Everything green soup
with broccoli-Cheddar sensibilities
A newsletter devoted to using what you have what you want.
Ever want to clear the decks? To empty everything from the vegetable drawer into a pot (not the trash!), cook it with some water, blend it, and see how it goes?
Stone soup. Everything soup. Garbage soup (with respect). It usually works — if you bury it under cheese. But cheese aside, there’s another single step that turns any blended vegetable soup from swamp to suave.
I learned it over a decade ago from my former boss at Food52, Kristen Miglore. When I miss peering over to see what she was working on, I reread her Genius Recipes books and column — and one from 2014 in particular, Anna Thomas’s green soup, showed me the promise of blended soup.
The recipe, adapted from Love Soup, seems so typical in parts and process that I probably wouldn’t think it was all that had I not tried it the day they were photographing it. But it tastes rich and substantial, not thin or fleeting, because of one step: a big onion slowly sautéed in oil until sweet and golden. That onion does real work. It gives the soup depth and sweetness that drowns out any vegetable murk.
The rest is flexible — seemingly endlessly so. Add whatever vegetables you have. Include one that brings starchiness to thicken the water (sweet potato, potato, squash, mushrooms). Keep the added liquid minimal so the vegetables make their own broth. Cook until tender. Then blend.
To test the bounds of this structure, today’s recipe uses, um, the majority of the vegetables in my 40 ingredients. It reminds me of broccoli-cheddar soup and not of the mish-mash that’s in it.
Admittedly, chopping and sautéing onions is one of my culinary red lights. I avoid it as much as possible because I rush it, my cuts are uneven, and the results show — burnt bits here, crunchy, sharp bits there. Still, this is one case where it’s worth pushing through (and the recipe includes a trick to smooth out any especially problematic onion pieces).
