Recipe: Sweet Cider Red Cabbage Soup

I'm not sure if the origins of this recipe are Russian or not, but it seems a bit Russian to me.... It's a great fall dish, warming and sweet, and packed with the flavors of fall. The red cabbage gives it a beautiful color, and while it may seem to be out of your comfort zone when it comes to flavors, it's simple enough to take a risk on. This would be a nice side dish with a pork roast. Give this one a try, and see how this simple vegetarian peasant soup suits your palate.

Sweet Cider Red Cabbage Soup
(Serves 2-4.)

Ingredients:

1 medium size head red cabbage, shredded
1/4 cup chopped dates
1/2 tsp kosher salt
3 cups real apple cider (or apple juice)
1 cup water
1 regular size carrot, coarse grated

Directions: 

• In a large soup pot over medium-high heat, combine all the ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, put the lid on the pot, and simmer very slowly for 20 minutes, or until cabbage is very tender.
• Serve hot. 
• To balance the sweetness of this soup you may want to add a dollop of Greek yogurt to the top of each serving.

Create Quick Harvest Soups With These Kitchen Staples

Have you ever had a quick and easy soup recipe become slow and difficult? It's usually not that the recipe is more complicated than you thought, but that the kitchen is missing a few ingredients. Yes, those simple soup recipes are often written by folks who assume the cook has prepared their kitchen with the basics. But unfortunately, too many of us have not.

In order to make simple recipes work, there are some basic ingredients you'll need to keep in your kitchen. Let's take a look at kitchen staples that will help you speed through any simple soup  recipe and make it even simpler.

Broth

(Image courtesy of Apolonia via FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

This ingredient seems almost like a given, but some cooks still have not gotten used to having chicken, vegetable, or beef broth on hand at all times. You can, of course, get by with water as a base for your simple soup recipe, but broth adds so much flavor it would be a shame not to take advantage of this kitchen staple. You can buy canned or boxed broth, but you may want to make your own to save money - it's so easy to make, and it tastes better too! Plan a day to simmer chicken, vegetables, or a beef bone for hours and you'll have a rich broth ready when you are. Then cool, strain into freezer-safe containers, and freeze until needed.  If standing over a pot doesn't thrill you, just throw the ingredients in your crockpot and let it cook all day. Either way, creating big quantities of broth and having it in the freezer is a big help when it comes time to make your quick soups and stews.

Chopped Vegetables

Soup making time can be cut drastically when you prepare at least some of the vegetables ahead of time and store them. These vegetables would include the ones we use most often as the basis for any soup – onion, celery, carrots, etc. As soon as you get home from the grocery store, wash and dice these vegetables, then store separately in zipper food bags either in the refrigerator or in the freezer. Then, when the recipe calls for the standard “saute onion, celery, and carrots” step, you are ahead of the game. Stopping to chop these basic vegetables takes time, which is something we are trying to avoid by making simple soups to begin with. This is a kitchen staple everyone needs to keep on hand. If you're harvesting them from your garden and you have a lot of them, you can also dice and freeze in freezer bags for winter.

Seasoning Blends

It doesn't matter what the blend is, having a favorite pre-mixed seasoning blend of any kind or flavor helps the busy cook with the creative process. Instead of stopping to search, measure, or think about substitutions, grab a seasoning blend you like and sprinkle it in the soup. It's like decorating a house; if you buy the styles you like, the house will look nicely decorated. That's because we all tend to lean toward the same styles over and over, making the house unified and pleasing to your taste. Likes and dislikes in flavors and seasonings are the same. Use seasonings you find tasty and your soup will please you, too. Once you find a seasoning blend you like, or several blends you like, stock up - or make your own. Now when you are following a recipe that has a list of spices as long as your arm, you can skip the frustration and grab your favorite seasoning blend and move on.

Any Starch

A quick and easy soup recipe can sometimes be on the watery side. Part of this may be because there just isn't a lot of cooking time involved, or a lot of ingredients, or both. Some recipes solve this by turning the soup into a blender to puree. This works just fine, but there are soup recipes you might want to serve chunky. Keep potatoes, pasta, and rice on hand to add body to your soup. These starches will thicken the broth without adding a lot of extra work. Both pasta and rice can be added to the soup raw or cooked, but raw will provide a little more thickening power.

