One of my early New Year’s resolutions is to stop apologizing so much, so I’m totally NOT sorry that there are way less photos than normal for this post, and that they were all taken hurriedly on my iPhone. I was pretty hungry and the soup smelled delicious! (spoiler alert: it also tasted delicious)
When Erich and I were deciding what we wanted to cook for dinner, we perused some recipes and I picked this one. Afterwards, he told me he had thought it was going to be terrible, but luckily his prediction was way wrong, much to both of our delight.
This mushroom barley soup recipe comes from the blog Sweet Potato Chronicles, which is full of amazing recipes. The best part is the little questions that are generated and scattered along the right side of the site, like “Lazy Sunday? Click here for a big breakfast idea,” or “5 o’clock shit-show? Click here for ideas.” And then you are directed to either one or multiple recipes for the given situation. It’s awesome.
The great thing about the mushroom barley soup is that you can sub in whatever kinds of stuff you want in a soup — like leeks, potatoes, chicken, whatever you would like. The only alteration we made to the original recipe was to add a little tomato paste, which is totally optional.
Mushroom Barley Soup (from Sweet Potato Chronicles)
Ingredients:
- 2 Tbsp olive oil
- 2 to 3 garlic cloves
- 1 onion
- 2 medium carrots
- 2 stalks of celery
- 1 lb of cremini mushrooms
- 2 Tbsp thyme (fresh or dried)
- 3/4 cup of pearl barley (or as much as you want)
- 6 cups of chicken stock
- 2 Tbsp tomato paste
- Mozzarella, for garnish (or your favorite kind of cheese)
