Sunday, September 29, 2013

VeganMoFo Day 29 - Hearty Bean Soup

This is the soup I was planning on making, before the other soup fiasco. I still have plenty of that one in the fridge so I won't be making this one now. Maybe some day next week? I'll still share the recipe.

Hearty Bean Soup
Servings: 4
Preparation time: 15 minute
Cooking time: 35 minutes

1/3 cup water
1 medium onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 medium zucchini, chopped
2 cans (15 1/2 ounce) cannelini beans, rinsed and drained
15 ounce stewed tomatoes
2 cups vegetable broth or water
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
freshly ground black pepper
1 cup packed fresh chopped or baby spinach

Place the water, celery, onion, carrots and zucchini in a large soup pot; cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are fairly tender, about 15 minutes.

Mash one cup of the beans until fairly smooth, then add to the soup pot, along with the tomatoes, additional can of beans, broth and basil. Add pepper to taste.

Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook another 15 minutes.

Add spinach, cook an additional 5 minutes, then serve.


The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart
John McDougall, M.D. and Mary McDougall
(1996), ISBN: 0-452-27266-1
page 320

One way people have made this soup even quicker is to avoid all the chopping and just do a rough chop of the veggies and pulse them in the food processor to turn them into smaller bits. While it does make for nice tiny pieces of the veggies, you're now stuck with clean-up of a multi-part appliance and a knife instead of just a knife. You can also use dehydrated/freeze dried veggies, either reconstituted first or just tossed into the pot with an extra cup of water or broth. For this meal, I'm using freshly chopped carrots and zuke, frozen onion, but freeze-dried celery.

I don't bother mushing up a can of beans. Near the end of the recipe, if I do want the soup a bit creamier, I take the immersion blender to it. I usually just skip that part and the soup is hearty enough.

I usually skip the zucchini, but did buy one this time. Right now they're plentiful and cheap.

Although it always tastes just fine to me as-is, my husband always takes his bottle of sriracha sauce and shakes a bit into it for added flavor. He seems to do that with more and more foods lately, especially now that he's on a low salt diet. Better him than me - I can't stand super hot and spicy things! When we were younger (WAY younger!), he would eat hot peppers out of a jar as a snack and add them to every sandwich he had. Just touching one of those would burn my finger, so you would never catch me attempting to eat one of them! He stopped his pepper infatuation almost 20 years ago but started it up again with the discovery of the rooster sauce a few months ago, before his heart surgery. It became a blessing then, when he had no appetite, and the sauce made foods more palatable to him.

This is a hearty soup and always made enough for us to enjoy for 3 days of lunches or 1 dinner and 1 lunch. If I want to stretch it out even further, I would get a loaf of whole grain bread and have a little of that every time, too. 

Darn, I really want this soup now! The Speedy Vegetable and Bean soup should last just about one more day and after that I can make this one for lunches during the week.

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