Category Archives: SOUP: Water and Vegetables

Slurp This, Not That

Not all soup is created equal. That’s like saying all chocolate is the same. I extol the merits of soup and its ability to help you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, but I feel the need to define “soup”. To avoid confusion and – in the spirit of this blog – to keep a positive spin on things, we’ll call good, healthy, diet-friendly soup “sexy soup” to distinguish it from all the other “soups” out there that are worse for you than an Italian hoagie. (Note: Italian hoagies are awesome BUT I don’t recommend eating them several times a week if you want to lose weight…unless you bike the five miles to and from the hoagie shop.)

Sexy Soup IS:

Mostly vegetables and water,

Going to maintain a liquid state in the fridge and not congeal into some sort of glop,

Less than 150 calories per 1 cup serving,

Tastes so good your kids will eat it.

Cream of Broccoli Soup, for example, is not Sexy Soup. If you remove the water, it’s really a block of cheese with one stem of broccoli added for color. Have you ever seen it when it’s cold? It’s Jello. But if you love cheese Jello like I do, then try this trick: Cook a bunch of broccoli and mix it in, about half soup and half broccoli (and water if you need to thin it out a bit). It won’t be quite as thick as the original, but at least it won’t be misleading to keep the word “broccoli” in the title anymore, and you’ll have calcium oozing out of your pores.

Canned soup is convenient, but it’s not Sexy. Some of the soup companies have created healthy lines of soup: “100% Natural”, “Light”, “Heart Healthy” and so forth. Not a bad idea, and these soups are on track calorie-wise, but each ONE cup serving gives you about 700 mg of sodium. That’s 30% of the sodium you should consume in an entire day. If they have less sodium, they add more sugar, as much as 3 teaspoons in a ONE cup serving. I don’t add that much sugar to my coffee, and I like it sweet!

Let’s not forget the main reason we love soup: it’s a warm, comforting, delicious way to eat lots of vegetables. Most canned soups don’t give you a lot of veggies; you usually get what you see on the label’s picture…a whole three carrot slices per can.

How do you make Sexy Soup that’s satisfying and rich without adding loads of dairy, salt, or sugar? The trick is to make the water feel like not-water in your mouth.

Option one: when the soup is cooked, pour half of it into a blender and blend it, then return it to the pot. Your “broth” is creamy, but there’s something left to chew. Note: this is a great way to get veggies into kids; if they pick out the carrots they can see, they still slurp down the ones they can’t.

Option two: add purees. Don’t pitch your decorative pumpkins! Did you know that pumpkins were a vegetable before they were décor? You can eat them! Not after you carve them, light a candle in them, and leave them on the doorstep for a month, no, but even in November and December, an unopened pumpkin can be cooked and consumed. Bake or microwave it, scoop out the now soft insides (not the seeds), puree it in a blender, and freeze it in little ziploc baggies to add to soups. Purees of cauliflower, yellow summer squash, and carrot also work for Sexy Soup.

Option three: add potatoes or rice. Potatoes and rice tend to thicken a broth when simmered for a while. Just make sure most of the soup is made up of colorful plants.

Option four: cheese or milk. If you add dairy, follow the Rule of Thumb for your veggie:fat ratio. One thumb of fat/dairy per one hand of veggies. Choose a strong cheese that you can taste; if a mild flavored cheese blends in too well, you may as well leave it out.

Option five: blend all of the soup and pour it into a large plastic martini glass. Put on sunglasses, heels, and lip stick, then sit by a pool and sip it through a straw. Sexy is as sexy eats!

“Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink.” Daniel 1:12

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: SOUP: Water and Vegetables. Tags: Diet, Fruit and Vegetable, healthy living, maintaining a healthy weight, SOUP: Water and Vegetables, Soups and Stews, Vegetable, Weight loss. 4 Comments

Sep. ’13

Homemade Soup in Twenty Minutes

A disclaimer before we begin: if you don’t own a food processor, the only way your soup will be ready in 20 minutes is if you use pre-chopped frozen veggies or went to culinary school and earned the nickname Flash for your chopping ability.

