Category: soups

I know I’m not the only person who starts thinking about vegetables this time of year. Preferably NOT cooked in heavy cream. With salads. Yes, the after-holiday desire to diet is almost a Pavlovian instinct in us crazy humans. And I have to admit, for me, the butter-cream-cheese-heavy meals have not just been a holiday indulgence. Alas for my waistline.

But I don’t believe in diets. Drastically cutting calories in an attempt to lose 10 pounds in a month is just plain unhealthy, and everyone knows that deprivation only increases cravings and decreases willpower. So what’s a girl with a heavy cream addiction to do?
Continue reading Warming Winter Vegetable Soup

When people think of broccoli soup, the ubiquitous casserole-glue cream of broccoli usually comes to mind. I don’t know many people who consider broccoli soup high up on the list of adored foodstuffs. But you see, my love of broccoli knows no bounds. I mean, I even love the stuff on pizza. And while I do have a bit of a weakness for a heavy, creamy bowl of canned badness, I’ve never tried my hand at making my own. Of course, now that I have an immersion blender, broccoli soup had to be one of the first things I introduced it to. (Are you guys sick of hearing about the immersion blender yet? I hope not–I suspect it’s going to be a soupy winter.)

When I started looking for a recipe, though, I found myself shying away from those full of heavy cream and flour and cups upon cups of cheese. I’ve been feeling lackluster from the lack of vitamins in my diet, and my inability to get to the gym on a regular basis probably means that I should limit my intake of heavy creamy dairy just a titch. I wanted to find a recipe that really let the broccoli dominate, but I was worried about producing boring soup. This was such a conundrum, people!

Continue reading Light Broccoli Cheddar Soup with Chive-Cayenne Oil

I didn’t actually intend to make pasta dumplings. And frankly, I think this would have been better if the pasta had turned out the way I wanted it to, so I think this recipe needs a little more tweaking. I actually based this soup off a recipe that has been sitting in my overstuffed recipe folder for almost three years: Mark Bittman’s Pasta in Broth recipe from his New York Times column, The Minimalist. His recipe is minimal, all right, and I am decidedly not a minimalist. So I decided to fancy it up just a little.

What intrigued me about the original recipe is that it seemed like a really easy way to have homemade pasta. No pasta maker necessary, no endless rolling out of dough. Bittman writes that you can just pinch small pieces of dough off the ball and throw them into simmering stock. What could be easier? Sadly, it wasn’t as easy as I thought to pinch small pieces. Mine were larger, and resulted not in pasta so much as in doughy, heavy dumplings. It’s not that they were bad, just…unusual.

Continue reading Tomato and Mushroom Soup with Pasta Dumplings

This is clearly the season for soup, and thanks to my lovely mother, there will be a lot of it this week. After last week’s not so smooth (yet still delicious) black bean and butternut squash soup, she went and sent me an immersion blender. Isn’t she awesome? In order to ensure that it gets a lot of use, I’ve already planned to make three, yes, three soups this week. And no, that is not a giant bowl of mustard you see above, that is a very simple, yet very delicious buttercup Hubbard squash soup.

I wasn’t planning on squash soup, since it just seemed a little repetitive, but when I saw Hubbard squash at the Roche on Sunday I had to buy it. Oddly, they called it buttercup squash, but as it turns out it was a Hubbard. Or rather, a piece of a Hubbard. A small piece. A piece so small that, much to my surprise, it made a single bowl of soup. Now that is cooking for one.

Continue reading Impromptu Buttercup, I mean, Hubbard Squash Soup