Recipe of the Month: White bean and kale soup

We just got back from a weekend visit with friends, so this is just going to be a quickie post to tell you about March's Recipe of the Month: white bean and kale soup.

Last week's newsletter from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken brought a recipe the author presented as "my go-to vegan soup." I'm always eager to expand my soup repertoire, and the blogger declared this dish to be "delicious, easy, hearty, and healthy," taking only 20 minutes to make. And fortuitously, the recipe called only for veggies we already happened to have on hand: canned white beans, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, and kale (which Brian had bought on a whim on our last trip to Lidl). 

The only thing that gave me pause was the combination of seasonings: a teaspoon each of oregano, thyme, and cumin, half a teaspoon of turmeric, and a quarter-teaspoon of black pepper. To my mind, the oregano and thyme seemed compatible, as did the cumin and turmeric, but not all four together. And adding these five spices to our usual Penzey's vegetable stock seemed like it would have an even greater potential for conflict. So, out of caution, we made just half a batch of this soup for our first foray.

The good news is, it was indeed quite easy. It was pretty to look at, too, with a nice combination of colors and textures in the bowl. And it was certainly hearty enough to make a full meal with a slice of whole-wheat bread on the side.

But the aroma coming off the bowl wasn't exactly appetizing, and the flavor wasn't an improvement on it. The combination of spices that had seemed so questionable to me when I tasted it in my mind didn't taste any better in my mouth. The cumin was predominant, but the turmeric contributed a faint but distinct sort of mustiness in the background, and neither of them really tasted to me like it belonged with the other ingredients. Brian, who rather enjoys a cumin-forward soup, liked it fairly well, but I ploughed unenthusiastically through about two-thirds of my portion before giving up and reheating some leftovers. In short, while this soup earned full marks from both of us for "easy, hearty, and healthy," only one of us could give it a passing grade on "delicious."

So I wouldn't make this dish again as written. But I think it might be worth trying again with different seasonings, or perhaps even with no seasonings at all except the flavors provided by the Penzey's stock. The rest of the ingredients are so simple that it's hard to imagine them not working together, and the soup base has enough flavor that it could probably carry the soup on its own. And if it didn't, we could continue to tinker with the seasonings (bay leaf? parsley?) until we had a version we both liked. Then we'd have a genuinely "delicious, easy, hearty, and healthy" soup worthy of being a go-to recipe for both of us.