Jacques Pépin's Simple Shortcuts For Fresh, Easy Vegetable Soup

As winter's chill nears, hot homemade soup is comforting and nourishing. Chicken noodle soup is often the go-to for most people, but if you're not a meat-eater or would just prefer a healthy bowl of veggies, there is a vast array of vegetarian soup recipes to try. Some vegetable soups, though, involve a lot of chopping and dicing, but the ever-resourceful Jacques Pépin shares a recipe in his recently updated cookbook, Jacques Pépin Quick & Simple, that lets your food processor do all the work in half the time. Pépin has taught the proper ways to weild a kitchen knife, but he also recognizes that home cooks really don't need restaurant-chef skills to prepare easy and elegant meals. His chunky vegetable soup is a perfect example of how you can serve a restaurant-worthy dinner or lunch in 40 minutes, and you won't need a kitchen staff to do the prep.

For the recipe, Pépin uses onion, cabbage, celery, scallions, carrots, zucchini, turnip, potato, and cannellini beans, but he's always been a champion for cooking with the season, so when you shop for the vegetables for the soup, choose those that are bountiful for the time of year. And one of his best tips for home chefs is not to turn your nose up at ugly produce; those bruised veggies will still make an excellent soup. Everything is sliced in the food processor in stages, and a big shortcut is you don't need to rinse the bowl every time.

Soup recipes often call for some sort of stock, but you may not have homemade stock stored in your freezer. In making Pépin's vegetable soup, you won't have to race out to the store, because his recipe uses water instead of stock. Packaged vegetable stocks can be loaded with sodium, and by simmering fresh vegetables in water, not only are you saving money, but you'll get a more pure taste of the particular vegetables you've chosen for your soup. 

Once the soup is ready to serve, Pépin adds a finishing touch of fresh parsley or basil, blitzed in the food processor with garlic and olive oil, which is then spooned on top of the plated soup. But if parsley or basil isn't appealing, experiment with other herbs, like tarragon, chives, or rosemary. Adding herbs just before serving is a technique that's similar to the Provençal soupe au pistou, a vegetable and bean soup into which pesto without pine nuts is stirred, and a Sardinian soup, s'erbuzzu, which is abundantly verdant with a melange of freshly picked herbs. Traditional basil pesto would be a fine topper for Pépin's soup, but you could also amp up the flavor by experimenting with other types of pesto, like broccoli pesto or sun-dried tomato pesto. The beauty of Pépin's recipe is that it's cost-friendly, time-saving, and adaptable to suit your tastes.