Green Minestrone with Homemade Crackers

Sponsored by: Providence

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In this class we’re talking greens, beans, and grains. A super nutritious take on the classic Italian minestrone soup will leave you full and happy. No skimping on taste–we’ll show you how to build big flavors in veggie-based dishes. Plus, we’re making crispy crunchy crackers, a recipe you’ll definitely want to hold onto.

Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today at Homemade. I’m Chef Diana and I’m joined today with a registered dietitian with our partner Providence, Megan CHC. Megan, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us and helping us today answer some questions. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you, Diana. I’m so excited to be here and I’m so excited about this recipe. I’ve never made crackers before, so I can’t wait for you to show us how it’s done. Well, I’ve tested this recipe a couple times at home and it’s it’s going in my repertoire and I’m serious. It’s so good. So, both the crackers and the soup are absolutely delicious. So, again, I’m Chef Diana and it’s my second class here at Homemade. I could not be more thrilled to be back. I taught my first class at the end of January. Some of you may have been here and I appreciate you if you were here coming back. It was um it’s a little nerve-wracking. I’ve taught culinary arts for 30 years, but there’s a lot going on here that you don’t see and they are super professional. We’ve got our wonderful tech people and Chef Cad is here today to moderate and help you in the chat um with any questions you might have. And uh it’s a it’s a lot. So, I’m so happy to be back. I went home after that first class that I taught and I watched it back the class and it’s that was torture. That was serious torture. And so I learned a lot from that experience and I I I have this. I got it. And I have total faith in Chef Cat and MO. You guys are awesome and they’re here to support me. And so I love seeing these faces. Anybody cooking from home today? We’ve got some people see some hands. Yay. Okay. It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. So just a couple of things before we get started. I um and Megan, if Megan wants to weigh in on this, too. I practice say Providence is really near and dear to my heart. I have two beautiful daughters um that were born there and many years ago and also I’m a 21-year uh breast cancer survivor and I had my treatment at Providence Hospital and super just wonderful care um whole holistic whole body care and I’m just so grateful. So again it’s uh our partner today. Thank you so much, Providence, for what you do for everybody and for always looking out for us. And here I am 21 years later. Um, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I sort of had to uh take a a good look at my lifestyle and see why why did that happen to me? And I didn’t know. And I thought, well, maybe it has something to do with my diet. I don’t know why else. Why? Maybe I should look at my diet. So, I sort of adopted this uh diet called an what I call an 8020 diet. And it means um 80% eat nutritionally delicious, right? There’s way to eat nutritionally. And Megan, I know you’re going to shake your head on this and weigh in, but that is so delicious like the soup that we’re making today. And then 20% I I also decided after that diagnosis that I didn’t want to deprive myself of things that I enjoyed. I wanted my chocolate cake every once in a while. I wanted my glass of wine. I didn’t want to deprive myself because I feel like when we deprive ourselves of delicious food or things that we want or things that we crave, we’re not really setting oursel up for success. So, whatever works for you to feel good is what you need to do for you. And we’re all different, right? So, you have to just ask yourself, do I feel good? Does this soup make me feel good? Do I feel satiated? Do I feel full? So, I love this dish and the crackers that we’re making today. Uh the crackers are um slightly a little bit on the decadent side. We’re going to use some butter, but we were talking prior to starting our class today and Megan can weigh in on um butter al alternatives if you’re looking for non-dairy or or another fat to use. We had a little discussion about that. I haven’t tried anything other than butter to be honest with you, but as you’ll see in a couple of minutes, the cracker dough is so forgiving and so easy to make that I am excited to experiment myself with some other fats. Um, before we have that discussion though, I do want to start, you heard probably heard my water boiling here. I do want to start with getting our fereral cooked. There’s a couple of things. If you’re cooking at home, I really want to honor what you’re doing and honor your time and keep you on track with what we’re doing here. So, I’m going to start the pharaoh. So, I have a boiling pot of water, just a small pot of water here on the stove, and it was boiling, rapidly boiling over a couple of minutes ago, so it’s coming back up to a simmer. I’m doing 3/4 of a cup of Pharaoh. Now, the recipe calls for 1 and 1/2 cups of cooked pharaoh. So 3/4 of a cup of raw pharaoh is going to give you just about 1 and 1/2 cups. So pharaoh goes in. We’re going to cook it kind of like pasta. So basically uh we’re going to drain it when it’s done. Okay. So a little bit of salt just to enhance the flavor. We’re not going to make it taste salty. So we just put a little bit salt. The reason of we use salt is to bring out the flavors of other things. So, just a little bit to bring out the flavor of the pharaoh and then um we’ll drain it. It’s going to cook for about 30 minutes. So, um the pharaoh will absorb some of that salt. We can always add more salt, but once you add it, it’s really difficult to take it out. Okay. So, just a little bit. So, we’re going to keep that just at a low simmer for about 30 minutes. Do we have any questions about the pharaoh? Or Megan, would you like to weigh in? Yeah, I have had uh one question in the chat already about substituting grains for this recipe. Um so Pharaoh is an example of a fantastic whole grain that does happen to be a wheat variety. So, if somebody is um you know trying to avoid gluten, if they have celiac disease or another reason, we could easily sub that for a different uh whole grain like brown rice or um this one’s going to be a little bit confusing, but I think buckwheat would have the most similar texture. And even though it has wheat in the name, it doesn’t actually have any gluten any in it, which is really confusing. Um you could probably use other grains, too, like quinoa or amaranth. They just have a little bit of a different texture to it. Less less chew to that recipe. Yeah, thank you. Actually, when I tested this recipe the first time at home, I didn’t have any pharaoh or spelt, which is similar, so I used uh barley because I had barley. I