Kale and Roasted Vegetable Soup

Today we ate Kale and Roasted Vegetable Soup.  I found the recipe at my favorite cooking site, Simply Recipes.

A quick aside.  Simply Recipes is a fantastic site.  Elise Bauer chronicles recipes that she and her family cook and enjoy.  I have enjoyed every recipe that I found on the site (with a single exception).  I appreciate that I can find recipes that don’t take an entire evening to make and still taste fantastic.

I chose this soup since Kale is in season and available at Whole Foods (already ate the Kale that came in our ah organics box).  Kale starts out fairly tough, and holds together very well in this soup.  The pureed veggies make the broth a fantastic consistency – not too thick and not too thin.  The white beans match the rest of the flavors very well.  I

Ingredients

• 3 medium carrots, peeled and quartered lengthwise
• 2 large tomatoes, quartered – I used canned whole tomatoes since good tomatoes are nowhere to be found
• 1 large onion, cut into 8 wedges or 4 or 5 slices
• 1/2 small butternut squash, peeled, seeded, cut lengthwise into 1/2 inch thick wedges
• 6 garlic cloves – leave the skin on for roasting
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 6 cups or more of vegetable broth – I really like the $2 / 4 cups organic variety at Whole Foods
• 4 cups of finely chopped kale
• 3 large fresh thyme sprigs
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 15 oz can of great northern white beans, drained

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 F
2. Toss carrots, tomatoes, onion, and butternut squash in olive oil, salt, and pepper.
3. Arrange on rimmed baking sheet and roast for about 45 minutes – until they are brown and tender.
4. Cut squash and carrots into 1/2 inch pieces; reserve.
5. Puree garlic, onion, and tomato to create vegi puree.
6. “Deglaze” pan with 1/2 cup broth to create pan bits.
7. In large soup pot combine broth, vegi puree, pan bits, kale, thyme, and bay leaf.
8. Boil, reduce heat, and cook soup for about 30 minutes, until kale is tender.
9. Add carrots, squash, and beans to soup.  Simmer for about 8 minutes.
10. Season to taste with salt and pepper  (mine needed a little pepper but no salt).

I made the soup in the morning and kept it warm in a crock pot until lunch.  I stopped after step 8 and added the carrots, squash, and beans in the office 15 minutes before serving.  This kept the beans and veggies from becoming mush.

For our office (8 eaters) I about doubled the recipe.

Soup

This past month we had a soup contest. Amal, Leanne, Nick, Corinne, and I (Mike) each made a soup and served it to the rest of the office (Prof Hall and Dr. E). Corinne’s won the contest with her fantastic borscht.

We enjoyed having lunch together as an office so much (the soup was pretty good too), that we decided to have a weekly office soup lunch.  Since I’m crazy, I offered to cook.  So far we have had two additional soup lunches and both were quite good.

All that said, over the next week we will be posting our all recipes and commentary. You can look forward to reading about:

• Corinne’s botscht
• Leanne’s chickpea curry
• Amal’s lemon lentil soup
• Mike’s butternut curry
• Nick’s potato soup
• Mike’s leek potato soup
• Mike’s roast vegi and kale soup