Cheesy Vegan Broccoli Soup

Or; It Tastes Better Than It Looks Soup

I love soup. I really do believe that it's one of the ideal methods of food production. Soup and loaves of pretty much any kind. Everything else is great, of course, but soup takes the proverbial cake for me. Not that I've ever considered making cake soup. Don't even think it.

I had a few too many potatoes that were starting to get a little old. I've also yet to properly experiment with the nutritional yeast that I bought a while back. The potatoes alone didn't seem enough, and I had a big hankering for some broccoli soup, so here we are. I overdid it on the cumin, but it all worked out.

I don't have it in me right now to write a real recipe, but here's the basics. Take a lot of potato and a lot of broccoli and chop it all up. I'm a crazy man, I know, but I (admittedly) shave the florets off of the broccoli before boiling it down. I like to add it at the end to preserve the great color and mildly different flavor. Add a small chopped onion and boil the lot of it. I used my gallon-sized glass cooking pot and nearly overflowed the poor thing.

If you made as much soup as I did (a full gallon!) your veggies will take a while to boil. In the meantime you can take care of your spices. I always mix them up in a little bowl before adding them to whatever I'm making. That's cumin, rosemary, basil, turmeric, garlic, and epazote. Make sure to add some salt. Take it easy on the cumin and rosemary but feel free to go crazy with the turmeric and epazote. Trust me, it all works out in the end. You can see my compulsively collected broccoli florets in the foreground.

While we're waiting now for the veggies to finish boiling you can take a look at my real workstation. That's the pantry, there, with a tiny counter top. Sadly that's the only place in my entire kitchen with a plausibly usable outlet. Ridiculous, but what can you do? When the veggies are nice and soft take them to the blender. Reserve a bit of the water beforehand - we'll get back to that in a moment. Presently we're blending crazy amounts of potato and broccoli. Blend most of it to a smooth puree (how I wish for an immersion blender) and mash up the rest a little bit so that the soup is a little chunky and hearty.

Pour all of this into your original pot. Take your spice mixture and throw it into the reserved water. Whisk it all together. Add a bunch of nutritional yeast. Seriously. A bunch. Go crazy. Pour this into your soup, add some almond milk (not too much!). I made a gallon of soup and only used maybe 1/4 C of almond milk. Just make it a little creamy. Stir this entire concoction well. The colors are going to do some odd things, but just let it settle. The milk and spice/yeast mixture will look vaguely like runny cheddar cheese, which is going to turn your soup a bizarre and unsavory looking orange color, as if liquefied broccoli was looking slightly queasy. That may not be too far from truth, but the broccoli will get over it. Pretty soon the soup will be a pretty stunning green, and then you're all set. Let it simmer for a half hour or so to come together, and serve. Make sure to serve this soup with copious amounts of bread, as shown above. It's only proper. After all, this is a soup.

It turned out great. Maybe I'll write an actual recipe for it one day.

Thanks

I can't really say that I celebrate Thanksgiving anymore. It's hard for me to reconcile the holiday that most Americans celebrate with the National Day of Mourning held in Plymouth or the other events nationwide like it. Today is always a poignant reminder for me that most Americans are willfully ignorant of the history of our country and/or of the current conditions surrounding the surviving Native tribes that were here before European settlement. Today is a reminder of that history and of those conditions.

There are other issues for me as well. I can't really appreciate the comical farce of a President "pardoning" a random turkey (and what crime is being pardoned, exactly?) to the amused naivety of the rest of the populace while hundreds of millions of other turkeys are slaughtered. Ignoring any animal rights or sustainability protests I might have, this is just a part of the American habit of ignoring the dirtier aspects of our communal actions. I can't take part in that, and remembering the history and continued problems surround Thanksgiving doesn't put me in much of a celebratory mood.

I do think that there's a genuinely good spirit in the hearts of people when they sit down for Thanksgiving dinner with their family. I don't protest that, or wish for it to come to an end. I don't even truly want to see an end to Thanksgiving. I only wish that more people would bring acknowledgement and respect for history with them to the table, and maybe an honest desire to see a better America. Instead so many people - certainly not all, but probably most - bring nothing more than empty stomachs and empty minds.

So I don't celebrate. But I do give thanks.

To the land on which I stand, from which I receive sustenance, I give thanks.

To those spirits in this place that help to guide and teach me, I give thanks.

To my friends and teachers who help to support me through change, I give thanks.

And to the Ancestors of this land, to the foundation and Greater Spirit that gives life to this place, I give honor.