Potato and Quinoa Stew

This is the last entry for soup month! We hope you've enjoyed making and eating these soups as much as we've enjoyed creating them for you. We're finishing things off with one of my absolute favorite soups (for making and eating!): Quinoa and Potato Stew.

A few years ago I checked out Love Soup by Anna Thomas from the library. I love soup and I'm vegetarian, so I was intrigued by this cookbook: 160 vegetarian soup recipes (hooray) plus it boasted a James Beard Foundation award winner sticker (extra bonus). Boy was I ever happy I took that book home. I cooked my way through it for weeks. Friends and family members started complaining of "soup fatigue", but I was undaunted. The recipes were outstanding! I kept that library book an embarrassingly long time. I exhausted all of my renewals and returned it to the library, only to check it out and exhaust all of my renewals again. I think I repeated this process 3 or 4 times. A family member caught wind of this ridiculousness and finally bought the book for me, likely out of pity and a bit of disbelief.

In my defense, this recipes in this book really are outstanding. There are several recipes for different types of broth and they are really delicious. I particularly liked the dark vegetable broth (it makes an amazing, if time consuming, French onion soup!). The recipes are grouped by season, which I really like, and all of the recipes I made (which was an awful lot!) were really terrific with loads and loads of flavor. My only bad experience was with the persimmon soup, but I probably should have seen that one coming. :)

One of my absolute favorites is the Quinoa Stew with Potatoes, Spinach, and Chard recipe. The quinoa and potatoes make for a really hearty, stew-like consistency and the flavors are really lovely. I've made this so many times that I've lost count, and it is always a crowd pleaser. Even people who normally give quinoa and hearty greens the side eye end up loving this soup. Over the years I've played around with it a bit. My version barely alters the original, mostly just reducing it to make a more manageable amount of soup (the original recipe makes A LOT of soup!) and adding zucchini to up the veggie count. I hope you love it as much as I do!

Spiced Cauliflower Soup with Spinach Pesto

About 8 years ago a friend of mine gave me a recipe to make a cauliflower spinach soup. I was hesitant, but it was delicious. It was bright green and loaded with flavor. Naturally I lost the recipe and have tried to re-create this creamy and flavor-rich soup with a bit of a re-mix. After much trial and error - I had only made the original soup one time after all - I created a version that had even more flavor and some elevated twists.

Sweet Potato Clam Chowder

 

We grew up having family reunions and taking family vacations to the Oregon Coast. The days were filled with sea-shell hunting, whale-watching, wave jumping, and sand-castle making. The day usually ended with all 6 kids completely covered in sand and a delicious bowl of clam chowder for dinner. We love a good clam chowder and all the memories of the coast that comes with it. Unfortunately most clam chowders are filled with lots of unhealthy ingredients. I created this recipe to include all the delicious flavors of clam chowder with cutting the fat and flour and adding a bonus veggie. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Potato Soup

Hello there! Welcome to Everyday Veggie's Soup Month! To kick-start soup month, we are going going back to the roots with our mother's classic Potato Soup. We haven't talked too much about our family here on Everyday Veggies, but it is important that we give credit where credit is due, and we definitely have to give credit for our love of veggies to our dear mother. 

That woman ^, she is probably one of the coolest women you will ever meet. Most importantly, she raised six pretty incredible daughters, and if you know all of us, you understand that is no small feat (we are kind of a handful), especially knowing that she didn't really have a mother role model (her mom passed away when our mom was three). 

My mom's mother was a very German woman, and when my mom was a teenager she was able to go back to Germany to get in touch with her roots. Mom is very proud of her German heritage and loves to make anything German. When we were growing up she made a "German" potato soup that was a staple at the Wixom household. It was one of those perfectly delicious, warm winter soups that always sounds inviting on a chilly day. And so, for our first soup during Soup Month, our dear mother is going to be guest blogging, featuring her delicious potato soup! 

Mint Green "Monstah" Smoothie

One of the things I love about January and new beginnings is trying out new ways to blend, sauté, roast, and bake with vegetables. If I'm ever needing to refocus my attention on heating nutrient-dense whole foods, my favorite go-to is a nice green smoothie. Now, there are no hard rules for these smoothies...just throw stuff in and whazz. But...if you want something the whole family will enjoy with real zingy flavor and a bit of minty flair, then look no further.