Don’t despair! You can still make homemade soup that is healthy, cheap, and delicious. You just might take a little longer to get it ready. Or you can plan ahead and chop the day before. Or the month before and freeze little baggies of soup-ready veggies. Or the summer before when vegetables are super cheap at the farmer’s market and you start September with three gallon sized Ziplocs full of chopped zucchini and potato and onion. You, too, can live like medieval peasants, working from dawn ‘til dusk during the harvest season and then reaping the benefits during the long cold winter. But I digress.

You have two options. The first option is Clean Out the Fridge Soup, one of my favorites. With a plethora of random leftovers, the resulting soup is different every time and you get to wash twenty little Tupperwares when you’re done. The second option is Planned Soup where you think about it ahead of time and try to match ingredients that will go well together.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: pull out all of your vegetables and meat, especially the ones that need to be used up because they’re going bad quickly. (Be brave, but not stupid. Pull it out from the back of the produce drawer; if it’s less than 50% mold, you can work with it.)

Step 2: Put the soup pot on the stove and turn the burner on to medium or medium high.

Step 3: Chop up a medium onion and mince 2-3 cloves of garlic. Don’t worry, it’s only raw garlic that make you unkissable; you can still ask your hubby to get you to bed on time! (See post from August 4^th) When the soup pot is hot (no, don’t touch it, just let your hand hover and see if it’s hot), add some fat: oil, butter, bacon, your choice, though olive oil is the healthiest. When the fat is hot, sauté the onion and garlic for a minute.

Step 4: Chop your meat up into tiny pieces and throw it in, raw or already cooked. Remember that you can mix your meats…one serving of meatloaf, a chicken leg, half a pork chop, etc.

Step 5: Chop up your veggies; smaller is generally better, but go with whatever you prefer. Sauté the veggies for a minute or two. My dad likes to add the veggies by length of cooking required so that the garlic doesn’t burn while he waits for the carrots to cook. He does carrots, broccoli, potatoes first and onion, pepper, garlic last. Soup is not an exact science; figure out what works for you.

The vegetables in soup are like a contemporary music band; the right combination creates beautiful harmonies. Onion and garlic are your lead vocals and your keyboard or guitar, water and salt/seasoning are the sound wave vibrations that your ears translate into music. Without these, it’s just not a band. (If you’re not a fan of onion and/or garlic, you need remedial eating classes. You can never have too much garlic!)

Celery, carrots, zucchini, spinach, broccoli, kale, etc are your drums. You can make a band without it, but why bother? If the point of soup is to give your body nutrients, don’t leave out the colored plants.

Corn, meat, okra, turnips, etc are the violins and harmonicas. If you like them, they add a special flare to the band. If you don’t like them, don’t add them; no harm done.

Beets are a diva with control over the volume of her own microphone. I like beets, but I don’t add them to soup unless I want beet soup. You will only taste the diva.

Step 6: Add water. Finally, right? You boil your soup just as long as you need to in order to cook everything in it. If you chop your ingredients small, they cook quickly. Ten minutes should do it. (If you add uncooked lentils or beans or rice, you just added 20-30 minutes to the recipe. Not a bad thing to do unless you want to eat in 15 minutes. Leftover cooked lentils or rice? No problem!) I add about eight cups of water. If that feels like too much for your family, start with less. If your soup gets crowded, you can always add more water later.

Step 7: Add the secret ingredient: salt. I used to have trouble making soup. At first I would throw a lot of things into a pot and serve it. My husband got a few nasty surprises since he was generally the first one to taste it, so I started sampling dinner before dishing it. If a soup didn’t taste right, I’d add a little of this or that or those and my husband would ask “did you add salt?” It only took me five years to start listening to him. Before you despair, add a little salt and taste. Add a little more and taste. It’s very hard to take extra salt back out! If you over salt, try adding potato.