love barley. I like chewy things and barley is chewy. The pharaoh is a little bit chewy. Um and I used barley and it was delicious. It was absolutely delicious. So, um yeah, good point. Thank you. Okay, so pharaoh’s cooking. The soup is going to come together pretty quickly. So, uh, the pharaoh is what took the longest time. And then our cracker dough does need to chill a little bit. So, we’re going to go ahead and get that started. I did grind the oats and the almonds ahead of time because I didn’t want the machine running the whole time. So, those are ground ahead of time. So, our ingredients, we’re going to put together a food processor. Can you make this by hand? Absolutely, you can make it by hand. So, um, it’s just going to take a little more muscle and we’re today we’re going to let our machine do the work for us. Okay. So, I’m making half of a batch of the crackers just for the sake of time. Turn that down a little bit so it doesn’t make a mess that we have to clean up later. Right. So, um, I’m going to use a half of a cup instead of one cup of almond flour or almond meal. And then I have a/4 cup. So, the recipe calls for a half a cup. And if by the way, I just need to say this. If you’re making a full batch, please proceed and make a full batch. I These are so fabulous. Once you have the dough made, you can wrap it in plastic wrap and put it into the freezer and then it’s all ready to go. Comes out of the freezer. It’s super thin, easy to cut and you bake it. You have a wonderful accompiment for any soup or salad you’re making. If somebody pops in unexpectedly, you’ve got a delicious little treat. It’s a It’s not a cracker that needs cheese or anything on top of it. It’s a cracker that is absolutely fantastic just on its own. So, make a full batch, just maybe cook um bake half of them and keep the rest in the in the freezer. Uh so, the oats next. So, we’ve got the almond flour, the oats, and then the recipe calls for a/4 cup of Parmesan cheese. Grated is best. So, not the shredded, but grated. So, if you have the shredded, that’s completely fine. You can just put into your food processor and give it a little wor and then it’ll come out a little finer. So a/4 cup is uh four tablespoons. So I have half of that. So I’ve got two tablespoons. I always, even though I taught culinary arts for so many years, I always practice measurement because I still mess up sometimes on my measurement if I’m not paying attention because I feel like ah I got this, I got this, I got this. And then it’s like, oops, I guess I didn’t. I guess I didn’t have that. Um let’s talk just a little bit about fresh versus dried herbs. So fresh rosemary. Um, here in the Pacific Northwest, it grows really, really well and it’s very hearty. This was actually from my garden yesterday. I’ve got this huge bush that’s hard to contain. So, um, I don’t know if you have fresh rosemary where you’re at, but uh, you can buy it in most grocery stores. They’ll sell fresh rosemary. It’s very woody. It’s very strong in flavor. So, I just pull the leaves backwards with my hand to pull the leaves off. Of course, it’s been washed and dried ahead of time, right? You always want to wash everything. This is the dried rosemary. You can completely use the dried rosemary. It works fine. Uh, general rule, general rule is to use twice as much of a fresh herb as dried. So, if the recipe calls for a half a teaspoon of dried rosemary, use one teaspoon of fresh. And the reason for that is if you think about the fresh herb as it dries, it’s losing moisture, so it’s concentrating the flavor. It’s losing moisture, so the flavor gets concentrated. So general rule is to use twice as much fresh as dried. So we’ve got just about the amount that we need there. We have dried thyme today, not um fresh thyme. So we’ll use a little bit of that if you want to. Your herbs can vary. You can totally vary your herbs. I would stay away from the delicate herbs like um cilantro maybe not in here or chives especially because it’s being baked. You want something that can handle that cheese. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the heartier herbs that we’re using today um thyme is hardy, oregano, margarm are hardy, rosemary’s hearty. So I would stick with the hearty herbs. And then just finally chop the herb. The machine’s going to do some of the work, so you don’t have to chop it super fine. Um, and then the next ingredient that we have is salt and pepper. Now, we are using a salty cheese. We’re using Parmesan cheese today, so I’m going to go pretty easy on the salt, but I certainly am going to add it again to bring out the flavors of everything else that we’re putting in there. So, a little salt, little black pepper after the rosemary and thyme, whatever, whatever you’re using. I pre-measured this ahead of time, so we’ll go ahead and put that in. And then the butter does need to be chilled for this. Not 100% absolutely chilled. Just make sure it’s not melted or separating from the the warm room. Okay. So, we just took this out of the refrigerator. It’s cubed up a little bit. It’s um half of the recipe. So, I’ve got two tablespoons of butter cut up into about half inch cubes. And then, you know what I did at home? And I’m actually just going to do it. The recipe reads great and it works wonderfully. By accident, I put the ground nuts in there and it worked great. So, I’m going to put half of them in and then with the other half, I’ll show you what we do. Um, as the recipe calls for it, you roll them out and then you press the the nuts into the dough. Just in case you’re wondering and you just can’t wait until we get to that. That’s what we’re going to do. So, I’m going to just bring this together in the food processor or by hand. We had a little question about our uh flour here. This dough is super forgiving. So, we could definitely use other kinds of flour, right? We don’t have to use almond. I don’t see why not. I’ve only done it with the almond, but I don’t see why not. It is. You’ll see in a minute. It’s a very, very forgiving. It’s a little bit wet and it’s um it’s a it’s what we call a short dough, meaning it’s high it it is high in fat. Of course, you don’t eat a lot. You just eat a small amount. So you’re not eating a a stick of butter or a half a stick of butter, but um it’s it’s what we call a short dough. So unless it’s if it’s not chilled properly, it might be a little difficult to handle, but um once again, I just want to let you know that I haven’t tried that, but I don’t see why not. So the ice water, we’re not going to maybe put the whole amount in. I think it says 2 to four tablespoons, and I’m doing half. So you’re just going to put the water in just until the dough comes together. Now, another thing that’s really wonderful about this recipe is that flour, wheat flour, has proteins that have gluten making capabilities. Okay? So, gluten is what gives baked goods their elasticity and holds things together. So, when