VeganMoFo Day 11 - Grandpa's Soup

Another winner from the Fuhrman forums. This one was posted by member "casinera" back in 2010. My husband loves lima beans and loves soup and put the 2 of them together (and make sure the fan is on and bedroom window is open) and he's in beany heaven. To add to the odiferousness of it all, I bought him a loaf of garlic/onion Italian bread to dunk.

Grandpa's soup

Chop and simmer in water:
2 onions
2 heads of garlic
Add:
1- 2 cans tomato paste
2 cans tomatoes (no-salt)
the spices (basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf and black pepper)
Then add:
1 whole thinly sliced cabbage
2 bags Fordhook lima beans (no-salt!)
1 bag frozen corn (no salt!)
a pile of fresh green beans, trimmed and cut to bite-size pieces
At the end, add, then turn burner off:
diced carrots (about 3)
~ ~ ~
I used the same amount of onions, a small bag of garlic cloves, 12-ounce can of tomato paste (no salt added), a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes, and about 2 cups of frozen green beans instead of the fresh.

The onions, garlic, cabbage and carrots I shredded in the food processor. It was much easier than standing for an hour chopping all those veggies into tiny bits.

I added everything but the spices into the pot at once. I used my 8-quart Fagor pressure cooker pot with the glass lid (NOT the pressure cooker top), because in this small apartment everything has to do double duty and I have absolutely no room for a big soup pot. All those veggies filled this pot almost of the top. I added around 2 cups of water and set it off to start cooking. The recipe didn't say to add any water except at the beginning to sauté the onions & garlic so I winged it. It's possible the 2 cups weren't needed at all and the juice from the tomatoes and what was released from the cooked veggies was all that was needed, but I doubt it. In the end there was very little soup and a heck of a lot of cooked vegetables.

After about 30 minutes everything was nice and tender, including the chunks of carrots and cabbage stems that didn't get shredded. It was at this point I added the spices and stirred it all up, put the lid back on, and let it cool enough to eat. While waiting I sliced up the bread.

My husband took one look at the pot and asked if I was planning on feeding an army, because this made a LOT of food! The veggies all softened as they cooked but the level in the pot didn't really go down all that much. In the end, we each had 2 bowls and I put away way more than what we had eaten, so this is going to make another full dinner and a lunch or 2, even for big eaters like us. We use bowls that hold about 4 cups for dinner, not those tiny soup/salad bowls that we use when eating soup for lunch or as a side dish. 

And he didn't touch the bread, either. The whole sliced loaf is going into the freezer for another time.

It tasted great, with no one flavor dominating the dish. Will I make this again? Possibly, but I'm going to cut the amounts of everything in half. While some people love making one big pot of something to eat multiple days during the week, we don't. Once a week is plenty for any one dish. Even cut in half there would probably be enough for a few lunches, that's how much this made.