Minestrone Soup

This flexible recipe is a lovely meal all on its own. It’s specially exciting if you have some pesto and croutons to top it.

Ingredients:

2 tbs olive oil

1 onion, chopped

3 or 4 carrots, sliced

2 celery sticks (optional, but add lots of good flavor)

4 to 6 cloves garlic

1/2 cup tomato paste, or 1 cup of tomato sauce, or 3 medium tomatoes, finely chopped

2 potatoes and/or 1 or 2 zucchini or other summer squash and/or green beans, or other seasonal veggies, chopped

2 cups spinach and/or kale and/or turnip greens and/or beet greens or other seasonal greens

1 tbs fresh oregano or 1 tsp dried oregano

1 tbs fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried thyme

2 or 3 bay leaves

8 to 10 cups water and 3 cubes vegetable bouillon or 8 cups liquid vegetable broth

1 tsp salt or more as desired

1 tsp pepper (optional, but cooks in to add wonderful flavor)

1 cup pasta (elbow, rotini or shell pasta works well)

2 to 3 cups cooked white beans (black eyed peas work well, too!)

Optional Toppings—

lemon juice

parmesan or nutritional yeast

parsley

basil

microgreens

INSTRUCTIONS

In a pan, saute onions with olive oil for a few minutes, when starting to become translucent, add chopped garlic, carrots and celery and saute for 3 more minutes. Add a splash of water if it’s looking too dry

In a pot, add the water and bouillon or vegetable broth, cooked beans, sauteed onion, carrots, celery and garlic, chopped potatoes/zucchini, summer squash/green beans, herbs and spices, cover and bring to a medium boil for 10 or 15 minutes, until the potato is cooked through

Add pasta and greens and boil for a few more minutes until the pasta is cooked.

Serve hot and serve with any or all of the optional toppings for your steamy enjoyment!

Green Potato Leek Soup with Mushrooms

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 to 3 large leeks, thinly sliced

3 to 4 cloves of garlic, sliced

3 to 4 cups greens, thinly sliced and then chopped up into small short pieces (Here, you can consider using up all the limp celery you didn’t get to in the last weeks, leaves and all! Kale, collards, spinach, turnip or beet greens, chard all will work. Mix and match. This is your chance to clear out the old greens to make space for the new!

2 to 3 potatoes, sliced into 1-inch slices and then cut into half moons (No, I don’t peel my potatoes! But I do make sure they’re organic. If you don’t have access to organic potatoes, maybe it is worth the trouble of peeling them. Potatoes are amongst the heaviest-pesticide-carrying crop in the industrialized agriculture fields.)

salt and pepper to taste

2 to 3 bay leaves

1 to 2 tsp thyme

8 to 10 cups veggie broth (or chicken broth if that’s your jam) If I’m using bouillon cubes, I will use 2 cubes Edward & Sons Not-Chick’n and 2 cubes Garden Veggie.

10 to 12 mushrooms (or more!), sliced in fourths (This is about what you’d find in an 8oz box at the grocery store)

fresh parsley leaves and/or microgreens for garnish

INSTRUCTIONS

Place mushrooms in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake in oven at 400 for about 10 minutes, or until beginning brown, sizzle and crisp a little bit.

Heat oil in pan and saute sliced leeks sprinkled with salt and pepper on medium-high heat for about 5 minutes. Add garlic (and celery, if you’re going with that!) and stir fry for a couple more minutes.

In a pot, add the veggie broth or water and bouillon cubes, bay leaves, thyme, potatoes, greens and your sauteed leek and garlic goodness. Bring to a boil, then cover with a lid and simmer until potatoes are cooked through. Turn off heat when ready.

Now, the quick and easy way to finish up is to get your potato masher (metal please! Don’t stick plastic into your boiling liquid!) and semi-mash your potatoes directly in the soup pot. This leaves you with a soupy/chunky mix that I love to serve topped with croutons and pan-fried veggie italian sausage. Although, doubling the mushrooms is healthier and often filling enough for me to skip the sausage.

