30 days of winter…day 10…basic Veg Soup

Veg Soup…the basic of basics, but this soup can have lots of uses and it’s incredibly healthy…lets learn how to make it. 

1. You can eat it as a heathy meal
2. after recovery from the flu or colds where you had a bit of low appetite, its easy to digest and full of healthy vegies.
3. use as a bulk filler for gravy (no need to add any flour or gravox)
4. use in other dishes as a thickener and a way to sneak in more veggies into your other foods.

Ingredients: 

1. Soup pack – any supermarket or fruit and veg shop should have soup packs – usually you get a turnip, parsnip, onoion, cellery sticks and a few carrots. If they put potato, I usually leave that out. 
2. 1/2 butternut pumpkin + 1/4-1/2 cabbage OR just butternut pumpkin
3. Herbs – can use Chinese herbs if you want:
   1. Dang Gui – to tonify Blood
   2. Huang Qi – for skin /wound repair, for healing, for immune system boost
   3. Bai Zhu & Fu Ling – if you have dampness
4. Flavour herbs:
   1. bay leaf + pinch of Thyme, oregano, even garam masala can be used to create a verystock base.

Add whatever you want from the herbs above.

The easiest and quickest way is to make this in a slow cooker.

1. Wash your soup pack veg. Peel or scrub and dice up roughly. Place all soup pack veg in the slow cooker. Cover with water and turn on low heat.
2. peel and cut up pumpkin, add this to slow cooker, and cover with more water so all veg are covered.
3. Cook on low heat for up to 7hrs

When it’s finished, you will need to blend through the food processor, and make sure mix is consistent.

If you used Chinese herbs you would want to pick those out of the mix as best you can before you blend it all up. Another option with herbs is to put them in a muslin bag while it’s cooking so you can easily strain them out of the soup.

I usually fill up about 6 plastic cups and freeze them for later use in other cooking, or for when I’m too busy to cook and need some vegies on the run.