you’re making a dough that you like a pizza dough or a bread dough, let the machine run. Let that gluten develop. Gluten flour needs water or liquid and it needs energy to develop. So, we put our ingredients into a food processor or a mixer and we’re making pizza dough and we just let it go because we want chewy pizza dough. We want chewy bread, but we don’t want a chewy cracker today. We want a really nice flaky crispy cracker. We don’t want a chewy chocolate chip cookie. So, we need to really control the amount that we mix that and not over we call it overdeveloping the gluten. If you overm mix a cookie or a muffin, you’re going to get a chewy muffin or a chewy cookie. Okay. So, what’s nice about this recipe is that we don’t have the gluten in there. So, if you mix it a little bit longer or it’s, oh, it hasn’t quite come together. I’m just going to go a little bit longer than that. It’s fine. You’re not going to make it. It’s not going to mess it up. Okay. You definitely want to stop before the machine gets too hot and starts basically kind of cooking our dough in there. Basically, this is a great time that I do want to mention. Um, the recipe calls just for oat flour. So, oats are naturally gluten-free, but they are often processed on equipment that also processes wheat. So, if you are truly gluten-free, it is important to read the label and find a gluten-free oat. Thank you, Megan. That’s that’s great. We had again, we had that discussion earlier, too, because it’s confusing, isn’t it? Shopping is confusing now. You know why? It’s wonderful. It’s sort of a a double-edged sword because we have so many options, right? There’s so many options out there, but it can be kind of confusing, a little overwhelming. Absolutely. There’s so many options. And now with food labeling, we’re seeing labels with food has this thing and then we’re also seeing it labeled as food does not have this thing. And then it just doubles up all of the verbiage on the packaging and makes it even more confusing. So, I’m going to begin with just pressing this down for starters. Trying to keep it kind of uniform. I’m I I usually shoot for a rectangle. It kind of depends on the shape you’re going to cut your your crackers because we’re going to have options. So, we’re going to have maybe a a round cutter or maybe we’ll cut them, you know, in the ones we have today that I made yesterday are triangle shaped. So, just think about how am I going to cut these? But you know what is also wonderful about this recipe is that you can cut and then rework that dough again. A lot of times if you’re making biscuits using a a flour, a wheat flour, you can’t re-roll that uh dough again very many times because it starts getting tough and you start o overdeveloping that gluten. So what’s nice about this is you can just your little scraps you can just ball them up and roll them out again and they’re totally fine. So I like to use uh parchment paper. Um, if you were here at my last class, you know that I don’t really Clean up is not my favorite part of cooking. I do it. I clean as I go whenever possible. So, if I roll this between two pieces of parchment paper or plastic wrap works great if you don’t have parchment paper, parchment paper is different than wax paper. So, you don’t want to bake on wax paper. You want to buy legitimate parchment paper in the grocery store. Most grocery stores sell it in a roll like plastic wrap or foil. Don’t worry about getting it real thin right now. We’re going to roll it again. I’m just rolling it thin enough right now so that we can chill it in the amount of time that we have. Okay. So, what maybe about between a/4 and an eighth of an inch thick. And I’m just going to keep it between these pieces of parchment paper. And then Chef Cad, I know you’re busy over there, but do you mind just sticking that in the fridge real quick? Thank you so much. You’re awesome. Thank you. So, we’re going to just let that chill and then um for rolling out, I have the rest of the ground nuts. And I’m sticking with the almond theme today. So, you can use hazelnuts. You can use pretty much any any other nut. Um, we’re using almonds today, but um, pecans, walnuts, all super healthy, high, good quality, healthy fats for us. So, I’m sticking the whole theme today is with um, almonds. So, I’ve got ground almonds and a little extra ground um, almond flour for rolling out, which will be helpful because it it’s going to be a little bit of a sticky dough. Okay. So, if we don’t have any questions about the crackers so far, I’m going to go ahead and move on to our vegetable prep. And we’ve got a lot of vegetables to prep. We have a lot of vegetables to prep. And I was so happy to see one of my favorite words, cruciferous. Yeah, cruciferous. We’ve got stuff from the cruciferous family. So, the cruciferous family is our cabbage. Uh, this is a regular beautiful head of green cabbage. This cabbage is a seavoy cabbage. It just has a little more like veininess to it. It’s a little more delicate. Any of these cabbage will work. Okay, any of them will work. And then we were also able to find something that I’ve never worked with before. This is actually a napa cabbage which is used in sometimes in a lot of Asian dishes, salads or stirfries. And it’s got a little purple, beautiful purple color to it. It’s so pretty. Yeah. So, what what vitamin are we going to get from that? Our registered dietician on duty here with the purple. Is that going to add any You’re absolutely right that the color is visual representation of nutrients that we get inside of our food. So, when we talk about um kind of vegetable intake guidelines, yes, we say things like eat five servings of fruits and vegetables every day or aim for so many cups. Um but we really do want you eating the rainbow. It’s important to have our dark leafy green vegetables, our red, orange, yellow vegetables that give us those good carotenoids. We want those dark purple blue things with our anthocyanin. So there’s a lot of really important nutrients represented by different color. Yeah. So that was fun. Even though we’re making a green green binestroni today, so we’re not going to use it. Um but different options. So what I’m trying to get to here and make the point is that we don’t want you to make this soup and go out and buy a whole bunch of ingredients just as the recipe says. What’s so wonderful about this soup is that you can literally open up your vegetable drawer if you’ve been cooking this week or you went shopping a week ago. See what you have. See what what what would work well in this soup. So you could make a an Asian chicken salad with the nappa cabbage and then use that cabbage for your soup. Don’t go buy two different cab types of cabbage and have one go to waste. So it’s it’s again the soup is also forgiving. Use what you have, use what you like, use what you’ll eat. Um we did get one question about vegetables in this soup. Somebody asked