Easy Vegetable Soup Recipe ｜ Beyond Easy!

Hey, I'm John Kanell. And today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making an easy, delicious vegetable soup. So let's get started. First off, gather all your veggies. We're gonna grab a big pot out of here. Out of here. I'm using a Dutch oven today, but like any large pot will do really well. We have some chopping to do first. If you are short on time, you can go to the supermarket and buy mirepoix. It comes in like little canisters or little containers. And that's a total time, that is a total time saver. I'm gonna give my onion a nice chop, smaller bite-sized pieces. One thing I wanna say about this recipe, it is so forgiving. This is like one of those classic recipes where you go into your fridge, see what's available, and you just put it in your soup. So today I'm using some veggies, but I'm gonna give you a ton of substitutions. And I want you to feel free till I just explore and play with some flavors on your own as well. You can let me know in the comments if you have a favorite combination of veggies in your soup. I love a lot of garlic in my soup. I want six garlic cloves at least. And I do wanna say, use fresh garlic. And I always peel it myself. Buy your own garlic, don't get it in those cans or containers. It has a very different taste in my opinion. Give them a smash, that helps you release some of the oils in the garlic. Give that a good chop, little mincing. So I grew up with soup in the house. It's like the snack that I love having, just to like grab a bowl, warm some up. And veggie soup is one of the favorites that we'd have in our household. Celery's gonna add a ton of flavor to this. However, a lot of you have texture issues with celery and the stringiness of it. It's gonna get cooked down, but if it bothers you, just chop it extra fine. So it's really gonna melt away into the soup. You're not gonna have like some weird celery moments. In the summer, we grow celery in our garden and it's very interesting. It takes a lot of water to get it to have any kind of characteristic like this, where it's just big and poofy. If you grow them like a normal veggie and just water them sparingly, they're super stringy and fibrous. Three carrots, these look nice. I might just run them under a bit of water. No need to peel them. Larger pieces are gonna get halved or even quartered and the rest of them will just get cut into beautiful little carrot moons. Don't go too thin on the carrots. I like to have some texture in my soup and they will just like totally melt if they're too thin. That is more than enough prep work for now. Into our pot, we're gonna add about three tablespoons of olive oil. I want this to be nice and hot before I add my onions. You know it's ready once it's dancing in the pan. My oil is nice and hot. Grab my onion. That's the sound I wanna hear. I also want a big wooden spoon, so let's stir that up. This is on medium high heat and I really just wanna see this onion become translucent and begin to brown a bit. It's gonna be about 10 minutes of occasional stirring, so in the meantime, peel those potatoes. You have more prep work to do. You can use a lot of different types of potatoes for this, just steer clear of russet potatoes. They're a little bit powdery. Russet potatoes are great for making mashed potatoes if you only use some of those. Russet potatoes and Yukon Gold together for a good mashed potato. These potatoes have a thin skin, so honestly, you don't even have to peel them, but Brian is not a fan. Propane is very hot, so did not need anywhere close to 10 minutes for this. Vegetable soup is one of those things that's just so comforting and cozy, but it fills you up, it's warming, and it doesn't make you feel too full or like you have to take a nap. It's just like you're ready to go and take on the day. And if you have your own take on vegetable soup, you let me know, because I'm all ears. Adding cream is super popular. You can add cheese to this as well, but we're doing a classic veggie soup today. All right, I'm adding in my carrots right now because this soup is coming along. Also the celery. Little stirring. Also the garlic. All these flavors are going right in here. We're gonna stir this for about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Just don't let the garlic burn. If it looks like things are burning, turn the heat down, but you could have some caramelized delicious moments in here and it just adds more flavor. Now I can get back to my potatoes. I'm giving them a nice chop for little bite-sized pieces. I don't want a giant mouthful of one vegetable. I want a combination of many things happening. Whenever you make soups, you don't wanna be standing around with nothing to do, so just stage the prep workout. If you want it to be maximum efficiency, chop the onions up first. While the oil heats up, pop those in there and then stir occasionally. Chop up