I mean, duh. I know it’s no longer soup season, but i just can’t give it up.

Anyway, as is typical of Italian families, whenever any long-lost cousin gets married or dies, we’re all expected to be there. This can be a royal pain in the ass when you are mourning the death of the father of the husband of a cousin you’ve never met, but it can totally rule when the wedding dinner includes wedding soup—or at least, it ruled in my meat-eating days. Wedding soup is, in my opinion, the ultimate soup. It’s like the entire food pyramid in your bowl! And veg-izing it wasn’t even too difficult, given the meat-alternatives on the market today. I know they aren’t the healthiest thing ever, but your life will [probably] go on.

Vegan Wedding Soup

You will need (for 3-4 servings):

Base:
½ yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, diced (this is a LOT. Use 1 or 2 if you’re not down with stinking for days)
2 stalks celery, chopped
Olive oil
Dried oregano
2-3 cups vegetable stock. In soups, I usually use a combination of stock and water with a vegetable bouillon cube…or if you are a better human being than me, make your own broth. I am not that great.
1/8 – ¼ cup uncooked small pasta such as acini pepe (Italian for “peppercorns”) or pastina (Italian for “tiny dough”.) I actually used a bigger star-shaped pasta, because I’m emo or something
Bunch of greens, chopped. Any kind will do. Escarole is traditional, I used spinach because I had it around.
Fresh parsley, chopped

‘Meat’balls:
¼ tube of Gimme Lean, either sausage or beef-style
Dried Italian seasoning

‘Chicken’
½ pound seitan, store bought or homemade
olive oil
lemon juice
Dried Italian seasoning
Garlic powder
Salt and pepper

Okay so, I know that seems like a lot of ingredients, but it’s really not. I actually started this soup the night before so prep on the day of would go quickly. Start with the ‘meat’balls. Take the Gimme Lean (you can find this at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and supermarkets that are not crappy, in the refrigerated section.) Add seasoning as you see fit, and roll into tiny balls. Heat a bit of olive oil in a skillet and cook the meatballs until just browned on the outside. When they were done, I let them cool in the pan and then put them in a plastic container in the fridge.
Next, the ‘chicken.’ Cut the seitan into chicken-like, bite-size pieces. You know what I mean, think chicken noodle soup. Throw it in a Ziploc bag with a glug of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice and the herbs/spices. I have no measurements for any of this and I don’t think it really matters too much. Add some chopped fresh parsley if you’re feeling saucy. Toss the seitan to coat and stash it in the fridge. The next day when I went to make the soup, I just dumped the whole mess into a pan and stirred it around until the seitan was a little crispy and browned.

So, that’s all the pre-soup work. Now, to make the soup itself. Heat some olive oil in a pot and add the onion and celery. I’m pretty sure celery isn’t traditional in this soup, but I like celery in all soups, so you can omit it if you want. Cook until onions are translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Add the garlic and a good amount of dried oregano and cook, stirring often, another minute or so. Add the stock/broth/water/bouillon/whatever you’re using, and bring to a boil. Pour in the pasta and cook about 5 minutes. Add the meatballs and browned seitan. Stir it all around and taste-test until your pasta is cooked to your liking. Add the greens and stir until they wilt. Add the chopped parsley and you’re done!

A word to the wise- eat this soup the night you make it. While many soups are great, sometimes even better, when they’ve had a day to hang out and are reheated, the meatballs get SICK NASTY in the broth overnight. So either eat it all that night, or pull the meatballs out before you refrigerate it.

So I finally installed a spam comment blocker, and all is well with the world.

Except the flu.
I was seriously laid up all weekend, leaving the house only to go to an optometrist appointment I’d had scheduled for about a month, and to pick up some groceries yesterday afternoon when I was feeling a bit better.

So needless to say, I needed some soup and I didn’t feel like inventing any. Normally I don’t publish other people’s recipes, so this is an exception. I made Chickpea Noodle Soup, recipe by Isa Chandra Moskowitz who wrote Veganonicon, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan with a Vengeance (catch the pattern?) She is also one of the masterminds behind The Post Punk Kitchen, a site I waste many a work hour on.

So here we go. I made a few adjustments to this, and they are noted below.

