Vegetable Soup

Last Sunday we slept in late. When we got up, SP started preparing the vegetables for vegetable soup.

I'm not as huge a fan of soup as SP, but the last time we made vegetable soup, I really enjoyed it. I like that it is filling and has lots of vegetables and is pretty healthy/non-fattening. Sometimes it seems like we eat a lot of cheesy, fatty, creamy, saucy dishes, which I love, but...

Since I wasn't allowed to do anything too strenuous for 2-4 weeks after surgery (like exercise) and surgery plus Valentines plus Super Bowl weekend (plus SP's birthday this weekend) equals lots of treats and not-so-healthy eats, I'm feeling a bit, well, more stuffed than usual! I don't think I actually gained any weight, but I just feel like it's time for a diet change - a change from hearty, filling winter foods to lighter, spring foods. I'm ready for a diet change - I've been craving the greens that we got in our first few CSA boxes last April. Thank goodness our CSA starts in about 6 weeks. I've been thinking a lot about salads and grilled veggies and fresh berries.

But it is still February and the grill is still buried under a mound of snow, so vegetable soup seems like a good idea!

I agreed to let SP put navy beans in the soup. Beans are another 'incompatibility' - as with fish, beans are something SP loves and something I don't really like!! He soaked the beans overnight.



Sunday morning we poured chicken broth and some canned tomatoes into the crock pot and then added the navy beans, carrots, potatoes, celery, green beans (we used frozen because the fresh seemed pricey), and peas plus some seasoning (pepper, thyme, parsley) and let it slow cook all day.For the chicken soup a couple of weeks ago, SP made homemade chicken stock. This time, we used store bought. We used College Inn but we prefer an organic, low salt, boxed chicken broth that we get at Costco. We needed chicken stock one weekend and Costco was out of our usual boxed kind, so we settled for the cans of College Inn, which are OK, but not as tasty to us as the organic, boxed kind.

Sunday evening we poured the soup into a large storage container and put it in the refrigerator. Last night, we re-heated some of the soup for dinner. We figure we'll get about 3 meals from this batch of soup.It was very tasty - even the beans were OK. I ate some of them and picked some out for SP to eat. We had some Carr's crackers and soup/oyster crackers with the soup. Comforting and warming and tasty - plus lots of veggies!