Saturday, October 4, 2014

In The Kitchen - Vegetable Beef Soup

How can you go wrong with vegetable beef soup? It's super easy and very satisfying. In my version I'll show you a couple extra steps to help build a bold flavor soup that's really pleasing to your taste buds.

You'll need ....
2 tablespoons olive oil, you can also use butter or bacon fat
1 med. onion, minced
1 head of garlic, minced
1 bag frozen green beans
3 med. carrots, diced
3 med. Yukon gold potatoes, diced
2 tablespoons corn starch, you can also use flour
1 - 3lb chuck roast, cubed
Salt & Pepper to taste
Mrs. Dash to taste
6 -8 cups beef broth

Notes:
-I always use my dutch oven when making soups, stews or chili. I just prefer the way the recipes come out. As you will see in some of the pictures, in the dutch oven you get a crust in the bottom of the pan that adds to the flavor of your dish.
-I prefer to use homemade broths, if I'm out of my homemade broths I use organic store bought broth. In this recipe I used 4 cups of homemade beef bone morrow broth and organic beef broth. I will add info about bone marrow broth at the end of this post.
-A trick I use to get the kids to eat this super healthy soup, puree when finished cooking. The soup will look like a thick creamy broth. They love it.

You'll need to ....
Salt & pepper your vegetables to taste and add about 1 teaspoon Mrs. Dash. Saute the vegetables in 1 tablespoon olive oil or butter, until lightly browned. Remove from pan. You can see in the bottom of the pan the "flavor" the vegetables left behind.


Salt & pepper the meat well. Place meat and cornstarch or flour in a zip lock bag and coat thoroughly. Brown meat in 1 tablespoon olive oil or bacon fat in same pan.



Remove meat from pan. The bottom of the pan should look like this. This is what you call "FLAVOR"!

Add 2 cups of broth to the pan to "deglaze" the bottom of the pan. This will loosen all that wonderful flavor into the broth. And you can see how dark and rich that broth looks when it's all mixed in.


Add all ingredients back into the pot. Add another 4+ cups of broth to just cover the meat and veggies.


Bring soup to a quick boil, reduce heat & simmer about an hour on low & covered. When it's done serve it up and enjoy!! 



Here is a fantastic link that talks about the health benefits and shows you how to make bone marrow broth. It's really easy, but a bit time consuming if made in a stock pot. I prefer to make it in a crock pot.