Chickpea Noodle Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, sliced thinly
1 cup chopped baby carrots
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups sliced cremini mushrooms
1/2 teaspoon celery seeds
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed in your fingers
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 tablespoons mirin (optional, and I didn’t use it)
1/3 cup brown rice miso (made a substitution here. Apparently our local grocery store chain had some dispute with their miso supplier and had yet to find a new one, so they didn’t have any. To substitute, I found one of those packets of instant vegan miso soup and poured the powder into a bowl, removing the dehydrated chunks of tofu and green onions and used that. A little shoddy, but it did the trick. I am sure this soup would be much better with actual miso. Sigh.)
6 cups water or vegetable stock (used 4 cups vegetable stock, 2 cups of water and one veggie bouillon cube)
1 (15-ounce) can, drained and rinsed (I used two cans for MORE CHICKPEA)
6 ounces soba noodles
Spinach

In a soup pot over medium-high heat, sauté the onions and carrots in the oil for about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, mushrooms, and herbs, and sauté for another 5 minutes. Deglaze the pot with the mirin (or just a splash of water). Add the broth/water and the chickpeas. Cover and bring to a boil.

Once the broth is boiling, break the soba noodles into thirds and throw them in. Lower the heat to medium so that the soup is at a low boil. Cover and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the miso and stir until it’s incorporated. Taste and adjust the salt, and add a little extra miso if you would like a stronger, saltier flavor. (At this point, I also added a few handfuls of spinach. You could also use escarole, kale, chard or whatever you have on hand.)

This soup was delicious. The recipe makes enough for 6 servings, and I definitely ate it for lunch on Saturday and Sunday and still have a whole lot left over. One thing to note is that soba noodles will continue to soak up broth in the fridge, so have a little extra broth in a separate container to mix in (I boiled 2 cups of water with a veggie bouillon cube, and a pinch each of thyme, rosemary and celery seeds.)

Even Rob liked this. Seriously, discovering that Rob likes chickpeas has been a revelation in our house. He ate around the mushrooms, but otherwise cleaned his bowl. SHOCK AND AWE!

Butternut Squash and Black Bean Chili

I made a big batch of this stuff for RAMBOTHON, which was this year’s version of ROCKATHON, in which a bunch of people came over to mine and Rob’s house early in the day, and we watched all three old Rambo movies and then walked to the theater to see the fourth. All that blood and guts and violence can really make you hungry, and this chili went really fast. Actually, in honor of RAMBOTHON, I’m renaming this to…

BLOOD AND GUTS CHILI

Okay. This was what I used to feed about 8 people, so by all means, scale back if need be.

You will need:
Olive oil
1 or 2 white onions, diced (pureed! You know the story). I used one big one and one small one
3 chili peppers (I’ll get to this in a minute)
2 medium butternut squashes
Handful of grated carrot
1 big can of pureed tomatoes (oh, how I wish it was summer…)
1 big can of whole peeled tomatoes
2-3 cups vegetable broth, depending on how thick you like your chili
2 cans black beans, drained
2 cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained
Lots and lots of cilantro
Lots of chili powder- 4 or 5 TBS?
Salt

Start out by roasting the squash. Now, you could cube it raw and sauté it in the pot but I don’t have a sharp enough knife to do this without losing a finger. Thus, we get out the saw and cut the squash in half and roast it that way. Think I’m joking? Here.

Yes, I realize this is actually a rutabaga. I didn’t get pictures of Rob cutting squash with the saw, but you get the idea.

Anyway, you’ll cut/saw it in half, scrape out the seeds, drizzle it with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place the halves cut side up in a 13×9 in pan (or whatever) with an inch or two of water in the pan, and roast it for 35-40 minutes at 450 degrees. Once it’s done and cooled, you’ll be able to slice it and cut the peel away easily. Cut into cubes and set aside.

Okay. Heat some oil in your biggest pot and sauté the onion and carrot together for a few minutes. Add the diced chili peppers.

(Oh, about those. I use these little red guys but it is difficult to tell how spicy they will be. My advice is to buy more than you need and taste them first. Use the leftovers to make salsa or something. Anyway, I used three in this. Also, this is not my photo, and in googling the phrase “red chili pepper,” I got many photos of Anthony Kiedis.)

So, add the diced chili peppers and cook for a minute or two. Stir in the chili powder (which, by the way, is not spicy. Why is that??) until well incorporated, or so it looks.
Add the cans of tomatoes with liquid, the vegetable broth and about ¼ tsp salt. Bring this to a boil and then reduce heat to low. Simmer about 30 minutes, stirring every so often and breaking up the big tomatoes.

