Crock Pot Vegetable Soup
Oh what a day! I’m suffering from a viral infection, which, as you can probably imagine, is making me feel like a throbbing, painful lump of uselessness. Even my gums are throbbing, which makes it seem like my teeth are all going to fall out. To make matters worse, me and my partner “experienced” a “dialogue”, which wasn’t particularly pleasant because I got the silent treatment for the rest of the day. Some days you just can’t win, can you?
To make matters better however, I decided to opt for a bit of comfort food, and what more appropriate than some thick, wholesome, virtuous, and immensely gratifying vegetable soup! I know, I know, the usual remedy would be a large chunk of chocolate to help soothe the woes away, topped off with a half dozen paracetamol to ease the physical discomforts. Oddly however, I’m now more of a savoury food fan, which is rather strange because I used to be a sweet tooth through and through.
At times I quaff when I read comments about only eating soup when it’s wintertime and particularly cold outside (and sometimes also inside). You see, here in South East Asia, it’s never wintertime. There’s only hot, hotter, and hotter still. But I’m cool with that (pardon me 
). A hot bowl of veggie soup (filled with extra hot chili padi I may add!) is enough to send that viral infection straight to the slaughter house!
This time around I used my new acquisition – the crock pot.
It does take more patience than cooking “normally” but the fact is that it tastes (and smells) so much better.
My mother used to make a whole metric-ton of vegetable soup all-in-the-one-go (the veggie soup was about the only thing she ever got right, teeheehee!). Then she’d freeze a lot of it. I swear that frozen vegetable soup which is re-heated (of course 
) is oh so much more flavourful than when eaten straight off the bat, so to speak.
What would you call that – marinaded? Permeated? Suffused? TBH (to be honest) I should have done the same with my vegetarian butternut squash soup. I mean, I should have marinaded it for a day, but it was just so heavenly that I scoffed the lot (five bowls-worth) within about 3 hours .
Onwards:
- Recipe Type: Soup
- Cuisine: Vegetarian
- 1 15 oz (426g) tin white beans, rinsed and drained
- 2 medium to large carrots, sliced
- 3 medium broccoli florets
- 1 large onion, diced
- 1 red pepper, sliced (half cup)
- 4 medium Shitake mushrooms, sliced (1.5 cups) (use any common mushroom if Shitake not available)
- 3 cloves garlic, minced or sliced thinly
- 1 corn cob, slice corn off the cob (can use 1lb bag of frozen corn instead)
- chili (erm, okay, so I like the hottie type – chili padi, but if you don’t like the heat, you best stay out of the kitchen – it’s entirely up to you if you wish to spice things up a bit)
- ¼ small squash, (1 cup), diced (kalabasa puti in Filipino Tagalog)
- 1 medium sweet potato, (1 cup) diced (also called kamoti cue here in the Philippines)
- ½ tspn basil
- ½ tspn oregano
- 1 or 2 bay leaves
- 1 tbsp soy sauce (I prefer this to salt)
- freshly ground black pepper to your taste
- 2 cans vegetable broth (14oz/ 4g) (I used a packet-based powder, similar to Knorr or Oxo)
- 6 cups water
- Using a 6-quart slow cooker, pop-in all the ingredients.
- Cook on low setting for 6 to 8 hours.
- On serving, remember to remove the bay leaf unless you have something of a penchant for such
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Looks great. Loving your photography. Sorry to hear how crappy you have been feeling, that sucks. Hopefully you are on the mend with this soup in your belly. Cheers, Bec
Yeah, the soup was great, Bec! Mind you, I feel worse today than I did yesterday, so it didn’t quite work out in the way I was hoping
I was wondering about trying to put together a Kuching favourite called Laksa. When you are there, you really need to try it – it’s AMAZING!