Soup!!!

Now that the days are getting colder and wetter, I am relearning my love for soup. Today I had a delicious 3-mushroom soup from the school food people (it's not the cafeteria so I don't know what to call it o_0). I used to hate mushrooms but I have really come to appreciate them since I went vegan. Especially shiitake mushrooms, mmmm. I've learned that not all mushrooms are alike, too. Seems like they have different tastes and textures, and I think it also depends on how they're cooked.

Take a look at some of the nutritional benefits of mushrooms.

So I have been on a quest of sorts to find an easy soup recipe that is also delicious and satisfying. I try a lot of recipes from Vegweb because I can type a specific ingredient in the search and (hopefully) find a recipe that uses it, if I have a lot of broccoli, or kale, or zucchini or something. I can also look at reviews people leave and see if I think this will be the type of thing I'll wanna eat. So I saved a recipe for a garlicy apple and squash soup a long time ago and forgot about it. Well, Saturday Danielle comes home from the dentist in need of something to eat which does not require much chewing. Unfortunately I hadn't gone shopping in a while so all we had was crunchy stuff, except for a little squash and some apples. I pulled up the recipe and decided to try it out, and it turned out great!

Here's the original recipe.

I did have to adjust it a bit. We didn't have a butternut squash... we had a flying saucer squash. Since it didn't say in the recipe how long to bake it before slicing into cubes, I just cut it into quarters at first, and baked it until it was softer and was sizzling... about 20 minutes in the toaster oven on convection bake (the temp was probably 450). Then I cut it into smaller pieces. We also did not have green apples, so we used one gala and one fuji instead. And, we also did not have vegetable stock, but that was no problem because of a brilliant invention called Better Than Bouillon No Beef Vegan Base. It's a paste made from vegetables (the company makes real beef and chicken bouillon too so watch out) and other good stuff, and it's easy to use... all you have to do is mix a tablespoon and a half with a quart of hot water and you've got good-tasting soup broth! We usually have their plain vegetable base in the house but we ran out, so we bought some no beef and no chicken ones. I wasn't sure how the no beef would go with the other ingredients in the soup but it was good.

Instead of black pepper we used a dash of red pepper flakes. Finally, we didn't have lemon juice, so we added a small ice cube of lime juice to the finished soup instead. I think this helped add the tartness that was lacking because we used normal apples rather than green ones.

To make the soup thicker, we also added soup noodles near the end since they cook pretty fast. The kind we had were like... little short pieces of angel hair, as far as shape.

For how few ingredients this soup has, it was pretty flavorful. This is definitely going on the permanent recipe list. Wish I had a picture, but the picture that goes with the original recipe is close enough to what our finished batch of soup looked like. It made about 4-5 bowlfuls.