After 30 mins, stir in the chickpeas and black beans. I think I really used about 1.5 cans of each, not 2. Add the cubed squash and bring the whole thing back to a boil. Simmer 15 minutes. Remove from heat, add handfuls upon handfuls of chopped cilantro. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Sorry the pictures are so dark.

This was actually a monumental meal in our house because it revealed that ROB LIKES CHICKPEAS. After insisting for months that he didn’t (having never eaten one.) This changes things. I honestly can’t remember the hot dog count for this one, so I’ll just say MAXIMUM AWESOME and leave it at that.

So, I’m a total dweeb, seriously. Do people still say dweeb? I’m a dweeb. Whenever people would mention to me in public that they’d seen my food blog, I’d get all embarrassed and feel like a loser. And I decided I wasn’t going to do it because I wanted to be cool. You know.

And then people started asking me what happened to it, and it was way more embarrassing to say that I didn’t want to do it anymore because I wanted to be cool, so fuck it, here’s some soup.

Seven-Veggie Soup

This technically has eight vegetables in it, but Rob said that Seven-Veggie Soup was a catchier name, so let’s go with that. You could use whatever you wanted, really. I had started out intending to make traditional minestrone, or at least what I thought traditional minestrone was, but as it turns out, there are no hard and fast rules to minestrone.

So, here we go. I had some zucchini and the very, very last of the summer squash. It looked a little anemic, but I figured it’d be okay. Dice these both into bite size pieces. Heat some olive oil in the bottom of a big pot, and add a clove or two of minced garlic, and maybe half an onion. Sautee them until they are soft and fragrant. This, incidentally, is the beginning to every good recipe for soup, and also for tomato sauce. I love this method, it just feels so familiar and smells so good. Anyway, enough dweebiness. I added a few shakes of dried oregano. You could use dried basil, or Italian seasoning, or whatever you like. The key to cooking with dried herbs is to add them at the beginning so they have time to release their flavors. When using fresh herbs, add them at the end so they don’t lose all their flavor in cooking.

Throw in your chopped zucchini and squash and stir. I also threw in a diced red pepper at this point, which I thought was really good, but Rob was not sold on. Also, I’d had half a bag of frozen corn leftover from something, and I added that too. Cook about 5 minutes until the veggies are soft, then add a can of crushed tomatoes. The big can. If it had been summer, I’d have pureed some fresh tomatoes, but it’s not, so canned it is. Pour in 2 cans of vegetable broth and bring it to a boil. Once it’s boiling, lower the heat a bit and simmer, covered, for 15-20 minutes.

Add a can of drained white beans. I used navy beans, which prompted me to keep singing that line from that terrible Adam Sandler song that just goes, “navy beans navy beans navy beans!” Clearly you know exactly what I’m talking about. Also add about a ½ a cup of uncooked small pasta. I actually ended up putting more in because I thought it didn’t look like enough, but I was wrong. ½ cup it is. I used ditalini, because that’s what I thought was usually in minestrone. Cook until the pasta is tender, about 10 minutes. Just keep trying it. Once the pasta is tender, throw in a big handful of spinach and let it wilt for a few minutes, then remove the soup from heat. Season with salt and pepper if need be, add a little fresh basil if you want, and serve.

I garnished with freshly grated asiago cheese, because Rob gets antsy if he doesn’t get at least some animal-product in him, but this would certainly be a good vegan soup otherwise.

I wish the picture had come out a bit better, because the soup was definitely more red and vibrant than this, but oh well. Rob says he was pleasantly surprised and went into it timidly, which isn’t surprising because we recently had someone who knows him well convinced that Rob is allergic to vegetables.

Eight hot dogs. Woo!

 Potato-Rosemary Soup 

Anyway.
MMMM soup. Around this time of year, I’m pretty much obsessed with soup. It’s liquid, it’s chunky, it’s WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE.

Anyway, I had made this soup a few weeks ago when Rob went out in the cold to play paintball with his coworkers (yeah– I don’t know why, either.) and then promptly forgot to write down what I put in it. So I tried to recreate it last night and paid closer attention this time around.

