Crazy Good Broccoli-Zucchini-Potato Soup

If Pablo Neruda were alive, he'd write an ode to it

My homemade Broccoli-Zucchini-Potato Soup

NOTE: This post originally ran on Dec. 1, 2022. I am re-running it today because a) it is soup weather, and b) I did not have anything particularly compelling to say this week! I’ll be back to regularly-scheduled originality next Thursday.

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I love soup.

I love watching cooked vegetables erupt into a bright, colorful whirlpool inside my stalwart Ninja Blender. The Daughter does not love soup the way I do, so I serve steaming bowlfuls of yellow pepper soup, Thai curry soup, and butternut squash soup to friends. I love soup so much that I indulge in warm, hearty spoonfuls even on 90-degree Los Angeles summer afternoons.

I love when late fall and winter temperatures drop to below 60 degrees — that’s downright nippy here in Southern California — because soup tastes even better then. I love the fact that in one month, I will be residing in a place that has actual winters with actual snow and then soup will be mandatory!

I love that soup is medicinal. During the pandemic, the IBS from which I’d long suffered devolved into an almost disabling condition (it’s much improved now). Since this is a post about soup, I will spare you the horrifying details, but I will tell you this: soup was easy to digest. Soup made me feel better.

Which gave me another reason to love it.

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The other night, I decided to make my until-then favorite soup: Seared Broccoli and Potato, from a NYT recipe by Melissa Clark. The recipe calls for two heads of broccoli, so I grimaced when I discovered one of the heads in the refrigerator was past its prime. I chopped up the good one and decided to substitute a zucchini for the head of broccoli I’d tossed.

While I was rooting around in the vegetable drawer (bad pun intended), I spied a lonely leek that was a day away from ending up in the trash can. So I chopped that up too, along with a yellow onion, five cloves of garlic, and a few baby gold potatoes.

Melissa Clark’s recipe calls for searing the broccoli. I do not love this part, because it is labor-intensive ( you’re supposed to do it in two batches so each @#$*&??! piece of broccoli is seared) and I am not known for my patience, as The Daughter will gladly tell you. Since I’d already veered off the map with this recipe, I shifted into what-the-hell mode, dumping the broccoli pieces and zucchini slices into just one batch at the bottom of my soup pot and firing up the burner.

After I’d seared, boiled, and simmered all the ingredients, I transferred the softened chunks into the blender, along with the zest of one lemon. Then I hesitated.

Lest you think me blessed with a gutsy temperament, given my cross-country move, micro-dosing, and tattoo and all, I must assure you that I usually color inside the lines. Perhaps you are an instinctive cook, but I am — was, until a few days ago — a recipe-following cook.

My mother christened me a “worry wart” when I was child, and she was right. But I don’t have the kind of anxiety that leaves me tongue-tied at parties. In fact, being around people often relaxes me. My anxiety comes in a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop varietal, its evil harpy envoys hissing doomsday tidings in my ear.

If you too suffer from anxiety, then you may have developed the futile coping strategy of trying to ward off disaster by fixating on everything that could possibly go wrong in order to prepare yourself. You might even adhere to rigid systems to ward off chaos, which you then try to inflict on other people.

Not that I have ever done either of those things.

So there I stood, finger hovering over the “pulse” tab on my blender, gripped with anxiety and guilt and maybe a smidgen of OCD that I hadn’t perfectly followed the recipe!!!, and braced myself for soup I might not love, and would Melissa Clark find out somehow? Then I reminded myself that I was risking a lot more than bad soup by leaving my hometown of 36 years to start over in The Blue Ridge Mountains.

I pressed Pulse and was delighted when the dull and soggy glop instantly transformed into a lovely, muted chartreuse hue tinged with bright green flecks. When I dumped the mixture back into the soup pot, I noticed that the liquid was much creamier — surprising for a water base soup — than the original recipe, and my stomach growled with anticipation.

Squeezing lemon juice in as a final touch, I then ladled two servings into a soup bowl and rushed over to the kitchen table to savor it while piping hot. I sighed, my anxiety melting away as the invigorating citrus aroma and vegetable nectar mouthfuls deposited me at the portal of gastronomic nirvana.

This apogee of comfort food was so heavenly that if the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda were still alive, I’m pretty sure he’d write an ode to it.

My copy has seen better days, but try to picture my soup on the cover.

At this point, you may be thinking this is all much ado about soup, for chrissakes. Or, you may be salivating. So here’s the recipe; you be the judge.

INGREDIENTS

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 head broccoli, separated into small florets, stems (yes, really) peeled and sliced

1 medium zucchini, thinly sliced

2 1/2 teaspoons salt, more to taste

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 large yellow onion, chopped

1 leek, trimmed (I prefer Trader Joe’s Trimmed Leeks)

5 cloves garlic, chopped

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

3 baby gold potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

Zest of one lemon

Juice of one lemon

PREPARATION

Step 1

In a large soup pot, heat 2 tablespoons of oil over high heat. Pour in the chopped broccoli and

zucchini slices. Unless you have a very big soup pot, they will pile on top of each other instead

of just one layer — this is fine. Cook broccoli and zucchini without moving it for 4 minutes.

Transfer to a big bowl, season with 1 teaspoon salt and set aside.

Step 2

Reduce heat to medium-low. Add butter and remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to soup pot. Add

onions, leeks, garlic, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook until soft

and translucent, about 4 minutes. Add potato with one quart water and remaining 1 teaspoon

salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce to low heat. Cover pot and let simmer for 10-15 minutes, until

potato is tender. Add broccoli and zucchini, cover again, and cook for 5-10 minutes.

Step 3

Add lemon zest and puree soup in a blender until it’s the consistency you prefer.

Pour back into soup pot and stir in lemon juice.

The recipe that this is adapted from suggests finishing with grated parmesan. I love parmesan, but have gone dairy-free, except for a little butter, due to my GI issues. If you don’t have a problem digesting cheese, by all means, go for it. Watching your salt intake? Cut the salt in half — or eliminate it and substitute nutritional yeast, although that may change the taste and color entirely so I can’t vouch for it. You’ll definitely want to dip toasted sourdough into the soup. I would recommend the kind I eat, but it’s a buckwheat sprouted sourdough that James Beard would not approve of, so you probably won’t like it either.

As I poured myself a second bowlful, I wondered why I’d gotten worked up over something as mundane as changing a recipe — that actually resulted in tastier, richer, prettier soup! I reflected on the times I’d held myself back by clinging to the way I’d always done things, or thinking I had to have things be a certain way. I decided that I would use this soup incident as reminder to stay open to The New as I move through the final third of my life.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotten so hungry while writing this piece that I’m going to go have some leftover soup. If you’re ever passing through Asheville, stop by and I’ll make you some.

All gone!