You should know right off the top here that I am just posting my efforts and tweaks on someone else's recipe. Kelly M at www.foodiefiasco.com posted this recipe and I just printed it off and followed it. She looks like a real peach and I'm kind of fascinated by her. She is a complete geek in the best and truest sense of the word. Kelly is 15 and all kinds of passionate about food. For her it started with being heavier than she wanted to be at a very young age, developed an eating disorder, and learned how to love food again and keep a healthy weight. Our paths that lead us to a healthier diet are different, but here we are, in a similar place.
I've just discovered Kelly's site, so this is my first adventure in cooking her recipes.
Kelly's pictures are much prettier, but I'm putting mine up anyway. :)
Several pictures and narration after the jump:
http://www.foodiefiasco.com/healthy-broccoli-and-cheese-soup-veganlow-fatpaleo/
Normally, I grab ingredients as I need them. This time I gathered them all ahead of time so I could take this picture, and I think it made the process go much more smoothly and saved time. I really like logic and math, so I've always had an internal debate about the efficiency of getting all the ingredients out ahead of time. On the one hand, don't I spend the same amount of time going from point A to point B while getting ingredients out of their homes? On the other hand, maybe getting all the ingredients out ahead of time means I only need to go from point A to point B once to retrieve ingredients and once to put them back. Hhmmm. Then I wonder about all those little seconds and minutes that it takes to get the ingredients ahead of time, add it to the total cook time, and then try to calculate how much time I'm standing around with nothing to do while I wait for various things to cook during the process. Please tell me I'm not the only one who has these needless and long conversations with the maths voice in your head.
I couldn't find any tape that wasn't sure to rip the paint off my ugly cupboards, so I used a post-it note to put Kelly's recipe up there.
I had a HUGE bag of fresh (not frozen which is what the recipe calls for) broccoli florets from CostCo, but I'm not sure that mattered much for this recipe. I doubled the recipe and tried to guess how much two pounds was. I added about 1/2 C water and microwaved 5 minutes.
Onions and garlic browning in EVOO:
I want to make a note here. Recipes always say onions or garlic only take a few minutes to become translucent or begin to brown. It has always been my experience that it takes much longer. This makes me doubt myself.
Almond milk coming to a boil:
Nutritional yeast, garlic powder and Dijon mustard:
Getting the pumpkin ready:
Broccoli is cooked and looks perfect. I hate if it gets too limp or loses its colour.
Pumpkin is whisked in:
Onion/garlic dumped in:
Broccoli dumped in:
Mixing it all up:
Time to get out the immersion blender. If you've visited Kelly's blog for the recipe, you can read her thoughts on immersion blenders. I agree with her. I only got one about a year ago and once I realized what it could do, I felt like a whole new area of cooking opened up to me.
This soup was surprisingly difficult to puree, and it was probably partly because the broccoli was in large florets and partly because I could have cooked the broccoli a little longer to soften it up more.
I added some Daiya mozzarella shreds. I also want you to notice my adorable mug.
This recipe is vegan, gluten free, paleo, and low fat. Kelly gives some nutrition facts based on following her recipe exactly.
Overall, I was really disappointed in this recipe. It was easy, yes. It was creative, yes. I had high hopes for this recipe. Ultimately, the broccoli and pumpkin tastes were very heavy, and there wasn't much flavour to the soup. This could have been my fault for using fresh broccoli, or over-estimating the amount of broccoli needed. After my first bowl I added in quite a bit of garlic salt, pepper and vegetable broth. It did help some. My son was also very excited about this recipe and had been asking me to make it since I first discovered it last week. He ate a bowl, but said it wasn't what he expected and probably wouldn't have another bowl.
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