Delicious Soup

Just this evening, I made a huge pot of amazing vegetable soup that will easily last me for the rest of the week.

I filled our biggest pot about 40% with water and set it to boil with a generous amount of salt to hasten the process and begin its seasoning.  I chopped an entire head of celery and added it immediately to the boiling water.  Celery needs the most time to soften up as it's essentially pure fiber.  Second, I cleaned and chopped three fairly large vine-ripened tomatoes.  These were added with two cans of whole kernel corn (rinsed thoroughly).  At this point, the soup had risen to boil several times at each subsequent adding of ingredients.  It was time to season.

Now I'm not playing around when I say season.  I like my food flavorful with a little bit of spice.  In went a heap of finely chopped, dried parsley; in went a heap of powdered garlic (for the taste and eye-health).  I ground a generous amount of pepper and stirred the pot thoroughly, mixing it all deliciously together.  The broth turned bright orange due to the garlic and tomatoes and was bubbling as I kept the heat up the entire time.

Finally for the two newest additions to the recipe... We stopped by our local Asian market earlier tonight in search of noodles and mochi.  While we struck out on the latter, we headed to the veggie section for the noodles (shirataki yam noodles, kept refrigerated) and gathered about eight packages--more on these later.  On the way, Lindsay had to have a giant head of cabbage, and we  also grabbed a 2 lb. bag of bean sprouts.  I'm beginning to love sprouts in a variety of meals for their added crunch and flavor.  Of course, I used the whole bag in tonight's soup.  I finished the dish with another Asian ingredient--a fairly large dollop of sriracha sauce, which is essentially a hot garlic, chili paste.  Mixing this all together, the pot was nearly overflowing!

I brought it up to a boil one more time, continuously stirring and mixing the wealth of veggies, added a heavy dose of lemon juice to brighten the flavor, cut the heat and put a lid on it.  Done!  With the volume of ingredients, the soup had become more of a stew than anything.  This is one of the reasons I'd only started with 40% water--I like it thick.


This took under 30 minutes from start to finish.  I'm incredibly grateful for Lindsay's sharp, sharp knives and her help as I've been preparing this for the past two weeks under her guidance.

Sampling throughout the process, I could tell the stew would be great on its own.  For each meal though, I will pan fry (with a touch of grapeseed oil) a small amount of chicken to add to the dish as well as a small amount of cheddar/monterrey jack cheese.  For larger meals, I'll even add the shirataki noodles mentioned above.  This really takes the stew overboard as it generally means a much larger bowl!  The yam noodles are great in that the add a huge amount of body to an already full dish, are basically pure fiber (the entire meal is gluten-free) and require only a cold-water path to prepare.  The bath washes off the extra starch and you just add them to an already hot bowl.

Three weeks ago, I didn't know how to prepare soup stock.  Now, I'm making chicken-noodle-veggie stew that will last all week and is incredibly healthy.  Including what I prepped for myself at the end of the process, the whole thing was completed in less than 30 minutes.  This is true convenience eating and cost less time and money than a past trip to KFC might have.  Awesome.