Thursday, January 14, 2016

Breakfast soup hack

What a weird title for a post, but that's exactly what this is about.

Okay, so it's been long established that I am NOT a morning person. Never have been. Not even a little. Don't get me wrong, I love being up at the crack of dawn on a beautiful summer morning. But only if I can sit in the peace and quiet with a cup of coffee and watch the world slowly come awake and NOT be rushing around getting myself showered, dressed, fed and out the door in the freezing dark.

Such was the case Monday morning when, in addition to my usual morning free-for-all (and this was my first day back to work after 2 weeks vacation, remember!), I wanted to make a stage 2 breakfast mentioned in the book by adding an egg yolk and some spinach to re-heated stock. Sounds easy, I know, but at 6:45am on a dark January morning when I'm still basically asleep and running on auto-pilot, it was anything but.  Long story short, I got it done and into me and I was only a half an hour late getting out the door.

There had to be a better way, I thought on the subway ride into work, than fiddling around with separating eggs and doctoring up soup at that insane hour of the day. Such are the things I think about while on the subway. And so, a hack was born. Why not just make a soup with everything already in it, freeze it and it'd be all ready to go?

This soup is based on one of the Stage 1 soups in Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett's excellent book, The Heal Your Gut Cookbook.  You can find my recipe here.


The Stage 2 additions are the egg yolks and the spinach and I thought rather than just add them to stock, why not make an actual soup?  So, I took inspiration from one of the stage 1 recipes and went from there.


I started by chopping a couple of organic white onions and 3 or 4 cloves of organic garlic, then separating the yolks of 8 organic free-range eggs.  I saved the whites in a freezer container and froze them for future use (a pavlova, maybe?).


Next, I cored and diced 8 organic vine-ripened tomatoes. I would have used my own canned diced tomatoes, but my inventory is getting low, sadly, and I want to save some to use later down the line. So, in the meantime, I am purchasing as natural and organic produce as I can find. I used to think that going organic was a waste of money until I started reading about GAPS and the importance of organic farming methods to maintaining the supply of natural probiotics in food.  Plus, the colour, taste and smell (especially the tomatoes!) is just so much better.


Next. I brought 2 quarts of home-made chicken stock to the boil with a heaping tablespoon of ghee.


Once the stock was boiling, I added the chopped onions and tomatoes, turned the heat down to medium and let the soup cook, covered, for 30 minutes.


After 30 minutes, the onions and tomatoes were soft enough for me to pureƩ the soup until it was silky smooth.


Then, I quickly beat the egg yolks and whisked them into the soup, stirring constantly.


Next, I added a few big handfuls of baby spinach leaves, then covered the pot and let it cook for about another 5 minutes to wilt the spinach.


A final pureƩ with the immersion blender to chop the spinach into the soup, then I left it covered to cool to room temperature.


Once cool, I portioned it out into freezer containers and placed them in the freezer, ready for my next morning dash.

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