Sweet Potato-Ginger-Miso Soup

This recipe for Sweet Potato Soup with Ginger + Miso combines many of my favorite flavors--- ginger may very well be my #1 flavor-- and this soup has plenty of it! It also happens to be one of the creamiest pureed soups I've ever made. I think that it probably has something to do with the sweet potato (I don't tend to make other pureed potato soups and come to think of it, potato is indeed a creamier ingredient to puree then say, asparagus). I actually did have some regular milk on hand to use up when I made this one, so made the recipe as is; however, I think that it would be just fine with a soy milk sub. (and maybe even a vanilla soy milk sub, though I tend to keep the Silk Light plain on hand).

One thing that confused me about this recipe though was that you add the miso, and then simmer it... All my other knowledge of miso is that you should not boil it-- as boiling/heating to very high temperatures kills some of the benefit of miso. See the notes on this recipe (speaking of which, that blog title is right up my alley... hmmm.. may be adding that to my list of recipes to consider...). In any case, for this recipe I simply concluded that the miso in this recipe was not for the health benefits, rather for the flavor that it imparts. I considered waiting to add the miso, but ended up following the directions as written.

This soup is a really pretty orange color (just as the photo in the recipe linked from this post shows). Enjoy!

Sticking with the Spring

The orzo/spinach/lemon soup was spring-ish... and I kept with the spring theme last week by making a fresh asparagus cream soup (compliments of Allrecipes.com). In fact, this soup didn't use cream at all... just soy milk and soy yogurt. I actually didn't have any plain soygurt on hand, so used regular (dairy) plain yogurt instead, but I loved that allrecipes was featuring a vegan recipe that wasn't marketed as such!

My starting asparagus was good... but not great. As such, the soup was good but not great. I think that if I had excellent fresh from the farm asparagus this soup would have been super. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the slightly tart and very springy flavor this week. Warning: this soup isn't pretty. Mine was sort of an olive green puree (almost looked like split pea soup color). I think that garnishing it with a top of fresh asparagus would have helped it look nicer, but I neglected to reserve any asparagus for this and just pureed the whole bunch.

Spring Soups

Spring is here... well, it was last week and when I was deciding what soup to make I was thinking of spring flavors--- things like asparagus, fresh tangy flavors, and green. I perused the Cooking Light online files and found a recipe for Spinach, Pasta, and Pea soup. I thought that it was going to be fresh peas (which would have been more spring-like to me), but realized that "Pea" in the title was actually referring to chick peas. Given that these are a favorite of mine, I decided to make the soup.

My favorite part of the soup was the lemony broth and the orzo. The spinach in the soup was good the first day that I ate it, but whole leaves of spinach in soup that's designed to be eaten for a few days can result is slightly slimy spinach come day 3 or 4...

Nevertheless, this is a good solid recipe. I now want to find more soups with lemon based vegetable broth (basically just a bunch of fresh lemon juice and rind mixed in with regular veggie broth). Yum!