veggie soup for dinner.....

This might be turning into a cooking blog.....at least for now. That's what happens when your kid is home sick for a couple of days......you have to find ways to not go crazy. And I can't get to the store--the best I've done is Rexall in the last few days--and don't get me started about that.....

So, below you'll see the video--that's sort of the basic recipe. I mostly put it up there to get my feet wet with embedding, but it is pretty good for 3 minutes. It will get you started.

Soup is like Jazz. I might have read that in an article. I feel like cooking is like Jazz--that drives Joel slightly nuts. He likes me to follow the recipe. I have a hard time measuring stuff. The great thing about vegetable soup is that you can mostly put anything in there and it will be fine. I had broccoli and some rainbow chard and little baby tomatoes, so I threw all those in there.
The twist for me came in using fennel in such a savory dish--it was so fragrant and really gave the overall flavor some depth. Also, I cheated a little and started with the 4 pieces of bacon that I had left in the fridge--gave it a little bite, a little minestrone vibe.

So, the soup itself was really good, but it was the additions that really made it for me. I did the croutons, that was easy and gave it a crunch and then I did a twist on the 'pistou'.....If I had a few minutes, I would look up the word, but I just rolled with it. I mixed some italian parseley, savory, garlic, lemon zest, dijon mustard and then a dab of olive oil.....I chopped the first 4 ingredients up super fine, then added the mustard and olive oil and mashed it all up together (you could do a mortar and pestle probably). This little thing added to the soup once its in the bowl was like a flavor explosion. That, a little parmesan and the croutons made a great dinner that didn't take very long to make.