For this week’s recipe, I am going to feature a recipe that my Amish characters might enjoy on a frigid day in January, and that recipe is Vegetable Soup. I found this recipe in “The Essential Amish Cookbook: Everyday Recipes From Farm and Pantry” by Lovina Eicher.
As you may (or may not) know), I collect cookbooks of all kinds, and I enjoy flipping through their pages — always looking for interesting recipes to try (even though I’m usually the only one who eats what I cook). Because the theme for this month’s “Tasty Tuesdays” posts is “Soups”, I perused the chapter in Lovina’s cookbook called “Soups and Salads”, and I found this recipe at the end of the chapter. Here’s what Lovina had to say about this recipe:
“Our children always called this Grandma’s soup. My mother would make it a lot and they really loved it. It is an easy soup to make. I like to make a big batch of it, then put it in quart jars and process it. On busy days you can just open a few jars and heat it up and have a quick meal. Our family likes to eat Colby cheese and saltine crackers with this soup. It is also easy to put in lunches for school or work.”
Like I said at the beginning of this entry, I’m sure my Amish might enjoy this soup, and I hope you will, too. And now… Without further ado, here is this week’s “Tasty Tuesdays” featured recipe:
Vegetable Soup
1 pint canned beef chunks or any raw beef roast or stew meat, cut into small pieces
1 medium yellow onion, cleaned but whole, stem removed
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 cup carrots, diced
2 cups corn kernels
2 cups peas
4 cups tomato juice
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground pepper
Brown the beef in a large skillet over medium heat. Put the beef and the whole onion in a large pot and add the remaining ingredients. Add enough water to cover the vegetables. Cook over medium heat for 45-50 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Remove onion and serve.
Judging by the list of ingredients, it sounds as though this soup is often made in big batches during the summer when the vegetables (carrots, green beans, corn, and peas) can be picked straight from the garden and then processed (probably by pressure canning, if I were to hazard a guess) to “put up” lots of jars of this soup that can then be enjoyed on those frigid January nights. I really like the idea of “putting up” this soup to have on hand during the winter, but… I still need to learn how to process food by pressure canning since I haven’t yet attempted this skill — possibly because of a childhood experience in which a pressure cooker that my dad was using blew up!
If you try to make this soup and/or process it via canning, I would love to hear what you thought of the recipe. I’d also appreciate any helpful tips you’d care to share about pressure canning. Looking forward to hearing from you!
By the way… If you like this recipe from Lovina Eicher, I would encourage you to purchase this cookbook because it’s chock full of lots of recipes for hearty and healthy food!