Category Archives: Soups

Cabbage Soup with Sauerkraut, White Beans, and Tiny Rye Croutons

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And now, ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present the next contender in my happy lineup of drab-looking-but-crazy-tasty soups.  Cabbage Soup with Sauerkraut and White BeansOh, what’s that you say?  The soup doesn’t look half bad with those perky green bits on there?  Well, those are little kale specks that I sprinkled on for the photo because I had no dill or parsley in my fridge.  For you, friends, a splash of color, since I have a feeling that all-brown soups, even if deserving, are not adequately appreciated by the food-blog-reading public.  (Oh, I crack myself up.  It’s hard to take my perceived obligations as a food blogger seriously sometimes.  Most times.  I mean, I can’t even get into Pinterest.)  And those little green specks just scream, “this soup is deserving!”…don’t they?  (Do they?)

In any case, the point is, I loved this soup.  I think you will too.  Continue reading →

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A Vegetarian Thanksgiving

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As an long-time mostly-vegetarian, I know a thing or two about vegetarian feasting in general and the Vegetarian Thanksgiving in particular.

The rules below are mine.  What are your ideas or family traditions for feeding the vegetarians on Thanksgiving?  Please share your own insights—or feel free to request advice!—in the comments. Continue reading →

Creamy Roasted Celery Soup and Vegan Cookbook Giveaway

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see more of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are July, August, and September).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your blog reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Here for the Vegan Cookbook Giveaway?  Head on down the bottom of this post.Hello, friends!  Welcome to my table.  I’m happy to be joining the Virtual Vegan Potluck for the second time today, and I hope you’ll join me in visiting many of the other participating blogs!  (If you’re making your way around the circle, click here to go forward to the tasty blog Cheerfully Vegan, or click here to go back to Cauldrons and Cupcakes, where I love living vicariously on Nicole’s Australian farm with the koalas, platypus, and wallabies–and there’s even a calf named after me!)

I’m serving soup today, and before you turn your nose up at a creamy celery soup, let me just talk to you about the roasted part of this roasted celery soup.  It’s transformative.  It’s sublime.  It makes me revel in all the things that one humble vegetable can be.  Celery is crisp and herbal when freshly sliced.  It’s aromatic and powerful when dried.  And when roasted, as it is here, celery becomes sweet and deeply flavorful, bringing an earthy umami element to this creamy soup.  Aren’t vegetables amazing? Continue reading →

Minestrone, or, My Biggest Pot of Soup

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This is a soup with a story.  It’s essentially a minestrone, so you might think that our tale is going to start in Italy, with a grandmother tending a simmering pot for hours—and you’d be partly right.  Except that this story is about my good friend’s great-grandparents, and the pot was simmering on a stove in a bar in Sacramento, California.

Now, Sacramento has a long history as a drinking town.  So from the first days of the California Gold Rush, to the speakeasies of prohibition, to—I can only imagine—the indulgences of today’s state government bigwigs, there has been a steady stream of drinking establishment clients in need of a little something to help them sober up.

Our story, this soup’s story, takes place in the respectable post-prohibition era.  So it’s the 1930’s, maybe, and later the 1940’s.  The bar is remembered in family lore only as “The Joint,” which may or may not have been its name.  It resided within what was, at the time, the oldest standing building in Sacramento.  A watering trough waited outside the door for customers arriving by horse and buggy.  And my friend’s great-grandparents, the proprietors, always kept a pot of this minestrone soup behind the bar.  The recipe, needless to say, has been passed down through the generations. Continue reading →

Lentil Chili

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At this time of year, I have chili on the brain.  It’s is basically everything I want in a winter meal: hot, filling, a little spicy, and a perfect vehicle for avocado.  I know that in the meat-chili world, there is a beans-or-no-beans question.  That question does not exist in my vegetarian chili world.  Yes, there will be beans (or, in this case, lentils).  Continue reading →

Green Spinach Soup

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What more do you need to know?  It’s a velvety, lightly lemony spinach soup.  A nearly-effortless soup.  A 15-minutes-to-the-table soup.  A vegan soup.  A painless way to drink your veggies.  And a green, green, green, green soup. Continue reading →

Shakshuka: Poached Eggs with Tomatoes and Peppers

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A new dish has come into my life recently.  I mean, it’s an old dish, maybe very old, and maybe you’ve been eating it for breakfast or dinner all your life, but I’ve only gotten to know it in recent years.  And I’m a little obsessed.  It’s called shakshuka.

It’s a Tunisian dish, or an Israeli or a Libyan dish, depending on who you ask.  All I know is that I’ve been loving a version from my local bagel shop (which also inspired that caramelized onion hummus recipe).  Shakshuka is a mildly spicy stew of tomatoes and peppers, adorned with a poached egg.  In this recipe, adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, the eggs are poached right in the tomatoes and peppers, making for a one-pot meal of the most delicious sort. Continue reading →

Chilled Beet and Yogurt Soup

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I know, I know.

I was posting hot soup recipes in July and August and now that it’s October I’m coming at you with a cold one.  I’m untraditional like that.  Let’s roll with it.

This is a beet lover’s beet soup.  And while I’m exactly not a beet lover anymore, I still speak the language.  And as beet preparations for non-beet-lovers go, this one has a lot to recommend it.  The beet’s sweet earthiness is tamed a bit here by the tang of yogurt and lemon.  And there are only five ingredients.  And oh, the color.  Continue reading →

15-Minute Pasta e Fagioli

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I want you to know something.  Just now, at 11 pm, I got up off the couch, poured leftover soup into a bowl, and garnished it with parsley to take the photo below.  Because the photo I had planned to use was admittedly drab, and because I want you to want to make this soup.  I’ve never done that before; I usually just snap a photo as I go.  Is that too ridiculous?  Is it better or worse if I tell you?

But here’s the thing: I want to you to put this recipe in your mental recipe file.  It’s an easy fix when dinner needs to be on the table in 15 minutes, and it’s a bowlful of soup when you need it most.  (I, for one, always need soup most when I’m in such a rush that I only have 15 minutes to make dinner.)

This is peasant food, which means it’s all the best things: thrifty, filling, comforting.   The name translates to “Pasta and Beans,” and those are the only essential ingredients.  I never like to pass up the chance to add vegetables to things, though, so I included my beet greens and a couple of tomatoes.  You can certainly select your own vegetables, or skip them all together.  If you’ve already got cooked chickpeas or white beans handy, you’ll be glad; otherwise just open a can and you’re ready to go.

Continue reading →

Chilled Watermelon Soup with Thai Flavors

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One of the nice things about writing a food blog, it turns out, is that you meet other people who like food. And in this networked world, you soon meet their friends, and friends-of-friends, and so it goes until you find yourself, as I often do, surrounded by people who love food, eating good food, talking about food.  Sometimes those people even cook for you. Continue reading →