Greens and Beans soup

I often make beans and greens soup but today I made greens and beans soup.  I want to not do any cooking during the work-week so all I have to do is prepare a salad every morning to split between lunch and dinner.  Then food prep takes only an hour and I'll have all my meals for the day.  It's repetitive but it doesn't bother me.  So I went to the garden and harvested a ton of greens: greens from the broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, collards and kale plants.  whew.  and some herbs.  and an eggplant.  and I combined those with all the veggies in the fridge that I normally cook, more eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms and onions.  and combined those with the beans and grains I was cooking.  Here's how I did it.

Last night I juiced 5 lbs of carrots and a bunch of celery added them to a pound of beans, 1/4 cup of purple barley, 1/4 cup of wild rice, and 1/4 cup of kamut (wheatberries), and soaked them overnight.  Here's the beans and grains before adding the juice (kind of pretty):


Cooked them up this morning for 3 hours.  Here they are cooked.  This was yummy.  I had to exercise discipline to not eat more than 2 bites of this:


I picked two lbs of greens from the garden, two lbs!

How am I going to cook up all these vegetables?  Use the food processor!   That shrinks them down.

Add some herbs from the garden:  basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary (chopped in the food processor)
Added 1 lb of eggplant, mushrooms, 1 green zucchini, 3 medium onions (like I said, whatever was in the fridge that could be cooked).

I cooked these up in two pressure cookers.  Two!   This was my crazy soup.

I dished them out into 20 1-cup servings.  20!   I ate two today, housemate ate one.  I figure I'll eat two a day, one for lunch and one for dinner.

I saved two for tomorrow, and froze the rest.  This will last me until I go on my vacation.  This is loaded, I mean loaded with greens.  And the odd thing is, it tastes quite good.  Even housemate liked it.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Here's the nutritional information for 2 servings:  327 calories, 17 g protein (17%), 2 g fat (4%), 65 g carbs (78%), 16 g fiber.

Posted on Sunday, September 4, 2011