Vegan MoFo: Garlic & Greens Soup with Garlic Bread (G is for Garlic)

G, my friends, is for geez Louise! I'm having one of those evenings. After a busy week of work and MoFo, I had planned a very simple dinner tonight (more on that shortly), something that would come together in about 5 minutes of active work. Then I decided to do some baking for a Farm Sanctuary bake sale tomorrow. I figured that I could probably get the two things I wanted to make today done by 5:30, bang out dinner and have it on the stove by 5:35 and be eating by 6.

Ha ha ha ha. G is for get real! G is for good luck! G is for going to happen comma it's not! We just finally ate at around 8:15. The soup wasn't the issue... it really was that fast. The gatastrophes (like catastrophes, but they start with G) that were my bakesale dishes accounted for the rest of the time sink.

Yes. It took me five hours to make TWO THINGS for a bake sale. Siiiiiiigh. Maybe I'll go into what went wrong with them tomorrow post bakesale when I'll probably feel better about it. But even aside from the dishes, just about everything that could go wrong in my kitchen this afternoon/evening went wrong. I broke a glass, which is not so bad-- except it was the last of an irreplaceable set, the rest of which had already been broken over time. (Don't ask me why the irreplaceable glasses were in circulation.) I finished scrubbing the kitchen counter just in time to knock over a dish of oil I'd forgotten I'd put on the counter, so I got to wash the counter all over again. I grated my finger a bit, which wouldn't have been so bad except that directly after that, I got a SPLINTER from my breadboard in it. G is for gimme a break already!

Which brings us finally to our meal. I knew I was going to need a break by today so like I said, I picked something really easy: The Garlic & Greens Soup from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Vegan Table. I knew we were going to do garlic because everyone in my house loves garlic, even the Emperor (who will eat it raw if left to his own devices). It would be wrong to do anything else. And when I saw that recipe in VT, it just looked so freaking easy that I knew it had Friday night potential.



For the record, that entire bowl of chopped garlic went into the soup.



Here's the soup itself. I absolutely love kale in soup, but I hate photographing soup with kale in it. It always looks so... swampy. Does not help that by the time this was done, natural light was long gone so color here is courtesy of my yellow kitchen bulbs.



And here's the garlic bread we made with it. I was going to make CPG's garlic bread from VT but it involved chopping more garlic so instead I did our typical home version... just a little earth balance & garlic dude dust & nooch, nothing fancy.

To my mild surprise, I really loved this soup. I expected it to be kind of bland-- you look in the ingredients list and other than the entire bulb of garlic, there's just not much to it. There are two things that really make it for me: obviously, the entire bulb of garlic. Also, the tablespoon of rice vinegar added at the end. It just brightens up the whole soup, giving it this slight tanginess that goes wonderfully with the garlic. Really excellent. If I wasn't so sick of looking at/thinking about food after my frustrating kitchen-o-rama today, I would have eaten a ton of it. As it was, I finished an entire bowl that I expected to only take a couple bites of.

Delicious. And easy. Would definitely make again.

The Emperor wouldn't try the soup (surprise) but of course, he loved the garlic bread. He was in a bit of a mood again tonight. We think he's getting a huge molar in (looks like it when we brush his teeth) and he's kind of spreading the pain around if you know what I mean. And yet somehow I got three separate shots of him looking deceptively cute. This one might be my favorite: