Moosewood Vegetable Soup with Extra Mushrooms and Alphabets

Mmm Moosewood.  Mollie Katzen's Classic cookbooks are all well worn around these parts.  I've mentioned them here before, but somehow forgot to share our favourite soup during last year's soup swap recipe posts.  

The Moosewood Vegetable Soup from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
 and it's many variations are a regular part of our fall meals around here.  There's a big pot of it boiling on the stove right now for our dinner so there's no time like the present to share this classic.


As the title suggests, this is a basic vegetable soup recipe with  bunch of great suggestions on how to mix it up.  This is our favourite way to make it, with a gazillion mushrooms and a rainbow of carrots, but it changes seasonally.

Boil together until the potatoes are just tender:


4 cups vegetable stock
1 large potato sliced thinly
a dash of sea salt




Next you'll need


2 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 large white or yellow onion chopped
1 large clove of garlic crushed
1 teaspoon of salt
4 carrots, we use a mix of orange and purple carrots
a handful of button mushrooms
a bunch of enoki mushrooms
1/2 teaspoon each; thyme, savoury, marjoram, basil
freshly ground pepper to taste

Heat a heavy skillet, add butter, olive oil, onions, garlic and salt and sauté on medium heat for 5 minutes or until onions clear. Add the remaining finely sliced vegetables and herbs.  Continue stirring for 8-10 minutes.  Add the skillet full to your pot of stock and potatoes. Simmer for another 20-30 minutes.

Before serving we add little italian soup noodles, especially the alphabet ones.  This is how my mother made it and now how we make it for our family. 
You need to cook the noodles separately or else its a big mess.  So cook one cup of soup noodles until al dente. Drain, rinse and put them in the bowls.  Serve the soup on top of the noodles, mix gentle and enjoy.

We're sending some over to a some friends with new babies, so we send the noodles separately with the instructions written on the lid of the jar.
Now I'm off to eat some.  I can't wait for a reasonable dinner hour.

project 365: week twenty nine: July 16th, 2011 - July 22nd, 2011

July 16th, 2011 Rebecca and I on the porch of my Great Grandmother's house in Oak Point New Brunswick along the St John River Valley.  The house has certainly seen better days.

July 17th, 2011 Family portrait in front of the Oak Point light house taken by Rebecca's 11 year old 3rd cousin Alexander.

July 18th, 2011 Grammy Clark's apple tree.

July 19th, 2011 A visit to our barn and Almerinda's farm in Conscecon Ontario.

July 20th, 2011 Harvesting fingerling potatoes for dinner at the farm.

July 21st, 2011 Home in Toronto for 24 hours so we harvested a bag of our potatoes. It's clearly too early but check out those Russian Blues.

July 22nd, 2011 Eating yesterday's potatoes along with some perfect Ontario mushrooms and shallots at the cottage in Haliburton Ontario.

Mmm Mmm Marla's Mushroom Mash!

Here's another one of my talented friend's delicious Soup Recipe. We are trying to name them as we eat them and Mmm Mmm Marla's Mushroom Mash! is certainly fitting. The exclamation point is part of the title.

So straight from Marla, how to make one of the best soups I've ever tasted:

First, I took enough of the garlic cloves you get in the big bags from Chinatown to cover the bottom of a 9" pie plate, and roasted them slowly covered in olive oil until they were gorgeous and smushy and sweet.

That went in the bottom of my soup pot, to which I added a little more olive oil, a good hunk of butter, three medium onions, coarsely chopped. I simmered that for 10 - 15 minutes, until the onions were golden and there were starting to be lovely little browned crusty bits of garlic skating around the bottom.

While that was happening, I took four large sweet peppers, sliced and roasted them under the broiler until the skins were black and easy to peel off.

Then, I chopped about a grocery bag full of various mushrooms, plus about six large Portobello mushrooms and added them to the pot, and liberally salted, peppered and added a handful of Emeril's Rustic Rub (you can google the recipe for that, or choose your own spices). At that time I added the peeled roasted peppers.

This simmered, with occasional stirring, for about 50 minutes until it cooked down quite a bit.

Now, here is where I would normally have added vegetable stock - but since I didn't have any but PC Organic (which has wheat and soy ingredients), I tried water.

But you should add vegetable stock, and let it simmer another ten minutes at least.

Use a stick blender, or transfer to to a regular blender, and puree until as smoooth or as chunky as you like, and cook a little longer.

Add cream and more butter to taste, and more rub to taste.

Now, because we had to be gluten-free for the swap, it still tasted too thin with the water, and I panicked. So, I cooked down another big bag of mushrooms, more onions, butter, rub, roasted and fresh garlic and added extra garlic powder, plus a whole bunch of chopped parsley and the rinds from some Parmesano Reggiano, and added that in and mixed it all with the stick blender, added it in and re-mixed it all together. That made it better - but veg stock is what I needed.