Thursday, July 30, 2009

Easy as Soup

We pick up our CSA vegetables after work Wednesday and try to come out of the gate strong that night making something that uses up a good amount of vegetables all at once. Since K has yoga and doesn't come home until around 9:15 - it's up to me to cook dinner so I tend to stick with easy recipes like soup or stir fry since K is the meat griller, cooker and master chef of the house.

So last night I made one of our favorite and easiest soup recipes, Middle Eastern Chickpea Soup. Even though it is super hot and humid out, I could eat soup every night. This one is taken from Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special but since I have made it so many times, I have kind of condensed the instructions into less steps. Check out the cookbook for the recipe in its entirety, but here is my summarized version. It used the potatoes, tomatoes, onions and the swiss chard from the CSA.

Cook 2 cups diced potatoes in water until soft. Meanwhile, chop a large onion (about 2 cups) and cook in pan with a little olive oil then add 1 tbs cumin, 1 tbs coriander, 1 tsp tumeric, 1/8 -1/4 tsp cayenne (depending on your spice preference) and some salt and pepper - about 10 minutes.

If you don't have vegetable stock, save 4 cups of the potato water when potatoes are done to reuse as soup base. If you do have stock, drain potatoes when soft and add 4 cups broth. Add two cans drained and rinsed chickpeas to pot and puree. If you don't have an immersion blender or hand mixer, a real blender works (recipe actually has you do all these steps separately in a blender, pouring each item back into the pot when pureed.) Add onions to mixture and stir. Add 2 cups chopped tomatoes and 2 cups chopped swiss chard or spinach to soup. Salt and pepper to taste.

Last night we received a bag of sweet potato greens in our share so I added a handful of those leaves to the chard. We still have potatoes out the wazoo so tonight are going to roast some chicken and potatoes (didn't do it the other night as we planned since babysitting and Los Tios called) and have a friend coming over to help eat them.

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