+-+FarmgirlFare.com.JPG "Recipe: Easy Spinach Soup Made with Fresh Spinach (2)")
This tasty, healthy, non-dairy soup is packed with fresh spinach and cooks up in about 40 minutes.
To me, fresh baby spinach is about as good as it gets in the vegetable department, and I could happily eat spinach salad five times a week. So you might assume that I devote a large portion of
my kitchen gardento growing spinach each year. How I wish.
Spinach is fairly easy to grow from seed, but the plants prefer a long, cool growing season, not the wildly fluctuating temperatures we have in Missouri each spring and fall.
The other problem with growing spinach is that you need to plant a lot of it. Those 'bunches' of fresh spinach for sale at the market? They're not one single clump like a head of lettuce. Each one is actually about 50 little spinach plants made up of just a few leaves apiece and bundled together with a twisty tie. Now start doing the math.
Even if I could get a decent spinach crop to grow, I'd need about two acres of plants to feed my habit, not to mention hundreds of hours to tend and harvest them. Store bought spinach is suddenly a steal.
Unfortunately, conventionally grown spinach is always near the topof the Environmental Working Group'sMost Contaminated Produce List.Thankfully fresh organic spinach is readily available.So I expend my energies in the garden growing Swiss chard (heat tolerant! cold tolerant! easy to grow from seed!) and treat myself to purchased organic spinach, which I buy by the pound and usually turn into enormous salads.
For many years, a version of the spinach soup in Margaret Fox's Cafe Beaujolais Cookbook(I love this book) was regularly featured at my dinner table. I made it with a box of frozen spinach (as does Margaret) and plain old canned chicken broth (she made her own stock), topped it off with a dollop of sour cream, and enjoyed every bowlful. Then I moved to a farm way out in the country, turned into sort of a food snob (but in a good way), and stopped making that soup. It's been years since I've even bought a can of chicken broth.
But the other night, two soon-to-be-outdated bags of organic spinach and a large bowl of rich, homemade chicken stock called out to me from behind the refrigerator door. It was 20°F outside, and there is only so much spinach salad even I can eat.
Naturally I turned back to my beloved Cafe Beaujolais recipe for guidance, but what I ended up with was like no spinach soup I'd ever had. I won't embarrass myself by admitting just how much of it I consumed in one sitting. Okay, one sitting and one standing over the pot in the kitchen. (Have you ever looked at how much of something has been eaten, known you were the only one who could possibly have eaten it, and yet started glancing frantically around the room for someone—anyone—to blame for some of its disappearance?)
Once again, top quality ingredients shine through in the simplest of preparations. And while the gist of Margaret's recipe remains the same, I've changed pretty much everything about it except the basic instructions.
A few chopped radishes as garnish add color, flavor, and a pleasant crunch.
Farmgirl Susan's Super Spinach Soup
Makes about 8 cups — adapted from Cafe Beaujolais
**Click here to print this recipe**
So what's so super about this spinach soup? It's super fast and easy to make, super delicious, andsuper good for you. It's rich and satisfying and yet contains no milk or cream. The secret to its thickness is a little uncooked white rice tossed in. If you're following Alejandro Junger's Clean program, use 3/4 cup cooked brown rice instead. Note that the texture of your soup won't be quite as smooth.
As always, I urge you to seek out local and organic ingredients; they really do make a difference. I recently discovered Lundberg Farms organic white long grain rice and love it. Their brown rices are really good too.
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound yellow or white onions, chopped (about 3 cups)
1 to 2 cloves finely chopped fresh garlic
6 cups (48 ounces) organic chicken stock, preferably homemade
1/4 cup uncooked organic white rice (or 3/4 cup cooked organic brown rice, see note above)
12 ounces fresh organic baby spinach (about 8 cups packed)
1 teaspoon salt (you may need less if your chicken stock is salty)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Optional garnishes:
Sour cream of creme fraiche
A few finely chopped spinach leaves
Chive blossoms
Chopped radishes
1. Heat the olive oil in a 4 quart pot, add the onions, and cook, stirring frequently, over medium heat until translucent and just starting to turn golden at the edges, about 7 to 10 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook 1 to 2 more minutes.
2. Add the chicken stock, turn up the heat, and bring to a boil. Add the rice, turn down the heat, and simmer, with the lid cracked, stirring every so often, for 20 minutes. (If you're using cooked brown rice, don't add it until step 3.)
3. Stir in the spinach, salt, and pepper and simmer another 5 to 7 minutes. Carefully puree the soup using a counter top blender or immersion hand blender.
4. Season to taste and serve hot, garnished if desired. Like most soups, this one tastes even better when reheated the next day.
Still hungry? You'll find links to all my sweet and savory Less Fuss, More Flavor recipes, including several more scrumptious soups, in the Farmgirl Fare Recipe Index.
©FarmgirlFare.com, the carefully blended foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares photos & stories of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres—and there's always homemade soup in the freezer.
