Cabbage Vegetable Soup and Dieting

Let’s first get clear that I do not hold with the cabbage soup diet as being anything more than a fad diet that has no potential for long term success.  But, I will say, that from personal experience, a hot bowl of low calorie high fiber soup keeps me out of the potato chips.  I use our diet planner to keep myself on track (how can you not when you spend your days testing things like Whoopie Pies?), and I make soup when I’m in a quantity not quality eating mood.

Yesterday I was out of groceries by plan.  I’m in fall reorganize mode and using what we have.  I started with ham broth from the freezer.  Whenever I make ham, Brian expects split pea soup.  I make broth from the ham bone in my great big stock pot, then freeze one soup’s worth in a zip top bag for later. 

You know when you buy cases of canned goods from the store you get the whole shallow box?  Those are excellent to put in your freezer.  The first time I put a bag of broth directly on the freezer shelf and had it settle INTO the grate and freeze, and then had to take it out VERY ungracefully?  Was the last time I did that…

Assuming you do not have ham broth in your freezer (yet) feel free to use whatever you do have, as long as it’s low sodium. 

Here’s what I did yesterday…

Sweat some onion, carrot, and celery in a bit of olive oil.  I had half an onion, 2 carrots, and I just sliced about 1/4 cup off my celery stalk.   Add about 1/2 tsp of kosher salt and black pepper.  IMHO this is the first step to a good soup.

Defrost broth in microwave and wish I would have frozen it in a more convenient shape.

Discover half a bag each of green beans and corn in the freezer and add that.  Discover cans of diced tomatoes and garbanzo beans in the pantry and add them.  Decide that the lone potato in the crisper must be included.

Remember that this is a cabbage soup, and go get a purple cabbage out of the garden.

Add the not completely thawed broth to the pot and simmer everything together.  It was done in about 30 minutes, but I just let it simmer on an ultra low burner until lunch so it would be ready when we were.

Did my purple cabbage keep its color?  Heck no (which is why there is no picture!), and it lost even more color when I had the soup for breakfast (I know, I know…).  Unless you have leftover purple cabbage, or one in your garden, you’ll probably use green.  But whatever you use, you’ll end up with a pot of hearty, healthy soup that tastes almost like Campbell’s vegetable soup, minus the tinny taste and the ankle swelling sodium.

Because I used homemade broth I can’t really know how many calories there are in this soup, but using canned chicken broth it works out to under 200 calories and 5 grams of fiber for a generous bowl.  And I don’t even feel like eating potato chips.

If you want to try some soup, start by adding All Vegetable Soup to your meal plan, and improvise!  You can edit the recipe based on the changes you make to see the nutrition.