WHITE BEAN + KALE SOUP

I appreciate you for visiting! Here's the typical rant about this meal, except it's not filled with pointless rambling. Learn what you are eating and why in this intro. 

This white bean and kale soup is perfect for those looking for a filling plant-based soup. You can have it as a side dish or a meal in itself. I used white navy beans, kale, cabbage, tempeh, lemon, celery, fresh garlic and ginger, onion, bell pepper, vegetable broth, and lentils as my main ingredients in this recipe. I was craving beans and lemon. I used to order a high sodium soup back in the day at Panera Bread and had the urge to reinvent the recipe with whatever was in my kitchen. They use lentils in their recipe, which I used in this recipe, but I only had one-half cup. Using more than one kind of legume will ensure consuming the proper amino acids to complete protein synthesis. So feel free to get creative. Improvising is my specialty, so white beans it was. I love their flavour and texture, as well.  For this recipe, depending on the serving size, it's a one-cup serving housing approximately 1/2 cup of beans in each serving. 

Prepping: Soak beans overnight, cover the beans generously with filtered water to allow the beans to absorb the water. I recommend using filtered water while cooking (and everything), but also soaking beans and nuts. However, I do not always remember this method, or I decide the day I want beans. So, the instapot is great for last-minute cravings. I soaked the beans around eight o'clock that morning and soaked them until 4 pm. After that, I added the beans to an instapot; they were completely absorbed by the water I had covered them with. I added all the ingredients besides the kale and mushroom extract powder and nutritional yeast, which I add after cooking. 

Dried beans are a versatile, affordable sources of protein and can be purchased in bulk. Beans include fibre, starches, iron, B vitamins, potassium, magnesium, and other essential nutrients. When preparing dried beans from scratch, sodium and other additives are avoided in canned beans. The importance of soaking beans and nuts not only softens the beans in preparation for cooking and shortens their cooking time, soaking beans can make them more digestible and enhance their nutritional bio-availability.

Additional ingredients:  Organic black pepper, vegetable bouillon, minced garlic, minced ginger, low sodium vegetable broth, smoked paprika, nutritional yeast, mushroom extract powder. 

Did you know that kale is a cruciferous vegetable? Usually, broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage comes to mind when we think of the word cruciferous, but it also includes; kale, garden cress, bok choy, brussels sprouts, arugula, and similar green leafy vegetables.

 When adding cruciferous vegetables to hot meals such as soups, I like to add greens along with broccoli and kale after the soup is complete and cooling down to eat in my individual bowl, using raw chopped kale rather than cook them in since cruciferous vegetables have more nutrients available when eaten raw or lightly steamed. Secondly,  I don't savour the taste of overcooked broccoli in soups because it overpowers the soup, in my opinion. When broccoli is raw or lightly steamed, it has higher nutrient content due to nutrients such as sulforaphane, a sulfur-based compound destroyed by heat and only found in cruciferous vegetables shown in studies anti-cancer and antioxidant properties. [1] This compound's best way to be activated is through chewing and cutting, reminding us to chew our foods to a  pulp before swallowing to further aid breakdown and digestion. 

I marinated a block of tempeh and threw it in my air fryer. I prefer the brand LightLife tempeh; their original tempeh has 18 grams of protein and 6 grams of fibre, and 12 carbohydrates per 3oz. For those diagnosed with diabetes, one may need to monitor their carbohydrate intake per meal and snack to keep their blood sugar consistent. "One carb count" is equivalent to 15 grams of carbohydrates. The thing about tempeh, you can crumble it if you don't want the cubes or strips, but I like to make a marinade for the tempeh like the picture above. Why tempeh? And what is tempeh? Tempeh is fermented soybean that gets broken down by organisms discovered in the 1960s as a known plant-based meat alternative. Before cooking, soy tempeh contains 19.5% protein, compared with 17.9% for hamburgers and 21% for chicken, on average. Tempeh is traditional to Indonesia, which is located in Southeast and Oceania. In Indonesia, traditionally and in dictionaries since at least 1875, the name for this food was written témpé; the name was altered in spelling to tempeh most likely by the Romans.  [2]  

Now that we have gone over some history, I must tell you that there is no tempeh you can ever buy in a store that will compare to authentic Indonesian handmade tempeh; fortunately, I made it to Indonesia last year for a month educating students at the local college on nutrition education with Veronika, another amazing Registered Dietitian I befriended on this trip from the Netherlands. Every day, the sweet cooks in our stay accommodated plant-based meals, and that's when I tasted the best homemade fresh tempeh; the way it melted in my mouth and the taste of the energy out into the food was healing within itself. 

Also, in adaptogenic mushrooms, which are known to have health benefits such as improving brain function, enhancing energy, balancing hormones, and improving the immune system; look for extracts instead of just "powder," when you see powder, you may also see "mycelium" beside the mushroom name, meaning they added brown rice as a filler. I use Fresh Cap mushroom extract powder, which has no fillers, no additives, just six pure mushrooms. Not that brown rice is "bad," but I don't want to pay for fillers when I want pure ingredients. I  have learned these helpful tidbits over the years when you want a premium product. There are great literature articles on these mighty mushrooms which include Lion's Mane, Turkey Tail, Cordyceps, Chaga, Reishi, and Maitake fruiting bodies.