A Yummy Teaser

“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.” - Laurie Colwin

Do you love soup as much as I do? Especially on a wet, blustery day like today? Well, even if you don't I just had to share the best homemade vegetable soup recipe ever! It comes from a friend of mine from college, Tara Barker, who is a pastry chef in Rockland, ME. She's also the author of a beautiful blog called A Baking Life. She happens also to have Celiac Disease (which is maybe a bit ironic for a pastry chef) so all of her recipes are gluten-free. And before you thumb your nose at the idea of gluten-free pastries, you have to try her recipes. Plus, the photos on her site are gorgeous and she's got a couple of beautiful little boys decorating her pages with their impish smiles and excited grins. But, that's beside the point.

Recently, I decided to try my hand at her recipe for "School Soup." It's basically a vegetable soup jazzed up with something called Nutritional Yeast. Hmmm, doesn't really sound all that appetizing, but what the hey, I'll try it.
I headed straight for my local health food store and bought a big plastic jar of the stuff. Well, the name of the product is definitely descriptive. It's made of inactive dried yeast and one serving provides between 130%-670% of your daily needs of Vitamins B12 and B6, Folate, Thiamin, Niacin, and Riboflavin...phew! I'm actually thinking you can't have too much of this at one time or you might OD on vitamins! Anyway, I threw in all the leftover veggies we had in the house which included broccoli, leeks, mushrooms, swiss chard, carrots, and onions along with some brown rice. Vegetable soup always tastes healthy to me but not really hearty and it usually feels a little flat, kinda boring even. But, wow, did this ever surprise me! Needless to say that big pot of soup didn't last too long in our house!

I wish I had a beautiful picture of the soup to post but I don't. Why not? Because, while the soup was super yummy and a huge hit, it wasn't really all that pretty to look at. Let me qualify here, it wasn't because of the recipe, it was more because of the copious amounts of broccoli that I included, which unfortunately seemed to have disintegrated a bit into the soup, and tinged the whole thing a slightly unpleasant shade of greenish-yellow. Ha! So, the only thing I might warn future chefs about this recipe is that if you want to use broccoli, I might put the broccoli in later in the cooking process so it holds up better, or just go ahead and puree it into a "cream of" style soup. For a beautiful picture of the soup I direct you back to Tara's site!

And, now, why does the title of this post include the word "teaser?" Well, because ladies and gentlemen, my wonderfully talented friend Tara has agreed to design a recipe just for you lovely readers and will be posting onto this site in the near(ish) future. (Her husband is also a chef, so one can imagine how serious holiday time is in their household. One might also wish to be sitting at their dinner table daily...sigh.) So, stay tuned for more beautiful food to come!

Oh, and PS, I did change one small thing to Tara's recipe. Instead of the wheat-free Tamari, I used Korean Soup Soy Sauce (국간장) to season the soup. Had to throw in a bit of flair!