Vegetable Barley Soup

By zorro623

Ingredients

• 1 onion, diced
• 1/2 head of celery (including leaves), chopped
• 1 1/2 tablespoons oil
• 3 quarts vegetable stock (water can be a substitute, but the soup will be thinner)
• 1 1/4 cup barley
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 medium potatoes or one large potato, chopped
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 large can diced tomatoes (28-30 ounces)
• 1 1/2 cups greens (kale, collard, spinach – whatever’s on sale), chopped
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Details

Servings 8
Preparation time 15mins
Cooking time 135mins
Adapted from thesimpledollar.com

Preparation

Step 1

Dice the onion and chop the celery – you can store them together in a bowl. Chop the potatoes and carrots – you can store them together, too. Also, chop up the greens.

Put the onion, the celery, and the oil together in your soup pot, then turn the heat up high. Your goal is to brown the onions a bit until they take on that wonderful caramelized look and smell.

This process will take five to ten minutes. Once the onions are looking tasty and brown, add the stock/water and the bay leaf. As the liquid is heating up, rinse off the barley, then add it to the soup.

Different types of barley have different cooking times. Read the barley package you have and see how long it suggests for cooking. Subtract an hour from that, then let the soup simmer that long before proceeding to the next step. This might be fifteen minutes or it might be an hour or it might be anything in between.

At the “one hour remaining” mark, add the tomatoes, the potatoes, and the carrots to the soup. You’ll now let this simmer for an hour, stirring regularly.