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When your life is especially busy—like during the holidays—it’s great to have some one-pot meals that are filling and delicious. I recommend this Savory Sweet Potato Soup with English Peas. As you plan different meals for the week your kids return from college or bring their carloads of grandchildren to visit, this hearty soup can make menu planning a lot easier.
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Looking for a soup to warm you, body and soul? Then look no further than this Curried Cauliflower Soup, which serves as a great introduction to the healing power of spices.
After a week of frigid weather in North Carolina, we’re definitely craving hot soup for dinner. Although the cherry trees in our neighborhood were already starting to bloom, as they were apparently confused by a few weeks of 65 to 70 degrees!
To many readers, nothing says “hot” quite like “curry,” but if you don’t enjoy heavily spiced foods—because, like me, you avoid cayenne pepper—you may be pleasantly surprised how much you’ll love this cauliflower soup. Why? Because this recipe has built-in flexibility from delicately flavored to spicy hot. Although “curry” usually signals fiery hot, when I cook, I leave the cayenne out altogether—but you can certainly add as much as you enjoy. A curry is simply any Indian-spiced dish with a mélange of spices that are cooked in water and fat to create a gravy, or in this case, a soup.
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As you plan an alluring vegetarian or vegan meal for Valentine’s Day, I invite you to sample this unique Savory Sweet Potato Soup with Mushrooms & Chocolate Swirl! I owe its inspiration to one of my very favorite and utterly charming movies: Chocolat.
In the movie, the main character, Vianne (Juliette Binoche) opens a chocolate shop that is considered too great a temptation in a conservative French village. If you watch the movie, you’ll see amazing delicacies that will have you lusting after chocolate! One of the movie’s more memorable and talked-about scenes features a chocolate-themed luncheon that Vianne hosts for a friend’s birthday in which chocolate sauces accompany every dish. Her menu features a large turkey and a pork roast, though I’ve often wondered what that meal might look like for a vegetarian feast. Today’s sweet and savory soup is my attempt at the first course!
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With family coming home this week for holidays and spring breaks, it’s a perfect time to make a delicious—if perfectly imperfect— Vegan Gluten-Free Pot Pie. No doubt, this dish is a project if you make your own crust, so working folks will want to save it for the weekend unless you make the crust the day before and refrigerate it.
I call it perfectly imperfect because I am not a pie crust aficionado. Although my mother was an excellent (and revered) math teacher, she was not a baker, so I never learned to make pie crusts by her side. My friend and baking mentor, Martina Straub, helped me perfect a spelt crust many years ago when I was hoping that low-gluten goodies were good enough to support my health. But alas! I needed to go 100 percent gluten-free to heal my gut and related inflammatory conditions.
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Today’s recipe for Peanut Butter and Cucumber Soup is the perfect remedy for this week’s heat wave hitting the South. It’s going to be 100ºF today in Raleigh, North Carolina, and with the humidity heat index factored in, forecasters promise it will feel like a blazing 109º—too darn hot for June! This is an ideal time to make some fun dishes that satisfy your hunger without ever turning on a stove.
The central ingredient in this delicious soup is, of course, peanut butter—which is a bit heating to the metabolism, according to Ayurveda. For this reason, I balance the recipe with cooling foods: a seeded cucumber, cilantro, and mint. (Cilantro haters can just use more mint!)
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I can hardly wait to share this recipe for Vegan Asparagus Soup with Cashew Cream as we celebrate the official start of spring! Asparagus are the true culinary heralds of spring, and I’ve been finding plentiful, gorgeous organic asparagus in our Raleigh markets.
My most loyal readers report how much they love—and how often they cook—the first Asparagus Soup recipe from Sacred & Delicious that I published on my blog in 2017. Nonetheless, I eagerly await annual inspiration for new and creative approaches to cooking nature’s springtime bounty, as you will see on the Sacred & Delicious Blog. So, my friends, you may want to be adventurous and try another delicious way of eating asparagus soup!
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Ayurveda’s common-sense dictum is that opposite qualities balance one another—whether in the body, the mind, or the emotions. So, to quell the last of the summer heat, I call for balance and say, “Bring on the cucumbers with this lovely Cucumber and Coconut Milk Soup!”
In this yummy summer soup, the cooling power of cucumber is augmented by coconut milk, cilantro, and mint, all which cool the metabolism even further. Fresh ginger, cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, and lime all aid digestion besides being richly flavorful. They are also warming foods, which bring balance to the dish for vata and kapha types, who tend to be cold natured.
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Have I told you that I love fresh pumpkin (see Spiced Pumpkin Pound Cake)? As the holiday season moves toward its peak, what can be better than a fresh Puréed Pumpkin Soup. The markets are still filled with sugar pumpkins, the sweet edible pumpkins used for pumpkin pies and all things pumpkin.
Pumpkin, like squash, is one of the favored foods of Ayurveda because it is so easy to digest. It’s ideal for vata and pitta. For watery kapha, it’s still fine if balanced with warming spices. I’ve chosen cinnamon, cardamom, allspice and fresh ginger—
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If you’ve embraced a resolution for healthy eating in 2021, you’ll surely want to try this recipe for Savory Spiced Carrots. Whether you are vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, or omnivore, vegetable side dishes are a must to balance every meal!
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Today I offer you a different twist on a must-have traditional dish for January 1: Curried Black-Eyed Peas. In the Southern United States, to eat black-eyed peas with greens on New Year’s Day is considered a culinary talisman to bring good luck and good fortune in the coming year. Sadly, the dish is thought to have been brought to the US from West Africa through the slave trade, but it survives today as a symbol of hoped-for fortune and abundance to come—and because it’s delicious.
Although my previous black-eyed pea recipes reflect Southern cooking, I decided to add a new twist to this celebratory dish and offer you a version that reflects traditional Ayurvedic cooking through a mélange of spices. You can decide whether the dish packs a hot punch or is simply flavorful with the artful use of spices.
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