Remnant Soup

Here I am three weeks into the eat local adventure and for the first time made a pot of soup.

Sometime ago I'd gotten a wild hair to make and freeze vegetable broth with the beet greens that were heading south and the first of the zucchini deliveries. I have no idea what else got tangled in there but tonight I hauled out a bag from the brew and proceeded to empty the veggie drawers to the kitchen floor.

I felt a guilty pleasure succumbing to vegetable soup so early in the year. After all, we are still eating Frog Hollow Farm peaches! But even the cute guy liked it, after he ran it through the blender; although he was more than ready for veggies after his foray with a Safeway birthday cake yesterday.

We finally used the shell beans that came in a Canvas Ranch farm bag and threw in typical soup fare, cabbage, carrots, potatoes. I used a couple of cubes of long hot red and yellow peppers I'd slow roasted, pureed and froze. The soup was festive as a result and in spite of the pieces of skin that weren't as soft as when I'd sauteed instead of slow roasted the peppers.

I pinched purple leaves of left over basil, diced a tiny yellow scalloped squash and added a slow roasted tomato that refused to be bullied onto the cookie sheet in the freezer with the others. Lastly, there was the eye of a newt, a palm sized cauliflower head I'd bought because it was cute.

Half an hour later we had soup. Unsalted because I'm nearly out of my mermaid salt that I've been tossing around like fairy dust for weeks now and I don't want to share a crystal of it. But we topped our bowls with Springhill Cheese Co. butter made at the ranch and it was magic.