Soup's on

One cold, rainy, dreary, sniffly-sneezey, grouchy day this week - I broke out the Duo again. Vegetable-barley soup and oat-wheat bread.

This is my theory on soup: throw it in the crock-pot and you can almost never go wrong.

Repeat after me, "Guesstimate, approximate, and taste."

1/2 medium white onion
1/2 green pepper
2 stalks celery
1 cup baby carrots
2 cloves garlic (smashed and finely chopped)
1 can diced tomatoes
1/2 can kidney beans (rinsed and drained)
1/2 cup pearl barley
2 inch long squirt of tomato-paste-in-a-tube
1 1/2 quarts of low-sodium chicken stock
a liberal shake of granulated garlic (about 1 tsp)
a pinch of ground rosemary (a wee pinch - I find rosemary to be strong)
4 sprigs of thyme (can you tell I have a thyme plant on the porch?)
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper

Chop all your veggies into bite size pieces, then add everything to the crock pot. Cook 4 hours on high or 8 hours on low for very soft veggies - decrease the cooking time by an hour if you like some crunch left in your veggies.

One note - adding the raw barley into the crock pot gives a strong barely flavor to the soup in the end. For a milder barley flavor, cook the barely separately and then add it to the soup before serving.




No, we don't have snow yet - this is a pic from last winter,
but I think it captures the mood of this rainy week just perfectly