Garden Vegetable Soup

I love soup so much and when the ingredients are this fresh, I love it even more. So good!

Vegetable Soup

Homegrown Veggies

Most of the ingredients in our soup today were harvested from the garden!

Snow Peas

The peas are growing like crazy out there, and needed to be picked so we are trying to incorporate them into every meal we can. 

Snow Peas

Beans

The beans are just getting started, due to late planting, but there were enough today to throw into the soup. We used a few Royal Burgundy bush beans and some green beans.

Chopped Beans & Peas

Potatoes & Carrots

The carrots aren't big yet either and needed to be thinned out in order to bulk up, so we thinned them out and used the teeny carrots in the soup.

The potatoes are still small too, but we've been harvesting a few of them anyway. We harvested a red potato plant called "Chieftain" for the soup.

Carrots & Red Potatoes

Kale

Kale isn't one of our favorite veggies, but it's great in soup so we made sure to chop a few leaves for it today. 

Kale

Fresh Herbs

The herbs have been growing well all summer and we harvest them as often as needed, and dry as many as we can for winter. Last year's herb harvest lasted all winter and we are still using some of them from 2015 this summer. We harvested parsley, thyme and oregano for the soup.

Parsley, Thyme & Oregano

We still have a bag of store-bought onions so we left the ones we planted in the garden to keep growing while we use what we already have. 

Garden Vegetable Soup Recipe

1 box vegetable soup

2 cups garden vegetable cocktail

4 cups water

1/4 cup rice

1/2 cup red lentils

1/2 cup soup mix (contains barley, lentils & various grains)

Several sprigs of parsley, thyme and oregano

3 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

Whatever vegetables in whatever amounts you want. I used:

• 2 small onions, chopped
• Handful of snow peas, trimmed and chopped
• Handful of green beans, trimmed and chopped
• 1 cup chopped carrots
• 3 cups potatoes
• 1 1/2 cups kale

Directions

I started with sautéing the onion in 1/2 cup water, then added the carrots. Next, I poured the box of vegetable broth in and then added the dried ingredients (rice, barley, etc). From there you can start adding the potatoes, beans & peas, kale and herbs, timed according to what takes longer to cook. I added the vegetable cocktail at the end, then began seasoning with the salt and pepper, tasting with every pinch to make sure it's not over-seasoned.

There are no real rules for making soup, but for it to taste good, seasonings are key. Salt is usually desired, but if you need to go low-sodium, go heavy on herbs, pepper, etc.

Pot of Soup