Cream of Cauliflower Soup

This is the best soup ever.

Make it. You will thank me.

First, chop up an onion, a potato, a ton of garlic, and a head of cauliflower. Remove the peels/leaves/skins. (You may adjust these ratios if you like. One entire bag of frozen cauliflower works nearly as well as a head of fresh cauliflower.) You don’t have to chop the items up neatly or into small pieces, just get them dismantled reasonably thoroughly.

Add water – don’t overdo it; just add enough for the veggies to cook in. When they cook down, there will be plenty of liquid to go around. Add, also, a generous spoonful of Better than Bouillon. Bring to a boil, and stir occasionally. You don’t need to worry about overcooking this, so err on the side of leaving it simmering for too long rather than risking the larger chunks being underdone.

When it’s cooked, it goes through the blender. I recommend a hand blender/blender wand for this purpose, because you don’t need to do as many dishes that way, but as long as you can be reasonably sure your stand blender won’t crack at an inopportune moment and hit you in the face with hot soup, that will work just fine too. Blend and blend and blend until you have a delightful off-white purée. Then, in goes the cream!

Isn’t it bee-yoo-tee-ful? Keep adding and stirring in cream (heavy cream and light cream both work fine, and if you are on a diet, you could probably get away with half and half) until it is this color:

Season to taste with salt and white pepper. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

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Cream of Green Soup

This is an example of a soup I made up on the fly. Much as with the bean corn lime soup, you begin by sautéeing celery and onion:

I used a combination of canola oil and butter. When it was fried to my satisfaction, I added water and a wide variety of green frozen veggies:

I used broccoli, peas, spinach, kale, green beans, and zucchini and cooked ‘em. Then I threw in some Better than Bouillon and green spices (parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, yes really, plus dillweed – and salt and white pepper, which are not green, but what can you do? I would have added chives but it did not occur to me.)

Now to mess with the texture. Again, like the bean corn lime soup, this soup is thickened with a purée of its ingredients. I ladled some of the liquid and vegetables into the beaker for my hand blender and blended them.

Added back to the soup, it made a delightfully thick and chunky consistency out of what was previously water with vegetables floating in it.

Just to make this all even healthier, I added a handful of soy flakes (textured vegetable protein). I didn’t reconstitute them first – I let them pull their hot liquid out of the surrounding soup as I stirred them in and it continued to cook.

Then, because I thought of the name “cream of green”, I turned it into a cream soup by – predictably enough – adding cream to it.

It’s not that pretty a soup, I will admit, but it tastes really good.

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Bean Corn Lime Soup

This is a tasty, simple soup with a little lime kick to it. Start out by slicing up a few ribs of celery very fine and sautéing them in olive oil; mince up an onion while they sizzle away.

Add the onion and plenty of garlic:

Put one can of black beans and their liquid through the blender until they are a fine purée and drain the other can, leaving them whole:

Pour the bean purée and then the whole beans into the pot with the sautéed veggies and add some Better than Bouillon. Then add some frozen corn and turn up the heat, stirring.

Don’t thin it out with water yet – if you still want to after you add the lime juice, you can, although this soup is very nice thick and can even be used as a chip dip that way. Speaking of lime juice:

You can also use storebought lime juice (to taste), but limes were on sale the week I made this, so I bought two of them to use in my soup. In addition to lime juice, I added cilantro, cumin, salt, pepper, and a little chili powder. Mmmm.

Serve hot, over rice, under cheese, on bread, as a dip, or all by itself.

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