn out to be. So much more than the sum of its humble parts. Yes it looked good on paper, but you never know, do you? Lucky us.
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Stuffed Peppers and Split Pea Soup
While our kitchen gets its makeover, the refrigerator, microwave, toaster oven, and water kettle have temporarily taken over a corner of the den, and we are doing our best to use up everything we have. It’s a little bit like camping out, except it’s inside your own house. So I’m trying to be extra-creative.
Our lovely little makeshift pantry has a variety of goodies including a half-empty bag of quinoa, and containers of various dry items such as peanuts, raisins, and cashews; and canned beans, baba ganoush, tomato sauce, and pickles. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Bean Crockpot Soup
All right, the holidays are over. It’s January, it’s been snowing for days, and it’s going to be this way for a while. There’s no going back; it’s only forward. Here’s a recipe that may help.
This is the kind of recipe that you start in the morning to cook all day and make the house smell amazing. It will work with any dark red beans, but I want you to know that I am absolutely crazy about the heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo in Napa. I like to add one-quarter cup of green lentils and 2 tablespoons (or 1/8 cup) of garbanzo beans for the added flavor and texture they give this recipe. Even this seemingly minute amount of garbanzos is guaranteed to put a few into every bowl. If the ingredient list feels a little daunting, once you gather and measure out all your ingredients I think it will feel a lot more manageable. You should feel free to mix together all the spices, and combine all the legumes (beans + lentils) before you get started.
I can imagine eating a bowl of this soup with a thick slice of crusty bread, but you can also consider it an entire meal all on its own. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Weekend After Thanksgiving Soup
This recipe is perfect for getting back on track after Thanksgiving. It will take most of the day to cook, but just 10 minutes to throw together. Some years we actually start it while we’re cleaning up, and leave it to cook slowly all night long. Except for the scallions and ginger, there’s a good chance you already have all the other ingredients. The only labor-intensive part of this recipe is the time spent looking through the bones for bits of meat. But don’t feel the need to go looking for every last piece. Whatever you have will be enough. If you don’t see much turkey on the carcass, that’s fine too. Since most of the flavor comes from the bones themselves, the broth will be delicious whether or not the bones are stripped clean. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: October Soup
I was looking back through old posts, and discovered this one from 2011, eleven years and almost 1000 posts ago. Though I do not remember who gave me this recipe, I do know that it came from someone I was working with at the time.*
I arrived home from work one particular evening to find my daughter frying onions, and I asked her what’s for dinner. “I don’t know,” she said, “this is as far as I’ve gotten.” Her amusing reply put me in mind of a guy named Jeff whom I had met many years prior. He became famous in our family, and remains there to this day, because of something he used to say: “First I fry the onions and garlic, and then I decide what to make for dinner.” And that is what my daughter was doing. Continue reading
YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Lentil Soup for Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight at sundown. High Holiday foods tend toward the sweet and the circular: sweet to represent our wishes for a sweet new year, and circular to symbolize the seasons that run one into the next, round and round, year after year.
So it is traditional to eat many different kinds of fruits, especially apples, prunes, pomegranates, dates and apricots; and sweet vegetables such as beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and leeks (sliced into rounds, of course), as well as black-eyed peas and lentils. And lots of honey, especially for dipping bread and apples. Continue reading