In a large pot, sauté the following in a bit of olive oil:
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 celery ribs, chopped (leaves and all)
1 white onion, chopped (because Rob is so afraid of big chunks of onions, I always puree them before I put them in soup or sauce. It’s actually pretty nice, except that when you go to sauté pureed onion, it will burn your eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Seriously, do NOT lean over that pot.)

Sauté these all for a few minutes until the celery seems tender. Add to this two cans of vegetable broth and 12 small red potatoes, quartered (this is about 2 pounds, I’d guess.)
Cover and let boil, then cook about 15 minutes or until the potatoes are tender.

Once the potatoes are cooked to your liking, take out about 10 of the quartered potato pieces and set them aside. To the soup, stir in a few glugs of balf-and-half (I never said this was fat free, did I?) until the soup begins to turn white/light brown. Ew! It tastes better than it sounds, I promise.

Working in batches if you’re me, or all at once if you’re an awesome person that owns a big food processor, puree the soup until it is a thick consistency. Return to pot and add salt and pepper generously. Simmer for a bit, and add more half-and-half if you want it to be a lighter color, a bit of water for a thinner soup, etc.

Sprinkle the potato pieces you left out with some salt and cut them into smaller chunks. You could either put them back in the soup now, or divide them among the bowls once it’s been served.

Chop a few sprigs worth of rosemary very finely and add it to the soup. I find that rosemary flavor gets weak very quickly when cooked in soup, but if you don’t cook it long enough, it’ll be overbearing. Just keep tasting, you’ll know when it’s ready.

Ladle into bowls and add the remaining potatoes, if you didn’t before. Garnish with a sprig of rosemary (come on, like you’re ever gonna use all the rosemary that comes in that package) and eat.

This soup is awesome with stale-ish bread, oyster crackers, and watching the X-Files on DVD in bed with your loved one. Um, not that that’s what we do. We’re exciting and fun, I swear!

Rob gave it 8 hot dogs. Awesome!

So for a few days there, it really felt like fall in Western PA. But then the temperatures rose again, and I think the high is like 70 today. But no matter, because technically it is fall, and that means I’m making soup.

At Rob’s suggestion, I made clam chowder. I’d never done this before, so I had to read through a few recipes to try to adapt them. Apparently, clam chowder is serious business. I mean it—people in the Northeast are crazy about their clam chowder. Being from Pittsburgh, which some will argue is the Northeast, some will argue is the Midwest, I’m far less concerned. So if this recipe is not “authentic” (and I know it isn’t), don’t complain! This recipe made two very large bowls of soup–we definitely didn’t finish them!

2 eight-ounce bottles clam juice
about ½ pound red potatoes, unpeeled, cut into bite size pieces
1 tablespoon butter
1 cups chopped white onions
2 stalks of celery, chopped well (including the leaves, they are so good!)
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup flour
3 six-and-a-half-ounce cans chopped clams, drained, juices reserved
1/2 cups half and half
squirt of Sriracha (see a pattern with this?)
salt n pepa

So, pour the clam juice into a pot and add the potatoes. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat a bit to cook the potatoes—around 10 minutes, depending on how big the potato chunks are. This will make your kitchen smell a bit bad, because let’s face it, clam juice is kind of gross. Remove from heat and set aside.

In another pot, melt the butter. Add the celery, onions, garlic and bay leaf, cook until the veggies are soft (5-7 minutes, maybe?) Stir in the flour slowly and whisk like hell. Don’t let it brown. Cook about 2 minutes, stirring constantly, and then slowly begin adding the reserved juice from the clams. Keep whisking…build those whisking muscles. Try to break up any clumps of flour and veggies. Add the potatoes with the clam juice they were boiled in, half and half, canned clams and the Sriracha. Stir well and allow to simmer, stirring frequently, for 10-15 minutes, just to let it get hot, let the flavors blend and the soup thicken. Be sure to take the bay leaf out, that’s a surprise that no one wants. Season chowder with salt and pepper and slurp away.

I served it with a sprinkling of parsley and some sourdough bread. You know what, this was damn good. It would definitely have been better with fresh clams, but when you’re landlocked in the fall, you do what you can.

Rob’s review:
Also 9/10 hot dogs!

You know, I’m beginning to think Rob’s being overly nice on the giving of hot dogs because he has to live with me. If you’d like to become a hot dog rater, please come over for dinner.