For a portable lunch, I like to make a garden vegetable soup and a dip or pâté with cut up veggie sticks. These foods are a nice change of paste from salad and a very easy to take with you. You can put a soup into a jar and then drink it and you can put the dip in the cut up veggies into small containers and eat them like finger food.
Garden vegetable soups are also a great way to get more greens into your diet because you start off, with the blender filled with greens and vegetables but then you blend it down and it concentrates them. There’s a lot of delicious soups in my book “Raw Food Made Easy For One Or Two People.” Some of my favorites include cream of zucchini soup, garden vegetable soup, cream of tomato, cream of cucumber and gazpacho.
But I want to teach you how to improvise your own soup based on what you might have in the refrigerator. There are six basic components that go into any great tasting blended raw vegetable soup.
The first component is some kind of watery vegetable and/or greens. Watery vegetables because they blend easily and those include tomato, zucchini, celery, also red bell pepper, romaine lettuce, you could use too other greens that you could use are spinach, chard, kale so watery vegetables and/or greens.
Try not to mix together too much red and green. One tomato in an otherwise green soup is going to be fine but if it’s equal parts red and green you’re not going to have a such color. So keep it mostly red or mostly green. So that’s your first component.
Second component is water, were going to thin out our soup a little bit, it’s not a salad dressing and you don’t want to the flavors to be too concentrated so second component is water.
Third component is some kind of citrus juice, lemon, lime or orange juice is really going to perk up the flavor.
And the fourth component is a salty seasoning. You might use a natural salt such as sea salt and you can also use miso which is a fermented soybean paste. And miso gives the soup a nice deep flavor similar to stock or bullion.
The fifth component are any pungent seasonings, things like fresh herbs, spices, onion, garlic, you might put a little curry powder into a soup, so that’s the fifth component, your pungent seasonings.
And the final component is some kind of fat, that’s what’s going to make the soup really creamy. I like to use avocado in raw garden vegetable soups because it’s creamy but it’s light. But you could also use olive oil, or soaked nuts and seeds.
So let’s go ahead and put together a garden vegetable soup based on some of theses components. I’m going to use a blender for this soup to get a nice creamy consistency.
I’ll begin with those watery vegetables and greens I talked about. First I’m going to put some zucchini in, I will just coarsely chop this, the blender will take care of the rest. No need to peel the zucchini you get a lot of vitamins and other nutrients right in the peel. I think I’ll add a little bit of celery too, another watery vegetable there. I’m going to add a little bit of tomato not enough to change the color of the soup, it’s still going to be green soup but the tomato will give a nice flavor.
I’m not going to remove the seeds. Since this is a blended recipe you won’t even notice the seeds, a lot of times when I’m making a salad though I do go ahead and just remove the seeds in the tomato with my thumb and fingers because it’s not always a pleasing texture in a salad. But for a soup just go ahead and leave those seeds in.
All right so we got the vegetables in there, now some greens. I’m going to put some spinach into this soup, kale would also be delicious and so with chard. And I’m also going to put some fresh basil in here, that basil is also pungent seasoning it’s a fresh herb. But I’m using a good bit in this soup it’s going to function like a leafy green in addition to the spinach.
And just so I can get things blending I’ll go ahead and add the second component now, some water. And now for some of my seasonings, the citrus juice, I’m going to go ahead and add some lemon juice. For salty seasoning I’m going to use both a little bit of natural sea salt and also a little bit of that miso. The kind of miso that I’m most like to use is mellow white miso. You can also get red miso but it has a little bit of a stronger taste and I just want it to be very mild for this soup.
And now for the pungent seasonings, a little bit of crushed garlic and a little bit of a green onion. Green onions are milder in flavor than red or yellow onion so it won’t be too strong. And I like a little bit of spice so I will just put a little bit of cayenne pepper, just a little bit.
All right lets go ahead and blend those ingredients first before we all our fat. I like to add the fat at the end because avocadoes especially are a little bit delicate and if you over blend it could adversely effect the flavor and the color. So we’ll go ahead and get all this blend it up first.
That looks great! It’s a nice vibrant green color, that’s one thing I love about raw foods in general, they’re so colorful, so now for the avocado. I’m going to cut this avocado in half and then give it a twist to separate the half’s and to remove the pit, all you is put the bottom portion of your knife blade right into the pit and just give it a little twist, comes right out. And now I can just scoop that avocado half right into the blender, that’s nice and easy. And I will just go ahead and blend that again remembering not to over blend the avocado because we don’t want the color to change. We want it to stay that nice bright vibrant green.
And we’re done that’s a lot faster than cooking a soup, isn’t? And this is a nice thick soup I like it that way. Of course if you wanted it thinner you could just add a little bit of water. And to take it with me for lunch, I’m going to pour this into a jar because that’s easy to transport and I can drink if I’m not in a place where I can sit down and eat it with a spoon. Take that with me for lunch and of course, you could also serve it as a first course to any lunch or dinner in a bowl. This is a nice silky creamy soup. If you wanted it to be a little bit chunky, you could go ahead and dice or cut into cubes some of those vegetables that we blended in and just add them right to the bowl for a nice garnish. And there you got a delicious change of phase from salad, garden vegetable soup.
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