if there was a substitute for celery and I really can’t think of one off the top of my head other than just omitting it if it’s not your favorite or if it doesn’t work for you. I would say in this case celery is you want celery for that flavor. So if anything just cut it up really small. Just cut it up really small so that when you sauté it you get the flavor and then it just cooks into the soup. That’s such that’s a really good question and I would agree with Chef Cat, but I would also say just then just skip it. It’s not it’s not critical. It’s not critical. Bump up something else in the soup that you like. Uh we also have three different types of onions, which I thought would be a good time to address this because we do most of us do a lot of cooking with onions. A lot of recipes call for onions. So, we have a standard yellow onion, which is a beautiful onion that um our shopper did a beautiful job on this, meaning the layers are super nice and tight. Uh probably has a few layers that we’re going to peel back in a minute. So, uh, that’s a nice yellow onion, which is what we could use today. We could use any of these today. Um, this one is a sweet onion, which are available pretty much everywhere now. Just any grocery store across the country, you can usually find sweet onions. Sometimes they say Texas sweet or Georgia sweet or something, but they’re usually labeled sweet onions. Uh, wala wala from Washington where we are. Um, it’s definitely not going to be as hot. Uh, it’s going to have a little sweetness to it. Okay. So, a little more mild sweet onion. And then the white onion, which is used um can be used interchangeably for pretty much any of these. White onions are often eaten raw, so maybe sprinkled on top of um I see white onion used a lot in Mexican dishes. Um it’s raw raw um marinades. Sometimes they’re pickled. They’re really, really good. So, we have the yellow’s probably the hottest. Then we go white and then we go with the sweet onion. But again, don’t go buy a whole bunch of different onions. Any of these will work. Okay, so let’s go ahead. We’ll go ahead and use the white onion today for the soup. And uh different ways to cut an onion. My advice for cutting onions is that you need to feel safe. Okay? So, if you feel wobbly, it’s rolling around, you need to set things up so that you feel safe and you’re not going to hurt yourself. Okay? Sharp knife is great. We’ve talked before about holding up on your knife, like really grasping up here where you’re literally your your thumb and your your first finger, index finger are holding the knife blade. Okay? I’m not totally on the handle. I don’t have a lot of control here. So, I’m going to seize up on the knife and I’m going to go ahead and before I do anything, I’ve washed it ahead of time always because we’ve got bacteria on the outside of the onion. So, I always wash everything ahead of time and I’m going to cut through. And I usually say pole to pull. So this is the sprout end here and we have the root end that goes into the ground there. So I we always refer to this in the industry as pole to pole in half. I’m going to keep all my hands out of the way and just cut straight through the onion. Okay. Then I’m going to put the flat side of the onion down on the board and I’m going to cut off the sprout end a little bit. I really like to use as much of everything as I possibly can. And then I’m just going to pull back the layers until I get to usable onion. It could be one layer. It could be two layers. Sometimes they’re a little more bruised. They’ve been handled. Then I’m going to remove the end of the onion here, the onion first layer, but I’m not going to cut all the way through that core. As you know, an onion has a lot of layers to it. And so I want to keep those layers together so the onion’s not all over the board. Okay. I taught culinary arts for 30 years and teaching how to cut an onion, we would spend two days on it because it’s really important. It’s really important. Um, and usually there’s pieces of onion just everywhere. Wouldn’t that be funny if that happened to me today? Every time I chop onions, there’s always onions everywhere. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe I can help you. Maybe I can help you with that. You’re very talented chef Cat. But maybe I’m going to put the flat side of my hand on top of the onion, keeping my digits that I really cherish and love, all 10 of them, out of the way, and just put some weight down. I’m going to my knife is going to be um parallel with the board. So, I’m going to make, depending on the size of the onion, I’m going to make a cut through, but not all the way through and out the other side. As far as I feel safe, I’m going to come up about a/ an inch, maybe a quarter of an inch. Make another cut. We want this pretty small today. And then I’m going to come up and do one more. And see, it would be actually be very difficult for me to cut myself. I’m cutting away. The blade from the knife is going away from me. My hand is on top. My fingers are out of the way. It would be difficult for me to cut myself. Not that I couldn’t do it because if anybody could do it, I could do it, but difficult. Okay. And then I’m going to make some cuts this way depending on the size today. Now, the recipe does say diced onion, which is a little bit vague. So with the experience that you have and you all are here because you like to cook and you have some experience at least cooking at home that a lot of cooking is just common sense. It’s like what am I making? How long is this going to be on the stove? Think about how I’m eating it. How big should this onion be? So I would say we don’t have to go like a mince which is really really really small. Maybe a small dice which is like a quarter of an inch. So again, I’m going to take my knife, flat side is down, and cut across about a quart of an inch. These Schmidt knives are nice, aren’t they? I brought my knife. I brought my own knife from home today and I didn’t even unpack it because I was just saying in the chat, this is why it’s so important to have a sharp knife. This is a nice It is important. Now, when I get down here, it’s starting to feel a little unsafe and a little wobbly. So that’s when I put the flat side of the onion down the base. Now I’ve got something stable. And then I’m going to take my knife and just make some little quarter inch cuts this way all the way to the core. And then I’m going to do what we call rocking the knife. So I’m going to keep the tip of my knife on the board. And I’m just going to come across like this all the way down to the core, keeping my fingers like this out of the way. And then I’m going to rotate the onion. Dice across. Rotate the other way. And all my onion is in one neat little pile here. And all I’ve got left is this last little bit of the core. Okay. So, I always like to teach that. I know you’ve all a lot of you have been around here a long time and you’ve maybe you’ve seen some different ways. So, often one way doesn’t work and the other way works better. Knife skills are so important. Knife skills are so important. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get with it. And speed will only come with your comfort. That’s so true. So true. Thank you. So, I’m going to go ahead and pull the pharaoh because it’s finished and just drain it over the sink. And then we’re just going to let that hang out there until our soup is ready. it it retains the fereral retains a lot of heat and our soup will be really hot and so we can probably just put the ferro in the bowl at the time we get to it and just pour the hot soup on top. But you can always just um reheat in the microwave or just warm up the pharaoh on top of the stove a little bit just to make sure. I think soup hot soups should be served really really hot personally. Uh let me just talk about garlic. These are the first uh two things I think well the celery actually needs to go in too. So we’ll do that next and then I’ll talk about garlic. um celery washed, trimmed. Let me go ahead and get this pan on a little bit. That’s getting hot. Actually, we’re going to go ahead and put our olive oil into the soup pot. And then we’ll get our onions started. We’re not looking for a a deep caramelization on this. We’re just looking for um I refer to it as sweating the vegetables. So, I’m going to turn that up just a little bit. until I hear something and I see something, but I don’t want caramelization. So, we’re going to look for a beautiful vibrant green color on this soup. And um I’m going to sweat the vegetables, meaning just like if we were sweating, uh we’re releasing moisture from our body. So, we refer to that cooking term as sweating. So, we’re releasing the moisture in the onions, concentrating the flavor, and having whatever’s in our pot, which we’re going to start adding different things, and having those flavors meld or marry together. Okay. So, we’ll get those started. Then, we’ll just throw the celery right on top as soon as we get there. Uh, celeryy’s been washed and trimmed. And again, we don’t want the celery up this way where it’s rolling around, which is a little bit unsafe. I like to have a flat, steady surface. I’m going to go ahead and cut it in half so it’s a little more manageable to handle. And then turn it over. Again, I always like to do this little claw hand. We call it the claw hand with our fingers out of the way. And we’ll aim for around the same size of the onion. Okay. So, just strips. Now, see, if I had that whole big long piece of celery, it’d be kind of difficult to make those little strips. So, always feel comfortable and safe when you’re cutting, when you have a knife in your hand. And then the rocking of the knife, aiming for the same size. They don’t have to be perfect with this. And then we’ll go ahead and put that. The onions are doing a nice little sizzle. We’ll keep an eye on them so they don’t caramelize. Caramelization is a wonderful um way to cook things. meaning we’re caramelizing literally sugar, which is in onions and celery and garlic and everything else. But, uh, sometimes you want caramelization. Maybe if you’re searing a piece of steak or something, you want a nice crust on it, a nice sear. Um, if you’re making French onion soup, you caramelize the onions for that. But sometimes, uh, recipes, you don’t want to caramelize. So, it’s just controlling the heat and the time. That’s all it is. Okay. Okay, so let’s talk about garlic for a minute. Recipes that call for one clove of garlic. This is again one of the common sense things. Okay, so this is a clove of garlic here and this is a clove of garlic here. They really vary in size. So, when I write recipes, I like to say a medium garlic clove or a small garlic clove or just something that tells us as cooks that like to cook that no garlic have cooked with garlic before, like give you a rough amount. Now, we’re making a soup, so it wouldn’t really matter, but we do want a nice garlic flavor in there. So, I went ahead and peeled two sort of medium to largeish garlic cloves. And a little trick that a chef taught me a long time ago was that if you see this little green um center in the garlic clove, that could impart bitterness into what you’re making. Okay. What’s happening here, and I’m just going to cut it in half so you can see what’s happening here is the garlic is trying to grow again. It’s trying to sprout. And so this little green inside here can turn things bitter. Now, with this soup today, does it matter? No, it doesn’t matter. We can put it in there. But if I was making a salad dressing, a small amount of salad dressing, I really might want to take that little green shoot out. Sometimes it’s actually literally coming out of the garlic uh clove. So then you’d want to remove it. Okay. So just for future reference, if you’re making a nice delicate salad dressing or something, you might want to do that. I like to use this microplane um for garlic. You can chop it by hand. Works completely fine. I like to use a microplane microplane. We do often You have to be careful though because sometimes we use microplanes for baked goods, maybe zest that’s going into a cookie or a bread or something. You definitely want to wash it really really well so that all the garlic is is um removed and you don’t get garlic orange. You don’t want garlic in your orange. So, but it is nice. It makes things easy as long as you keep your fingers away from the blades. I have, which is always a good thing. I have injured myself on a microplane before. I have, too. And when you buy them new, when they’re new, they’re they’re sharp. They’re sharp. They’re really sharp. Yeah. Okay. So, we will get all that wonderful garlic out of there. And I’m going to go ahead and put in these little extra pieces. That spared my fingers. Add those as well. Okay. So, uh, that’s all that’s going to go in the soup right now as far as vegetables. I wanted to show you a technique. This recipe is very, very well written. And if you follow the recipe just as is, it’s it’s fabulous. It works great. So, um, we’re going to do a blanching and shocking of the vegetables separately, though. And the reason I’m going to do that is I like things crunchier. I like I want the vegetables to be crunchy, not raw, but not cooked all the way through. And I want to keep their vibrant green color. Okay. So, um the cabbage we could actually go ahead and add because that’s we’ll add that soon because that’s going to um not change color too much. So, we will go ahead and add that pretty soon. But, I’m going to show you just a little bit different just because we don’t have a whole lot of time. I um don’t want to I want to show you something new. If you follow this recipe just as is, it’s wonderful. It’s delicious. I’ve done it. But I thought I would just show you just a little tweak on the recipe so that you can just file that away if