Soups are a great comfort food – they’re warm, nourishing, and tasty, and you can usually make an excellent soup just by throwing a bunch of things into a pot. If you’d like a little more direction than that on how to whip up a good soup, we’re going to dedicate the next few of our posts to some great recipes. Today’s soup is an easy one: it uses staple ingredients that you likely already have in your pantry, it doesn’t take long at all from start to finish, and it’s not just vegetarian but also vegan. There’s some technique involved, though, so let us show you how to make this delicious soup.
You’ll need:
- Flour
- Baking powder
- Olive oil
- An onion
- 2 carrots
- Garlic
- Dried rosemary
- Dried oregano
- Dried basil
- A large potato
- Bay leaves
- Parsley
- Vegan chicken broth base – we used Orrington Farms
You’ll want to start by boiling 6 cups of water and then stirring in the broth base. While you’re preparing this, you can make your dumpling dough by mixing together a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, and a large pinch of salt. Then slowly pour in 1/2 cup of warm water and 2 tablespoons of olive oil and mix until you have a wet clump of dough.
Now slice up your carrots and chop your onion and cook them with another 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat. After 5 minutes, add in 2 finely diced garlic cloves and a generous sprinkling of the dried rosemary, basil, and oregano. Let this all cook for a few more minutes.
Dice your potato and place that in the pot along with your broth and 2 bay leaves. Let the soup come to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes.
Now you can scoop up your dumpling dough in rounded spoonfuls and gently drop them into the pot. Let these cook for 10 minutes, flipping them over halfway through.
Your soup should be done once the dumplings hold together on their own and are no longer sticky. Serve up your soup topped with parsley leaves.
This soup is surprisingly rich considering that it’s vegan: the dumplings are thick and chewy and make for a great addition to what would otherwise be just a soup with vegetables. All the herbs and veggies, plus the rich flavor of the vegan soup base, cling to the dumplings well and make everything taste great. While there is some amount of prep work involved in this recipe, it only takes about half an hour in total for this soup to come together, and we didn’t have to go out and buy any extra ingredients to make it. So we think this is a perfect quarantine meal – but make sure you check back later for more of the soups we’ve been cooking up these past few weeks.