First, I'll explain the odd occurrence of my making a cream-less broccoli soup when I started out this blog by saying that I'm hoping to venture into the world of meat, cream, and butter. The truth is that I have done nothing but set up camp and make myself right at home in that world for the last two weeks, so I'm starting out 2011 with a little cleansing. Hence the cream-less recipe.
I have to say I didn't miss the cream at all. But I DID miss the butter on the bread that I used to basically eat the soup with. Who needs spoons when you have wheat oatmeal bread?
Here's how it went.
I first chopped up half of a yellow onion.
You could definitely add a whole onion to this, but Mr. T and I aren't the biggest onion fans, so I always cut back a little bit.
I then added this to a large soup pan with a good dollop of olive oil, and grated three garlic cloves in there with them. Yes, I said grated - I told my mom the other day that I was resorting to grating my garlic cloves because I was too lazy or inept to chop garlic finely enough and she looked at me like I had garlic growing out of my ears. Is it really such a bad thing to grate your garlic?
You know the next drill - I let it cook until the onions turned translucent.
Meanwhile, I cut up my heads of broccoli. I was hoping to make enough soup to serve four (this recipe ended up being about that), so I used three small heads of broccoli.
 |
No, that isn't furry broccoli, it's just my really poor photography skills. |
I chopped the broccoli up pretty small so that it would cook quickly and blend easily.
I then added it to the pot along with one cup of low-sodium vegetable broth and let it steam for about 10 minutes.
Once the broccoli was soft, I added about three more cups of broth and one 15 oz can of butter beans (you could really use any white bean here - cannellini, great northern, etc)
And then, ladies and gentleman, I did something so exciting that I had to do a little dance to celebrate. I used my new immersion blender (thank you to my sister for the Christmas present) to blend the soup smooth! Gone are the days of the dreaded "blend in small batches" in my soup recipes thanks to this most wonderful of kitchen tools! I have no pictures of this because I was too busy being ridiculously excited, blending, and dancing all at once. But after all of that I ended up with this:
And it was good.
Then came the magic - salt, black pepper and red pepper to taste, and a 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger.
I let the soup simmer for a few minutes to combine the tastes and bring it up to a good temperature, then served it in a large bowl with a slice of (alas) un-buttered wheat oatmeal bread - which Mr. T proceeded to devour in a record breaking 30 seconds.
And that was that! Delish!
So - what have I learned from this post? That I really, really need to work on my photography skills (I'm sure practice will make perfect, right?), that cream of broccoli soup can be REALLY good without the cream, and if I want to have a nice, leisurely dinner with Mr. T, make the soup a little hotter so it takes him a little longer to get it down.
No comments:
Post a Comment