Vegetable Soups for the Soul

I grow a few things in my garden that I love to cook with: lemons, lemongrass, curry leaves, grapes and a variety of soft herbs. But this year, I really want to start a fenugreek patch! Or at least, I want to try. My dream is to roll my own methi paratha, layered with lots of ghee and woven through with the chopped fenugreek leaves, then eat it while it’s still hot enough to burn my fingertips.

Fenugreek is a delicious, tender little green — sweet-scented and gently bitter. The fresh leaves aren’t always available to me, though it’s easy to find frozen or dried leaves at South Asian grocery stores (which sometimes carry the fresh stuff, too!).

Naz Deravian has a new recipe for eshkeneh-yeh adas, the Iranian stew in which you can use whichever form of the leaf you can find. It’s exactly what I want to eat right now — the warmth of onions, potatoes and lentils, seasoned with turmeric, Aleppo pepper and black pepper. The final step is slowly pouring in a stream of whisked eggs, which sets in soft, floaty strands.

If you’re looking for something vegan, there’s Lidey Heuck’s cauliflower soup. It’s creamy, but the creaminess comes from the vegetables themselves, cooked until properly soft, then blended patiently and thoroughly. Don’t worry about having leftover rosemary oil — it’ll be great to brush on a thick slice of bread before you broil it and rub it with a garlic clove to have with a bowl of soupy beans, or to dress some winter vegetables after they come out of the oven.

And if you’ve still got broccoli in the fridge after last week, consider Melissa Clark’s seared broccoli and potato soup. The technique in this recipe is really smart: You brown the broccoli florets first, just on one side but really, really deeply, so the final soup has a serious roasty-toasty flavor.

You can try that same technique with other soups, too. Though if you’d rather just freestyle a soup with whatever you’ve got, Samin Nosrat has a wonderful guide with tips!

Seared Broccoli and Potato Soup

Go to the recipe.

One More Thing!

A quick correction from last week: Broccoli rabe is not a form of broccoli, but it is a brassica. Thank you to all the readers who wrote in last Thursday. It was especially cool to see how many gardeners, across so many different parts of the world, subscribe to the Veggie (and I may need your help again with this fenugreek patch!). Thanks so much, and see you next week.

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