Bewitched, bothered and bewildered

Just a quick drive-by recipe. Sorry for the lack of posting on Monday, I ended up working instead of being off as usual and I could not get it together sufficiently to blog. I did knit a hat.



Almost embarrassingly easy one skein hat pattern that I found via the Livejournal knitting community. I'll be making several of these for various relatives.

Monday, when I was supposed to be blogging and ended up working and shopping instead, I bought a bunch of vegetables and wanted to eat some of them. It is a coolish evening and I thought a nice fresh soup would be just the thing. So was born "3B Soup". The three B's being Beef, Broccoli, and Bok Choy.

I think the key to this is really the soup base. I made a lot of greens over the summer (and will continue to do so as long as they're available) and when I make greens, I tend to have a lot of broth left over. Broth from greens makes a wonderful soup base, full of flavor and so hearty. I freeze it and use it later, either in more greens, or in soup, like I did today. If you don't have homemade vegetable soup base in your fridge, you can use any type of vegetable broth.

Ingredients
1 1/2 quarts vegetable broth
1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
One medium rutabaga, cubed
One good-sized stalk of bok choy, chunked
Two broccoli "trees", chunked
Three small to medium carrots, chunked
One sweet onion, sliced or chunked
As much garlic as you want
Salt and pepper to taste
(You can cut up the veggies any way you like, but it always looks and eats better if you keep the pieces a consistent size. In other words, don't dice the carrots tiny and have big hunks of broccoli floating around. I like to leave veggies like broccoli and cauliflower in large chunks because they can overcook so easily.)


Place ground beef in frying pan on medium and break up well. Put broth in soup pot on medium heat,add rutabaga and carrots, and garlic, cover. When the beef gets going well, add the onion to the beef and brown them together. Drain well. Add bok choy and broccoli to broth, put drained meat and onion on top, cover and bring to a boil. Stir well and turn down to simmer covered for about 30 minutes or until rutabaga is cooked.

You can substitute potatoes for the rutabaga, or do an East Asian version with a splash of soy or teriyaki sauce, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots. You can use cubed beef, chicken, or pork in place of the ground beef too, I used it because it was what I had thawed out.



It looks good and tastes great!