Garden Vegetable Soup - A Fast, Healthy and Delicious Raw Food Recipe

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 pace from salad, and they're very easy to take with you. You can put a soup into a jar and then drink it, and you can put the dip and 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 a 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 1 or 2 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 such a great color. So keep it mostly red or mostly green. So that's your first component. Second component is water. We're going to thin out our soup a little bit. It's not a salad dressing, and you don't want 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 bouillon. The fifth component are any pungent seasonings. Things like fresh herbs, spices, onions, garlic. You might put a little curry powder into a soup. So that s a 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 these 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'll 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 a 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 of 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 would chard. And I'm also going to put some fresh basil in here. Basil is also a 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 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 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'll just put a little bit of cayenne pepper. Just a little bit. All right, let's go ahead and blend those ingredients first before we add our fat. I like to add the fat at the end because avocadoes, especially, are a little bit delicate and if you over-blend them, it can adversely affect the flavor and the color. So we'll go ahead and get all of this blended up first. That looks great. It s a nice, vibrant green color. That's one thing I love about raw foods in general is they're so colorful. So now for the avocado, I'm going to cut this avocado in half and give it a twist to separate the halves. And to remove the pit, all you do is put the bottom portion of your knife plate right into the pit and just give it a little twist. It comes right out. And now I can just scoop that avocado half right into the blender. That's nice and easy. And I'll 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 it? 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 just drink it 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 can also serve it as a first-course to any lunch or dinner in a bowl. It's 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 here, you ve got a delicious change of pace from salad: garden vegetable soup.