Potato soup with mustard greens

This soup comes from the French style of slow simmering, a technique that allows the vegetables to flavour the broth as it cooks. This basic technique was important in the olden days when meat stocks and ready stocks were not easy to come by or expensive.

The soup starts with slow-cooked and caramelised onions and potatoes simmered in water with the greens. The flavours are extracted from the onions, potatoes and spicy greens. they come together beautifully, giving a lovely soup. The soup is also super healthy, with a few carbs from the potatoes, but the healthy greens add lots of vitamins and other essential nutrients.

This is an early tome of over 1400 recipes for vegetarians from Deborah Madison. This volume was written to become the bible of vegetarian cooking. After her many years as a teacher and writer, she realized that there was no comprehensive primer for vegetarian cooking, no single book that taught vegetarians basic cooking techniques, how to combine ingredients, and how to present vegetarian dishes with style. This was one of my first cookbooks and it taught me that in today's meat-centric diet, vegetables can also be amazing and are never second fiddle. This is the one book every vegetarian should always have open in their kitchen.

For more recipes from this cookbook, click here.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons oil

2 onions, finely diced

1 small bay leaf

1 lb potatoes

Salt, to taste

1/2 teaspoon pepper

6 cups water or stock

4 cups mustard greens, stemmed

Parsley, minced, to garnish

Peel and cut the potatoes into uneven chunks from tiny to large. You want to do this so that some of the potatoes cook and melt into the soup giving a lovely texture.

Heat the oil in a large pot and sautè the onions and bay leaf on low heat till soft and translucent. Add the potatoes and turn up the heat to medium. Cook till the onions begin to take on colour and turn golden. Take care to toss the pan often so the onions do not burn.

Add the water, salt, and pepper and bring to a boil. Simmer for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, blanch the mustard greens in salted water for 4 minutes. Cool and chop finely.

Add the mustard greens to the soup and simmer for an additional 15 minutes. the potatoes should be very soft and begin to melt into the soup. You can also mash a few chunks with a spatula on the side of the pot and mix them x into the soup till you have a consistency that you like—taste for salt.

Serve hot garnished with parsley.