everything else for the mirepoix, meaning the garlic, the carrots, and the celery. Then while that's in here, make the potatoes all nice and chopped up. This soup is begging you, begging you for some herbs, so at least add some thyme in here. You could also add dill. You could parsley later on. So many options. You can let me know what your favorite herbs to add in here are. I want about a tablespoon of thyme. I'm giving it a nice mince. It's time to add in our diced tomatoes. That's two 14-ounce cans. In you go. Give that a stir. And you also wanna add in your herbs, so I'm gonna be popping in my fresh chopped thyme. These diced tomatoes, I just popped the whole thing in here. We're gonna cook this down and simmer away a lot of that water to concentrate the flavor, but I do want the liquid in as well. Okay, this is gonna be stirring occasionally for 10 minutes and during that time, we have the pleasure of removing the stems from our green beans. You can buy these pre-prepped. Ahem, Brian. But that's okay. Remove any bits like this. Very fibrous nonsense. And I like to trim both edges. We're just going to chop these up into bite-sized pieces. These are fresh green beans. I suppose you could use frozen ones as well. I would not add canned green beans into this. I wanna talk about some of the additions you could add in here. I love chickpeas in this as well. Also known as garbanzo beans. Straight out of the can, just pop them in. But my all-time favorite addition to this, which I'm not doing today, is just barley. Oh my gosh, barley vegetable soup. It's really filling. It has a silky, just wonderful texture to it. I wanna hear from you in the comments. Just let me know if you literally have never had barley soup before or if it's one of your favorites too. You can see a lot of this liquid is just burning off. All the steam is just water escaping our pot, and what we're left with is pure flavor. That's just about two cups of green beans. You could add more, you could add less. And if you don't like green beans, let me tell you a great addition to this soup, kale. I know kale's a little bit trendy, past its prime, had too much exposure, was in every single dish, but kale in a vegetable soup adds a wonderful little bit of flavor, a lot of nutrients, and it makes it a bit more filling because of all the fiber. Most of the liquid is cooked way, what am I saying? Most of the liquid is cooked off of our soup, so now we're gonna add some more liquid back in in the form of veggie stock. You could add chicken stock to this, but this is a vegetable soup, so I'm using a vegetable stock, specifically six cups. My stock's all in. It's time to add the potatoes, the green beans. I'm also adding in one and a half cups of frozen corn kernels and a few bay leaves. Stir that all together. These bay leaves are wonderful. I had a bay leaf tree, let's call this a bay tree, in my garden growing up as a little boy. The soup looks good, but how does it taste? We need to add some salt, so I'm starting off with a teaspoon. There we go, and pepper. Give that a stir, and we're gonna taste the soup just to make sure we're on the right track. A little bit more salt. These potatoes need to cook, the green beans need to cook, and the flavors need to come together a bit more, so let's watch out. Bring this to a boil, and then we're gonna reduce to medium-low and partially cover this up. We just wanna cook the potatoes through, and depending on how thinly you slice them, could be anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour, so just check in 10-minute increments and make sure that everything is nice and tasty, soft and ready to eat, and once those potatoes are cooked through, we can add our final ingredients. I'm gonna chop some parsley up just for a nice green finish at the end. It also adds a wonderful vegetal note. We can add in about 1 1⁄2 cups of frozen peas. You could use fresh peas, but let me tell you, when you use fresh peas, it's so often disappointing because they do not travel well, and they can be mushy, so you paid all the extra money and had your hopes raised for beautiful peas when really, frozen peas are flash-frozen at their peak freshness, and I'm not being paid to say that. We're stirring these in at the end so they have a nice, beautiful emerald green color and wonderful texture, along with the parsley we just chopped up. If you wanna add some extra flourishes, you could add a swirl of pesto. You could add some Romanesco sauce, and really, if you wanted some extra spice, you could've added some harissa at the beginning with the onions. You'll remove those bay leaves. Just stir this together. Seasoned to perfection. So delicious. I will eat this entire bowl and then go back for seconds. It is amazingly delicious, and just makes me feel great inside. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe, and if you like my videos, check out my soup playlist.