you want to try it. Um, the cabbage has been washed. Uh, again, safety is really important. I’m not going to try and core it like this, holding it and then putting my knife towards my hand. I’m going to go ahead and create a safe space and just cut it down towards the cutting board in half. And then I’m going to cut it um take the core out. There’s just a little piece of the core here which we will compost. And the recipe says to slice it, which again is a little bit vague, but you can use your own judgment for that. Uh so slice, just think about we’re going to be eating this with a soup spoon. So we definitely want a size that’s going to fit in this soup spoon as we eat it. We don’t want a big long sliver where we’re kind of trying to it’s awkward to eat, right? So that’s something to think about. So, I’ll just cut it into cabbage heads are going to vary from what you get in the store in size density. Again, here I’m getting just like the onion. Remember, we got a little wobbly there. So, let’s go ahead and find the flat base. Feeling safe. Also, you don’t have to get real hung up on measuring the two and 1/2 cups of cabbage or one and a half cups of broccoli. just look at your cup measure and just sort of estimate. Okay, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got an extra 1/4 cup of cabbage in there. Just more nutrients and more delicious stuff to eat, right? So, we’ll go ahead and put the cabbage in. And then before we start blanching the vegetables, I’m going to roll out the dough. I think this would be a good time to make that transition. So, I didn’t really have anything to be too concerned about on my cutting board. So, I’m going to go ahead and just give it a a quick wipe down with a sanitizing towel. Turn the stove up just a little bit. Thank you, Cat. And again, we didn’t we gave it probably a little bit longer than you would have to. I think 10 to 15 minutes is totally enough time to chill the dough. Plus, it’s it’s really thin. Could you put it in the freezer for a quick chill? Of course. Sure. Your freezer is going to give you a little a little faster on that. Okay. So, we have our baking sheet here. Oven is preheated, ready to go. So, you might need a little extra almond flour. And you might not if your rolling pin starts if you’re rolling directly with the rolling pin or and your and your dough starts sticking to your rolling pin or you start rolling with using parchment paper and you see that it’s sticking to the parchment paper, then you need to add a little more almond flour. But you might not. And then just we’re going to roll it just a little bit thinner, which is easier to do after it’s been chilled. And you can rotate this this way. Having it even is important. So, even thickness. When you’re rolling something out, like a pie dough or something, don’t roll off the edge this way because what you’re doing is you’re tapering it. The edges are all going to be really, really thin. And again, it doesn’t really matter. We’re going to wad this up and roll it out again anyway. So, nothing’s nothing is going to go to waste. I baked all my little scraps when I made this at home and um just snacked on them. Super good. Okay, so then that comes off. And again, you could use I just wanted to be set up for you ahead of time. You could use this parchment paper to not be wasteful as your baking paper. You don’t have to have a separate one and throw this away. I’m very frugal. round triangles, squares, whatever you like. Whatever you like. So, we’ll just cut some rounds. And then do remember to add that little extra crunch on top. You can either add it on each one after you cut them, but probably best to sprinkle it over the whole thing. And I’m not doing this very evenly, so it’s chilled. I’ll just take my hand, clean hand, clean, dry hand, spread it out. You know what else would be really good on here? If you didn’t put too much salt, how can you tell? Just taste a little bit of the dough. There’s no raw eggs or raw flour or anything in here to be concerned about. If you if it could use a little more salt, sprinkle a little sea salt on there, too. A little crunchy sea salt. Be delicious. Okay, so we’ll cut those out. And they are true to recipe. I think it’s 15 minutes is pretty true, but we’ll keep an eye on them. Turn the soup up just a little bit. Well, I’ll turn it up a lot and then we’ll keep an eye on it. And then these are going to come off onto the baking sheet. How’s everybody doing? I see some action in the kitchen on the screen. So exciting. People are busy. cooking along with us. Yeah, I love that. These crackers would be really good. Like you said, baking off the scraps is just a snack, honestly. Well, I can attest to the fact that they are really good just as a snack. Okay, I’m not going to reroll this because got other vegetables to cut. Managing my managing my time on homemade. It’s only my second class, but managing my time is an issue already because I I guess I talk a lot. No, we love what you’re talking about. We have people talking about We got the knife here. There’s people at home going, “Okay, next step, Chef Diana, next step.” No, we love the the knife lesson. It’s always so good to go over basic knife skills. I’m telling you, I know. I also find myself in a hurry and I’m looking down at what I’m doing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. My knife skills are awful.” And I’m not being safe, right? A visit to the ER is not in my plans for tonight. All right, we’re going to go. Let’s check them in seven minutes. Can we do that? Cuz I want to show you something. So, into the oven. Might have to increase the time on the oven a little bit, but yes, you can do it. Increase the time on the oven a little bit. Temperature or time? Time. Okay. So, uh what I like to do whenever I’m baking anything is I like to rotate the item halfway through the baking process. And the reason for that is most of our ovens, mine included, has hot spots. So if you’ve ever baked a a pizza, uh cookie, you know, batch of cookies and you’ve baked them and it’s like, “Oh, why are the ones in the back done and brown and the ones in the front aren’t done yet?” It’s because our ovens don’t have even heat all the way through. So I always rotate items when I’m baking halfway through, at least once. Now, the trick to that is that you need to open and close the oven quickly so you don’t release the heat into the room, warm up the room, and cool down the oven, right? You want to keep the temperature in the oven consistent. So, you do have to pay a little more attention with that, but um I always rotate at least once, okay? And again, quickly and carefully. Okay? Okay, we’ve got nice sweated vegetables here. At this point, we’re going to add our broth. We’re using chicken broth today. You can use a vegetable broth. I wouldn’t recommend water. Personally, it’s just a personal opinion, which is all I’m teaching you here. Remember, everything is