Alternatively, and perhaps, more traditionally for a potato-leek soup, you can blend it smooth. An immersion blender works great and you can better control how smooth you want the soup to be. The last method I would suggest, if you love your soup smooth and creamy, is to let it cool a bit, then transfer into your blender. The big blender is faster than the immersion blender, gets it smoother, but takes more patience waiting for the soup to cool enough to transfer to the blender, and then, of course, there’s more clean up because you’re stuck washing the blender. Blend and return to your pot (reheat if necessary) and serve topped with your garnish and mushrooms. The upside of blending to me, is that the kids tend to eat more greens this way. Can’t pick them out if it’s all blended up!

Beet Soup

For the more authentic Classic Polish Borscht (a.k.a. Barszcz) recipe that inspired this post, click here! My version has simplified the process (I didn’t boil the beets whole, then remove half to dice them up, for example…) and includes more of our in-season veggies (gotta get the greens in when you can!).

Sometimes you just need soup on a cold winter day. Other times you just need soup to have a good excuse to eat more bread on a cold winter day. Once in a while, beet soup is just the right thing to nourish your body and brighten up your afternoon. Try it this week!

INGREDIENTS

2 or 3 beets, chopped into small cubes

1 or 2 turnips, chopped into small cubes (optional)

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 or 3 celery stalks, chopped

a couple of handfuls of dried shitake mushroom (or other dried mushrooms)

3 vegetable bouillon cubes (I used Edward & Sons Not-Beef)

and/or (if you’re not going for a vegetarian meal) 1 lb beef bones

8 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped

3 bay leaves

2 tsp ground black pepper

1/2 tsp marjoram (optional)

1 to 3 cups greens, finely chopped (try using your turnip and beet greens here, and/or spinach and/or kale)

4 to 6 green onions, chopped

3 tbs fresh lemon juice

parsley, cilantro and/or microgreens (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

Add all ingredients (except the greens, green onions,lemon juice, parsely, cilantro & microgreens) to a pot with around 12 cups water

Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes or so, until beets are cooked through.

Add greens and green onions and simmer for 3 to 5 more minutes

Turn off heat and stir in the lemon juice before serving.

Serve with crusty bread or croutons. Garnish with parsley, cilantro and/or microgreens!

Receta de Quelites de mi Nanaita (My Great-Aunt's Quelite Greens Recipe)

Quelites in Mexico

What exactly are “quelites” is a contentious issue amongst some because the plant most commonly known as “quelite” varies from region to region in Mexico. So, my grandmother’s quelites might not be your grandmother’s quelites.

On my quest to find clarity over the years, I came across this poster and this great article. Quelites are a pre-columbian dish indigenous to the americas. The name comes from the Nahuatl word Quilitl which translates roughly to
”tender and edible green”. Another key characteristic is that they are wild-harvested, a weed, not something you plant in your garden. At least that’s how it used to be. The one my father excitedly found growing as a weed in our yard, that his mother called quelite de monte, was green amaranth. The plant my Nanaita used the day I was introduced to this quelites recipe was spinach (not a traditional quelite, but available and delicious nonetheless). I felt nourished and was in love with the simple magic of her recipe. Since then, I make it with whatever I have around, including amaranth, spinach, chard, collards, chaya, beet greens, turnip greens, arugula, kale, and the list goes on. So here it is—-

Ingredients:

1 bunch of greens (try chard, kale, amaranth, chaya, spinach, collards, beet greens, turnip greens, arugula…)

olive oil

1 tsp coriander (ground)

1 tsp sea salt

black pepper (to taste)

2 cloves garlic (sliced)

1 handful of organic corn masa

1 cup water

lemon or lime

Instructions:

1. Thinly slice your greens

2. In a pan (I prefer to use cast iron), drizzle a little bit of olive oil (maybe a tablespoon) and saute the garlic, coriander, salt and pepper for a minute.

3. add water to the pan, then sprinkle the masa into the pan immediately (before water gets too hot) while stirring so the masa dissolves and doesn’t clump up too much.

4. Bring to a low boil, add greens and cover to simmer for just a couple of minutes (unless you’re using some of the tougher greens like collards or chaya, which you’d want to cook for a few minutes longer).

5. Remove from heat, add a little squeeze of lime (or the juice of a whole lemon or lime, like me, depending your preferences!) and serve.