Smoky Kale Soup

Chipotle, peanut butter, and greens sounded like a good combo to me, so I made a soup yesterday by cooking then blending up some roasted bell peppers, kale, garlic, chipotle powder, a dash of liquid smoke, onion powder, and Bragg's liquid aminos in water.  While blending it, I added some fresh orange juice and peanut butter.  Then I reheated it with some frozen corn and chopped sun-dried tomatoes (I didn't realize that the cheaper sun-dried tomatoes I bought had salt added-oops). 

This is the sort of thing I would not have made a year ago, but I found it to be quite delicious.  It's good to be flexible and creative so you can use up ingredients that might go bad, and avoid forgoing a recipe simply because you don't have an ingredient.  It's fun to look at various recipes just for inspiration.  Of course if you're new to cooking or have little confidence, then it makes perfect sense to follow a recipe so you can avoid having to eat something that just didn't work out right.

Blending a lot of greens in a soup is a really good way to eat a lot of greens at once which is great for your health.  Sure, a lot of the nutrients come out of the veggies when they're cooking, but they're in the water that's part of the soup.  It's hard to stick with the recommendations to chew veggies, especially green leafies really thoroughly to get all the nutrients, especially if you're in a hurry such as on a break at work.  A soup like this, which you might even enjoy cold, is a good way to consume greens which are pretty much pre-chewed by a blender.  By the way, I do not have a Vitamix, and my veggies blend just fine thanks.  Just remember to let it cool enough before you start blending because hot liquids can create pressure in the blender that causes it to splatter out.  I saw a chef accidentally do it on a show, which was a better reminder than making that mistake myself.

I apologize for making no effort to figure out how much this soup costs, or providing a recipe.  I just threw it together and don't have a good sense of quantity to guess well.

I was thinking about putting in some sweet potato or carrot.  Since I didn't buy or roast the bell peppers myself, it is something I wanted to add, but if I were making a cheap version of this, I would probably skip that.  If I had put more thought into this, I would have put in fresh onion, but since my veggies were roasted bell peppers which were already cooked, and kale which cooks quickly, this made for a really quick soup.  Also beans would've made this good as well.