Comfort food, vegan style.

This morning, I woke up with a runny nose, a sore throat, and an achy body. Being the little (whiny) trooper that I am, I trudged off to work at 6:45am, leaving my husband to recover from his Vegas vacation all cozy in our warm bed.

Life is so unfair.

So after a miserable 8 hours at my boring job, I decided I needed some comfort food. I had bought asparagus on Sunday and half was still in the fridge, so I thought cream of veggie soup would be perfect. I had made it on Sunday and loved it enough to make it again in the same week.

Behold!
I probably should have bought a better camera before starting a blog. Huh. Whatevs yo. Yet another thing I am not very fabulous at: food photography.

Anyway, for those interested enough, here's what goes into making vegan cream of veggie soup. I improvised it after reading a bunch of other recipes. It's easy enough that I can do it. That's pretty easy.

Liz's Cream of Veggie Soup

• 1 c water + 1 can swansons vegetarian broth OR 2 1/2 c water and 1 1/2 vegetarian bouillon cubes
• Half a bag of frozen veggies. Mine was a "california mix" so it was broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots
• Half a 1 pound bunch of fresh asparagus
• a few cloves of garlic
  
• 3-4 medium potatoes
• 2 tablespoons of flour
• 2 cups of soymilk or soy creamer, or regular whole milk.
• 3 tablespoons of margarine (you can probably omit this if you want, I just love the buttery taste)
• seasonings to taste. I used salt, pepper, and onion powder. If you use fancy seasonings like thyme or rosemary or whatever, more power to ya.

Add the broth and water to your soup pot. Bring to a boil. Throw in your frozen veggies. Dice up your asparagus, tossing the non edible bits and saving the tips aside. Throw the diced up asparagus into the broth.

In a separate pot, boil water and salt for the potatoes. Peel the taters and slice them kind of thin so they cook quickly. Let them boil for 15 minutes or so while the broth simmers the asparagus and veggies.

Once the taters and veggies are soft, drain the taters and add them to the broth. Take a few scoops of the veggies and set them aside to add back in later. Add the flour to the broth and let it simmer for another minute or 2, stirring it around.

Pour the contents of the pot and puree it in the blender until it's nice and smooth. At this point, it will probably look like baby food. Return the puree to the pot and add your soymilk, margarine, and reserved veggies and asparagus tips. Stir and simmer to warm up the soup again and season to taste. You are done :)

So yeah, so not fancy, but it's comfort food for me. I don't use many fancy spices and I rarely buy fresh produce, so I'm kinda happy with how it turned out. For clarification, fancy spices are any seasoning that isn't salt, pepper, onion powder, seasoning salt, or garlic salt. I have some ginger and cloves, but I only bought those for pumpkin bread. I must confess though, I saved the non edible ends of asparagus, because I heard you can make your own vegetable broth with the "throwaway" parts of veggies. They are sitting in my freezer. A project for the future I suppose. Oh and for those who may be concerned, I am feeling better now :)