Celery Soup

Yesterday I had to put my intuitive eating skills to the test, because I'd be out from 10am to 1pm. I prepared by the hunger monster by eating a late breakfast before leaving and packing my accidental crackers for snacks, but with the long walk to my car and various chores, I didn't get to eat lunch until 2!

I was going to go with my tried and true recipe for carrot ginger soup, because it's quick but packed with vitamins. However, it's the only soup I ever make, and I really should mix it up sometimes. Enter the Vitamix cookbook; the otherwise neglected origin of my favorite carrot-ginger recipe. I never use it because (a) I prefer solid foods most of the time and (b) they insist on listing calorie counts and whatnot for every single recipe, which makes things difficult for a gal trying to get saner about food. But I squashed my fears and pulled it out because I was looking for one thing: a recipe for celery soup.

Last week I wanted to buy celery because I was on a tuna sandwich kick. I didn't post about them at the time, because canned fish is nothing to brag about, but I can retrospectively assure you that there were plenty of these:


And these, of course, require celery. Unfortunately, the grocery store only sells celery in these enormous bundles of stalks, unless you want to shell out a different kind of bundle to get the tiny precut cups. Tuna salad doesn't require that much plant material. So what to do with the rest of it? Well, according to the unoffending purple volume, you two chop two cups of it and combine with:

-1 potato, cooked and cubed
-1/4 of an onion, chopped (and sautéed if you're not in a hurry)
-1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
-1/2 cup light soy milk
-teaspoon of lemon juice (because technically, the soy milk was supposed to be buttermilk)
-minced garlic and black pepper to taste


The veggies looked so pretty layered in the container that I felt bad turning on the power switch. But I quickly overcame that misgiving and whirred away....


I'm not a big celery fan, but this soup was amazing. The potato and soy milk made it unbelievably creamy, though its silky consistency doesn't come through in the photo (partly because I was impatient and snapped the picture right after it came out of the Vitamix full of bubbles). If you dip your spoon into it and let it run back into the bowl, it flows like full-fat whipping cream, and feels like it on your tongue, too!


I ate it with an obligatory protein component, though I wasn't too happy about it. These veggie burgers are okay slathered in ketchup and other strong condiments, but they're boring and fake-tasting on their own. They taste like a soy substitute through and through--but they were free from AMIL and tame the hunger monster, so I eat them. Well, gobble them so I don't have to taste much...and then revel in my soup.

Enjoy your weekends!