Sola Gratia: Goodbye Summer No Recipe Soup

Otherwise known as Clean Out Your Refrigerator Soup. I haven't written about as many of my Sola Gratia cooking adventures as I would have liked to this season. I missed a few weeks because of vacation, then because  my sister was ill, then because I was swamped missing so much work, then because I was sick and so on.

The last few weeks have been a case in point. We've been far busier than I like, with more house concerts than I should have scheduled and some huge work events that even when they weren't taking my time literally, distracted my mind. So October found us letting the boys eat early too often as we scrounged later. Hence we had a refrigerator full of vegetables that we needed to use.

I love to make soup come fall anyway so I decided to make a clean out the refrigerator soup with all my Sola Gratia bounty that was beginning to wilt. I started with a pot of boiling water and a bowl full of almost gone by tomatoes. I made an x in the bottom of each one with a knife and dropped them in the boiling water for 30 seconds or so. Later when they cooled we pulled off the skins and just squished out as many seeds and juice as one or two squishes would do. It always sounds like a big bother to do this but it really only takes a few minutes so I do it more often these days. Then I chopped a few onions and started sauteeing them with handfuls of cut up pepper--- hot peppers, bell peppers...just everything I found. In the meantime I'd started simmering some chicken broth I'd made (but of course you could use water or store bought chicken stock). Once the peppers were softened a bit I tossed them, as well as the onions, into the broth. I added some salt and pepper, a few dried herbs here and there (oregano and basil I believe) and the bowl of squished tomatoes. I simmered it a bit then added a big bunch of cut up green beans, zucchini, and some slivered collard greens. I found some leftover mashed sweet potatoes in the refrigerator and dumped those in as well. I let it simmer a half hour or so then turned it off. It went into the refrigerator for a night when we needed something easy. Of course soup always gets better with a day or two in the refrigerator and this was no exception. Last night I warmed it up and added a large can of black beans which I had rinsed off. I warmed up some good bread and that was it....just a bowl of summer vegetables.

Heaven.

When Ernie got up this morning he said he was craving it so much that he had some with his coffee. I took that as a pretty darn good recommendation.