There’s nothing like a warming bowl of homemade soup, especially in winter. And although there are good plant-based canned soups, it’s nice to make your own (get an immersion blender stick to simplify things).
Before cooking, read up on food safety for people & pets (many human foods are unsafe around animal friends). Never feed leftover croutons or any crusty bread to garden birds or wildfowls, as they could choke.
Soup Club is a unique book that focuses on the healing benefits of both soup and community. After the author (a writer from Seattle) was diagnosed with brain cancer , she told friends she was craving homemade soup, and found soup on her doorstep each day for months. After being give n a year to live, she has now been cancer-free for 5 years. And retains gratitude for both community – and soup.
So Caroline decided to start a weekly soup club, delivering her own original healthy soup recipes to her friends’ porches. Soon word spread, and the area morphed into a large community of soup enthusiasts, inspired by her story.
Unlike any other recipe book, this soup book includes artwork, photography and even short poems from her community, all in celebration of vegan soups! Each soup can be made on the hob or in an InstantPot, and all recipes are also gluten-free. Learn to make:
- Catalan chickpea stew with spinach
- Jamaican pumpkin & red pea soup
- Split pea soup with roasted kale
- West African vegetable stew
- Kale farinata
- Broccoli & rice soup
- Pumpkin coconut soup with curry leaves
- Teddy’s black bean soup
Caroline’s inspiring story that began with cancer and ended with community, compelled me to make soup for others. What better way to thank people for their kindness. And the recipes do work! Deborah Madison
Caroline Wright is a cookbook writer, former TV producer and veteran of Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Her terminal brain cancer diagnosis in 2017 shifted her career to focus on her health and young sons, leading her to write the book Lasting Love (about enduring love after death). She lives in Washington, USA.
more good plant-based soup recipe books
Vegan Soups & Stews for All Seasons is an updated edition of a classic book with colour photos of 120 recipes. From hearty warming stews to fruity dessert soups, each chapter highlights seasonal produce. Autumn focuses on the harvest, winter is full of thick nourishing soups, spring lifts the palate and summer is about fresh light soups. There is something for everyone in this book! Author Nava Atlas is also an artist in New York State, so her books always include beautiful illustrations.
Awesome Vegan Soups is a classic family cookbook of 80 recipes, made without processed ingredients to feed everyone. Learn how to balance flavours and make different textured soups (broths, creamy, chunky) using seasonal produce. The author is a mother and chef from the US, who currently lives in Germany. Recipes include:
- Mushroom quinoa chilli
- Chipotle pumpkin soup with apple
- Cauliflower tikka masala soup
- Creamy horseradish parsley soup
- Celeriac rocket soup with coconut & chickpeas
- Chilled creamy borscht
- Gazpacho soup
- Pho & goulash
- Vegan sour cream
- Homemade croutons
reusable cubes for freezing homemade soup
Souper Cubes (US – sold in Lakeland) let you freeze leftover soup in perfect portions, so you can make recipes that serve more than one or two people, to encourage you to make homemade soup from scratch. Made from silicone (which doesn’t break into microplastics and is easy to recycle), this is food-safe and can withstand high temperatures and freezing. One purchase should last years.
Just pour in soup to the fill lines. The 1 and 2 cup trays have double the capacity of ice cube trays, and are designed to fit perfectly in standard freezers (created in mind by a busy mother and designed by her engineer husband!) You can also use them to freeze spaghetti sauce, bread or baked goods. Just pop on a snug lid to keep out odours, then stack the tray in your freezer.
homemade leek & potato cup-a-soup
Leek & Potato Soup (The Veg Space) uses whole potatoes and stewed leeks, and vegan cream to make a delicious freezable soup. Most cup-a-soups in shops contain palm oil and the vegan ones tend to be tomato or minestrone. Instead, just vary the recipe above, keeping the potatoes and vegan cream, but swapping the leeks for other vegetables.
Leeks are very popular vegetables in England with a roast dinner, and of course for leek and potato soup. Eaten for thousands of years, they are related to onions, just be sure to rinse the grit out thoroughly before cooking. They are also very cheap to buy. Here are some simple plant-based recipe ideas, to use up leftover leeks.
This recipe for vegan leek & potato soup (ElaVegan) uses starchy potatoes, leeks, celeriac (or celery if easier to find), carrots, garlic and broth, along with seasonings, oil and dairy-free cream. Garnish with fresh herbs and optional sliced vegan sausage. If you like homemade soup, invest in a stick blender to blitz ingredients in the pan and freeze leftovers.