soup Archives · Annie B Kay

Garlicky Leek Soup Recipe

This Garlicky Leek Soup Recipe was inspired by my love of potatoes. While there is only a little potato in it, that certain creamy potato flavor is there. The combination of potatoes, leeks, and garlic are more than the sum of their parts – they were made to sing together. Lately, I’ve been on the sub cauliflower for white potatoes in everything train, and I did stir some cauliflower into one bowl of this soup and that was delicious. In this vein (of mashed potatoes) you might top a bowl with a little grass-fed organic plain yogurt. This recipe also has a boost of plant protein with a can of white beans in there. All in all, a nutrient-dense and delicious soup, perfect for a cool spring day.

In my humble opinion, potatoes have gotten a bad rap in the healthy food world. They are rich in fiber and vitamin C, and particularly when you can find smaller colorful purple, red or gold fingerlings – all very worth the space in your garden – filled with disease-busting antioxidants.

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Garlicky Leek Soup

In honor of my love for potatoes.

Prep Time 15

Cook Time 30

Total Time 45

Servings 6

Equipment

Soup pot
Immersion blender or Regular blender

Ingredients

1 large spanish onion chopped
2 medium carrots cleaned and chopped
4-5 stalks celery chopped
6 large cloves garlic peeled, center stem removed, chopped
1 medium organic potato skin on, chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
6 cups clean water
3 large leeks sliced and rinsed
2 Tbsp thyme dry
1 15-oz can cannelloni beans (Eden brands is a good choice)
1 small bunch parsley chopped
1 pinch salt and black pepper or to taste

Instructions

Place onion, carrots, celery garlic and potato in a heavy soup pot, with olive oil, and simmer over medium heat until vegetables are soft. Add leeks and thyme and stir. Once you smell the leeks and thyme begin to cook (couple minutes), add water and beans.
Turn to medium-low and simmer 30 minutes.
If you have an immersion blender, lucky you - blend the soup. If not, use a blender (to minimize accidents, let the soup cool before you blend it). Alternatively, leave it unblended. Add parsley, black pepper and just a smidgeon of salt.
Other additions if you so choose:1/2 head cauliflower, chopped. Plain organic grass-fed yogurt.

Potato heads unite!

I hope you enjoy my Garlicky Leek Soup Recipe. For more delicious recipes, visit my Easy Healthy Recipes page.

Hungarian-inspired Mushroom Soup Recipe

I never met a mushroom I didn’t like, and I’ve had the pleasure of quite a few. It’s what inspired me to create my Hungarian-inspired Mushroom Soup Recipe.

If you ever get the chance, take a mushroom walk with the Boston Mycological Club(or your local club). They are a perfect collection of culinary, botany and sensation-seeking enthusiasts. When I went, we found baskets full of colorful beauties, then using field guides and spore patterns (the definitive method to differentiate friend or foe from a safe-to-eat perspective), we identified, divided up and took home our bounties for happy times of all sorts.

Gathering mushrooms from the wild is getting ever more popular, but I don’t do it because even though I’ve had some experience with my mycological friends, every year even expert mushroom collectors eat the wrong fungi and that’s it – they can kill you. There are such a phenomenal range of cultivated mushrooms now available, I suggest sticking with and enjoying that.

I love the mushrooms, dill, and sour cream that frame Hungarian mushroom soup. If you can find a good local organic grass-fed sour cream, then by all means, use that (grass-fed dairy has a more favorable lipid profile as well as being easier on the earth relative to its mass-market cousins). If you are dairy-free, you can substitute a bit of soy milk plus an extra squeeze of lemon to approximate the tang you’ll miss from yogurt or sour cream.

Here I’ve aimed to boost the nutrient density by loading up on herbs – both dill and parsley, as well as other vegetables, and lightened it up with yogurt rather than sour cream. I found that when I used this quantity of herbs, I needed to blend the finished product – herbs are so delicate that when they are cooked like this in a soup, they need to be blended or finely, finely chopped or their texture just isn’t what you want it to be.

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