These kitchen staples are particularly helpful when making simple soup recipes. Be sure to have the basics on hand in your pantry, refrigerator, or freezer and you can have your soup on the table quickly and easily, just like the recipe says!

Fast & Fresh Meals From Your Garden

Planting a vegetable garden is work – often a lot of work. Depending on the scale of your operation, you'll probably have your hands full during the growing season. What with planning, tilling, planting, weeding, watering, and more weeding, and more watering, there doesn't seem to be much time left over to relax and enjoy the results!

After all that work, when it's time to harvest, you want to get to the eating part fast! Let's look at a few ideas for dishes you can quickly prepare from both your summer garden and your fall garden.

Summer Garden Soups

You don't have to wait for the fall harvest to create soups! The summer garden provides ample opportunity to serve up big pots of satisfying soups. Cold soups are a great time saver, and so delicious and refreshing after a hot day spent in the garden. Pick ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions and you have the basis for a cold soup such as gazpacho. Blended sweet pea soup is another favorite. Get out your blender, or invest in an immersion blender, and throw your summer vegetables in to make creamy cold soups that are filling and ready in minutes.

Summer Garden Salads

(Image courtesy of Apolonia at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Of course, salad ingredients are there for the picking right under your nose. But, don't forget some of the less obvious choices in your garden. Pea vines are becoming very popular in salads. They have a very delicate flavor and are so economical, and prolific! Also, those zucchini don't have to get gigantic before you can eat them. Pick tiny zucchini, and the blossoms, too, and use them in salads for a delicious and pretty addition to your meals. Walk around your summer garden and you'll find tender greens, blossoms, and all sorts of young sprouts to quickly pluck and add to your salad; ingredients like baby broccoli buds, tiny beets clinging to their tender greens, and itsy-bitsy radishes. Just wash them up and toss them into a salad. Cucumbers can also be the star of a salad, not just a bit player. A big bowl of young cucumbers, sliced and marinated with fresh herbs, vinegar, and olive oil is a wonderful treat on a hot summer day! Or try my favorite - dice a few ripe tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers, toss with fresh, snipped dill, olive oil, and balsamic or red wine vinegar, then sprinkle on some crumbled feta cheese and sliced black olives. I could eat this every day!

Fall Garden Soups

When the season changes and nights start getting colder, you need a nice bowl of hot soup to finish off the day. But, you don't have to stand in front of the stove for hours to make a soup that's satisfying. When the vegetables are right out of the garden, the flavors will do the magic without hours of cooking. Harvest an armful of squash, onions, beans, carrots, rutabaga, potatoes, and any other vegetables you can pick or dig, then scrub and dice them. The trick here is to roast them for a few minutes to sweeten and intensify the flavor, then throw them in a big pot with water or broth and simmer for just a few minutes. When the vegetables are tender, it's time to dig in. It's delicious simplicity at its best!

(Image courtesy of Apolonia at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Fall Garden Salads

It may seem like summer is the time for salads, but not when you have such lovely fresh fall vegetables to choose from! For a delightful cold salad, cut beets in half and roast them just until knife tender, then peel them, dice them and refrigerate. Once they are cold, toss the beets in a bowl with chopped onion, vinegar or salad dressing, then top with some crumbled goat cheese or feta cheese. Any fall vegetable such as squash, sweet potatoes, or even pumpkin can be diced and roasted and then tossed with tangy oil and vinegar dressing for a filling salad. If you have the end of the season tomatoes still hanging on, you can blend those, strain the juice, and create lovely creamy dressings. And check your pepper plants! You may be surprised with a few that have turned a gorgeous red color and are just waiting to be chopped up and tossed in with a big bowl of shredded cabbage.

Walk around your garden any season and think about what you could do with your harvest without spending a lot of time in the kitchen. It's really quite easy to turn your fresh produce into delicious soups and salads without fussing with lots of ingredients or preparation. A well tended garden will always provide satisfying meals in minutes – all it needs is your imagination!