The easiest way to do this is to add chicken bullion cubes or packets. Bullion gives you seasoning and salt all in one easy step. Just as with the salt, you should add one, taste. Add one, taste. This is also when you can add herbs, pepper, or spices. When in doubt, let Simon and Garfunkel guide you: add “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme”. When it tastes good, soup’s done.

Now I know some of you are panicking right now! NO recipe? That’s ludicrous! Anarchy won’t help me, Katie! Calm down and start by clicking here. It will lead you to a recipe for Potato Chicken Cheddar Soup. Experiment when you feel comfortable. Anarchy comes with practice!

The Lord gave this command to Joshua son of Nun: “Be strong and courageous, for … I myself will be with you.” Deuteronomy 31:23 (Taken completely out of context!) Be courageous to change your life!

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: SOUP: Water and Vegetables. Tags: Diet, dinner, God, healthy living, SOUP: Water and Vegetables, Soups and Stews, Vegetable, Water, Weight loss. 2 Comments

Aug. ’13

Second Week Is Soup

Just as sex combines exercise and sleep (read my last post if that came out of nowhere for you), SOUP combines two more elements that I believe are essential for weight loss and a healthy lifestyle: water and vegetables.

Our bodies are 60% water, so let’s start there. A research study showed that drinking 16oz (one bottle) of water before each meal helped people lose more weight and keep that weight off. It makes sense, right? If your stomach is full of water, there’s less room for food.

But water is so boring! Yes, yes it is. Dress it up with lemon if you have to, but chug it down. Because if your pee is still Crayola Crayon Laser Lemon Yellow after lunch, you’re not drinking enough water.

Another great reason to drink water is that if you’re drinking water, you’re not drinking soda, juice, tea, coffee, etc. Calorie-wise, that’s HUGE! Now, I love my coffee. And I love it about as close to melted coffee ice cream as you can get. So, I’m not saying that you can never drink anything other than water; I am saying that most of what you drink should be water.

^“You gave your good Spirit to instruct them. You did not withhold your manna from their mouths, and you gave them water for their thirst.” (Nehemiah 9:20, NIV)

And now, the moment you’ve all been dreading…. Time to eat your vegetables.

Yes, your mother was right.

At a family reunion a couple of years ago, I looked around at the plates of all of my skinny relatives and noticed two things when I compared their plates to mine. 1. They had less on their plate. 2. Half of their plate was covered by veggies.

Vegetables (or “rabbit food” as my siblings and I used to call them) have lots of fiber, nutrients, and vitamins and very, very few calories. (Which means you can pig out on them and that’s a good thing!) They, along with whole grains and legumes, were the original menu planned by God in the Garden of Eden.

One theory I heard is that your body will continue to crave food until all of its nutritional requirements are met. That means that if you fill your body with crap, it will ask for more in hopes that it will get the nutrients it needs. If you fill your body with vegetables, your body gets what it needs and stops asking.

So, here are a few rules for vegetables:

Rule 1: Half of your plate should be full of vegetables at lunch and dinner.

Rule 2: It is ALWAYS okay to snack on vegetables. 10am, 3pm, midnight, I don’t care…eat them until you’re sick.

Rule 3 (The Rule of Thumb): If you can do plain ol’ naked veggies, please do. I rarely can. I eat a whole lot more of them when they have a little extra flavor (read that “fat and salt”) added. So, the Rule of Thumb. Look at your hand; your palm and four fingers represent the amount of veggies you’re preparing and your thumb represents the maximum amount of “flavor” you can add to it. Bowl of green beans? Thumb of butter and salt. Baby carrots? Thumb of Ranch dressing. Keep in mind, the less fat and salt you add, the better. Perhaps it should be called the “Rule of Half a Thumb”?

You will learn to like vegetables, I promise. After eating them all the time for months, I actually started to crave them. (Don’t worry, I still like chocolate; the insanity hasn’t spread that far!)