just my opinion. It doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It’s just my opinion. And my opinion is that you’re just not going to get enough flavor with water. So they make really good quality vegetable stocks now on the market that I would recommend a vegetable stock if you want to keep it vegetarian. I think it’s also important to say that you should buy the no sodium or low sodium chicken stock as well. Yes, because you can control the amount of salt that you put in there. So absolutely low sodium healthier more control over that. Uh, I wanted to mention that with butter also when we were talking earlier about butter because um I always buy unsalted butter because then you can control the amount of salt that goes into your dish. Unsalted butter is it tastes fresher. Um, sometimes I’ve literally boughten salted butter or it came across somehow to me because I usually I I don’t know when the last time I purchased it myself, but it was actually too salty just as was, you know, as as I bought it. So anyway, just um I like to use low sodium stock for sure and then control the amount of salt and unsalted butter. Control the amount of salt myself. Again, think about that soup spoon. So, we’re going to cut the broccoli into what we call broccoli fuettes. It’s been washed. I’m going to save some of these stocks for a salad later. I don’t waste anything. Hardly. Hardly anything. My favorite thing is leftovers. I also I talked about having those um those the cracker dough in the freezer in my house. It’s funny. My family teases me. I call it having things like that in the freezer, like a big batch of soup or crackers or something that’s delicious in the freezer ready to go. I call it money in the bank. To me, it’s just like having it’s like having money in the bank. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, let’s put this in the freezer. It’s money in the bank.” It’s sort of a joke at our house, but I love it. It just It’s nice. It’s comforting to know that something healthy and good is there that you made yourself. You don’t have to rely on ordering the pizza or whatever. So, broccoli’s just about ready to go. The water I’m going to turn it up just a little bit so it comes to a boil quickly. Um, waiting to add the salt. Thank you. I’m going to rotate halfway and then we’ll go another seven minutes. and we’ll take a peek at them. They’re doing really, really nicely. And then the zucchini is the last thing I think that has to go in here. Um, I’ve washed it. I’m going to cut off both ends. Just just a little trim. Salad. No, maybe. Maybe not the stem end. Maybe the other piece. And then, uh, I’m going to take the zucchini and cut it in manageable pieces just as I did the celery. And then I’m going to go ahead and cut down around the interior, the middle, the seeds. Okay, this is actually a really, really nice zucchini. It’s not super watery and seedy like a lot of them are. That can totally go into our soup. Sometimes you are with a cucumber, it’s like a cucumber or a zucchini, you cut around and this is like all watery and and whatever. This is nice and dense. And actually that can then totally go into our soup. And then I’m going to cut nice diced zucchini. Soup spoon sized. Water’s boiling. Zucchini is also just a really good vegetable for you, right? Yeah. Sauté. Um carameliz zucchini. Carameliz is really nice. You put a little caramelized on it. Onion, garlic, little tomato product. Right. Ratatouille. Oh, I think your oven turned off. You just got to press the start button. Oh, that would be helpful. Boom. It’s bacon. That’s okay. It’s preheated. It’s telling you it’s preheated. Good to know. Thank you. Okay, so again, my claw hand cutting across small dice. These vegetables are going to cook really, really quickly. Oh, the kale. I’ve got the kale still. I got to get going here. Actually, once these are prepped, it’ll go really fast. And we can just add a little bit of the kale for now. So, kale. Beans can go in pretty soon, too. We’ve got a can of white beans, cantalini, northern white beans. Um, doesn’t really matter. Super nutritional. So, what Megan? We’ve got the beans. So, we’ve got legumes. We have um the whole grains. We’ve got all these cruciferous vegetables. I mean, and the soup tastes really filling and really decadent. So, this has been washed. I’ll let Megan talk while I’m doing this, but I just want to I’m pulling the stem out, the ribs out here. So, as you’re describing it, we have the the whole grains, the bean is our kind of our protein for this meal. And a huge amount of vegetables. This is easily getting us um you know, a third of our vegetables for the day. It is a fantastic meal. It’s going to have tons of fiber. It’s going to keep us full for a long time. It’s going to feed our good, healthy gut bacteria that we want living in our intestines. Um, and and like I mentioned before, this is specifically getting us those dark leafy green vegetables. Um, and that can be a challenge for a lot of people where, you know, maybe the lettuce greens are easy to get, but it’s harder to get the kale, the broccoli, the the cabbage, something like that. all again all those cruciferous vegetables um that we love so much. So, I’m going to go ahead and add the beans and the to the broth, which is just about ready to come to a simmer. It’s nice and hot. It’s steaming. I don’t know if you can see that at home, but it’s nice and steamy, so it should come to a simmer here pretty quickly. And then, this is just boiling water. I’m going to add my salt now. I didn’t want to add it earlier because the water has a tendency to boil down and then the salt flavor intensifies and it kind of mucks up the the pot too. I’m actually going to add like a tablespoon of salt. I’m going to cook a lot of vegetables in there. So, close to a tablespoon. And you don’t have to measure it. Just a fair amount of salt. The salt is going to not only flavor, but it’s going to also set the green color in our vegetables. So, it helps keep them nice and vibrant and green. So, the the of these three vegetables on the cutting board, the broccoli is going to take the longest to cook, right? So, I’m going to put the broccoli in. This is going to go really fast. And then I’m just going to maybe count to 10 or just move really slow. Follow with the zucchini. Zucchini is going to go really quick. So, in goes a zucchini. And you can do this with any kind of like green vegetable, especially I recommend doing this with green beans. Then it holds the color when you sauté it. What about Brussels sprouts? Absolutely. Asparagus. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. And then the kale is going to be really fast. And this is this beautiful, we call it um linenado kale or dino kale. So that’s just going to be really really quick. And then I have a if I was making the soup ahead of time, I would pull the vegetables out and I would shock them into ice water. So this is called shocking. But if you’re eating it right away, we’re just going to go ahead and put it right in the soup. So I have control over the crunchiness of the broccoli. I’ve set that beautiful green color. I’ve added a little bit of seasoning with the salt and we’re going to serve this right away. So, you don’t need to worry about um shocking today. But again, it’s nice especially if you’re having somebody over or if you want to prep dinner ahead of time. Then you have your vegetables cooked, blanched, shocked, and then all you do is reheat your soup and then dump them in there and you’re ready to eat. And again, the recipe just as is written is fabulous. Also, this is just a little added bonus here today. Okay. So, like we were talking about earlier with the color representing nutrients inside, when the color of the vegetable changes and it moves into that water, that is nutrients moving. Um, so in the case of soup, I might not be as concerned because you’re going to consume the broth of that soup. But say we’re just, you know, um, blanching, boiling our vegetable and then we throw away that water. We’re missing out on all of those nutrients, too. Yeah, those vegetables really got super vibrant. Yeah, they’re so pretty. I don’t know what would happen to the purple uh napa if we put it in there, but I’ I’d sure like to find out. It’s kind of a gamble. Some red things keep their color and some things lose their color. So, okay. So, then we’re just going to bring this back up to a simmer. I’m going to move it to the hotter burner where the where this is so it can go a little bit quicker because we’re ready. We’re ready to Uhoh. Whoa. A little suction on that stove there. It’s really surprising like once you get all that prep done, that soup just comes together, right? And you know, for the sake of the class, I definitely wanted to show a couple tips on knife skills even though I know um Chef Joel and Chef Jenny do a excellent job with that if they’re return returning homemaders here. They do such a good job with that. But um I don’t think, as you mentioned, I don’t think it it hurts to ever review that again. Right. So, here we go. Absolutely delicious. Uh let’s see. That burner shut off. Stove’s been working well for me today. Huh? Until now. That’s okay. It’s nice and hot. Uh, optionals things to put on here. So, we have our pharaoh, which is in the recipe. So, here’s the pharaoh. And oh, I could talk about herbs forever, too. There’s beautiful fresh basil here. Um, I keep it in ice water. And even if in the refrigerator, I keep it in ice water so it stays. Basil is a delicate herb and it wilts really really easily. So um I keep it in ice water. I refresh it and then you could shifod a fine little ribbon to sprinkle on top. I wouldn’t put a whole leaf on top because as we talked about the eating in a soup spoon if you’re eating this delicious soup with all these flavors you don’t want to come across a big piece of basil and try and navigate that, right? So if you’re going to use it, it’s fabulous. Flavor is wonderful in there. But do a nice little shifod, a thin little ribbon. And if you would like to make or buy a pesto, typically pesto has basil in it. I made this pesto sticking with the almond theme. I made it with almonds and with um I actually made it with uh kale. Hello. Sticking with the theme with kale. So, it’s almond kale pesto. So, nice theme with the soup. The soup recipe calls for a half a cup. Um, actually, it’s a full cup of almond milk, unsweetened almond milk. Delicious in here. It gives it a nice little silkiness, little smoothness. Not necessary, but definitely a nice option if you would like it. And if you have almond milk, it definitely does add a nice little textural and flavor thing. But these are just options. And then if you feel like you do need a little bit more, I have some poached chicken breast. So just super simple, low temperature, lean chicken breast. Uh cooked it until it was cooked all the way through, cooled it, and then just gave it a little shred. Okay, so that is a nice option. And our crackers are perfect just in the nick of time. So we’ve got the crackers here. You don’t want to try and I know you want to try and pick one up right away because I really do because they I wish you could smell everything smells fantastic. I wish you could smell these. They smell so good. Um but they’re super crumbly. Remember it’s a short dough. It’s a crumbly dough. So they’re warm and if I tried to pick one up right away, they it would crumble. So we need about 5 minutes to just let them sit until you can comfortably pick one up. So I want to bring my soup back to a simmer here if I can. Maybe what do I turn the stove off and then back on again? We’ll just use a different burner. Let’s do that. The off button. Okay, perfect. Okay, so I’m going to put these on a cooling rack over here. Or actually, we can just put them right on top of here. Let them cool a little bit. And then uh Pharaoh would go in and it’s it’s had a fair amount of time to cool. Pharaoh’s had fair amount of time to cool. And then uh poached chicken. And then I might want to just stick this in to the microwave for a quick little or even just a warm oven if it’s a heat proof bowl. Just a nice little warm oven. Soup can go on top. And it’s so beautiful. Do you see the bright color of the broccoli? It looks so good and vibrant. Crunch to it. And then a little pesto. You could either make more sense to sort of drizzle it around, right? So, disperse it. And then these are the crackers that we made ahead of time. So, I cut these ones that I made yesterday into a triangle shape. And it’s a delicious meal. How we doing? We’re doing the Oh, somebody. Who is that? Is that Lena? Yes. Oh, you beat me again. Wow. Beautiful. Good job, Lena. Oh, that’s so fun. Just got chills. Look at Oh, we’ve got more. Oh, beautiful. Nice job, everybody. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Megan. It was so fun to be with you today. Hey, do you have anything to add before we sign off? Could we get Where’s my soup? Are you going to I want a bowl? You know what? Nobody ever usually has to remind me to eat. No problem. Taste it. That’s That’s a first. I know it’s good. I mean, just looking at it. Mhm. You’re going to get over here pretty soon, aren’t you? For sure. It’s so good. And the broccoli is beautiful in color and crispy. Delicious. Again, for me, it’s a little tiny bit underseasoned, but I can add a little salt at this point, right? But if I’d added too much in the beginning, I can’t take it out. So, after we sign off, I’m going to add a little salt and finish that. Oh my god, so good. Thank you so much everybody. Homemaders enjoy. Make sure and we our next class is herb crusted rack of ve which is on March 5th. And uh just really wonderful being with you today. Thank you so much. Enjoy. Keep cooking. Hope to see you next time.

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