Quick and Easy Soup - Revisited

It started snowing here yesterday morning and is still snowing now.

This is the view out my back door, looking over the deck.

It's a thoroughly rotten day designed for staying inside and keeping warm.  What you can't see in this photo is a small shelter we have made for a stray cat who lives in our neighbourhood.  It is made of insulation board and it has an outdoor-rated heated cat bed in it.  I don't know how warm the box is because it is open on one end, but I know the bed is warm - we found our cat Harry curled up in it the other day when it was -10 degrees Celsius outside.   Here is Harry indoors on his very own heated cat bed.  He loves that bed, and it probably feels good on his sore spots - he was hit by a car about nine years ago and he still has a spot on his side that he doesn't like to have touched.

Because it was such a miserable day, I decided to make soup.  I opted for my go-to soup - my sister Leslie's Quick and Easy Soup, but I changed it up a bit.  You can see the original recipe in February of 2014.

This time I omitted the onion - I know it seems like a crazy step to take when making soup - and instead added a few potatoes.   For spices, I added black pepper, Trader Joe's Everyday Spice Mix and a tablespoon of herbes de province.

Ingredients
1 large bag of frozen California mix veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots)
2.5 litres of vegetable broth
black pepper (I have a grinder - I used 15 twists of my grinder
Trader Joe's Everyday Spice - 10 twists of the grinder
herbes de provinces - about one tablespoon

Directions
Put all of the ingredients into a large pot and bring to a full rolling boil.

Turn the heat down and simmer for about 15 minutes, then use an immersion blender to blend it into a creamy soup.  If you don't have an immersion blender (they are very handy) you could transfer the veggies in batches into your food processor and puree them.

Also, to make this into a protein powerhouse soup, you could add a can of cannelloni beans and puree them too.  If you have a child who loves soup but is wary of beans, this is a good way to go - you can't taste the beans at all.