Not Without Your Protein! How To Prepare More Complete Soups And Creams

In winter, dinners based on soup or vegetable cream are very helpful. It is a very good option, since it is a quick dinner that we can have previously prepared or frozen and that is only heated, suitable for the whole family since the little ones also eat it very well, and comforting at this time.

Creams are a good option to eat a good amount of vegetables, and in soups we should also include them, in the paisana or julienne style soup (with vegetables cut into strips or squares) or like the typical Italian minestrone.

We should avoid soups only made of broth and pasta, if we are not going to eat anything else, because in that case they are a very poor intake. If you don’t like broth-only soup, let’s think about a second course that completes that menu.

Ultimately, if we are too lazy to make another dish, and our soup does not have vegetables, we can turn to the bags of cut vegetables for soups that many supermarkets already sell in the area of ​​salad bags. Although chopping a carrot, half a zucchini, a little leek and adding a few chard leaves, it doesn’t cost anything.

If you are one of those who do not make the broth at home, remember that in the last article we showed you how to choose the right brick broths in the supermarket.

The only downside is that these dinners often fall short on their protein side. But in reality it is very easy to solve and there are several vegan alternatives to enrich those creams or vegetable soups with a protein part and make them a dinner of ten.

Let’s look at some suggestions.

How to add protein to vegetable soups and creams

Soups:

• Add cubes of tofu, tempeh or natto.
• Substitute legumes for pasta such as red lentils, which cook quickly, or previously cooked chickpeas, for example.
• Use legume pasta. It is now common to find lentil or chickpea pasta that can be used to replace traditional noodles if we prefer to accompany the soup with a “pasta” format.
• We can choose to put the protein part in the dessert, taking one or two soy yogurts without sugar.

Creams:

• Add tofu, tempeh, textured soy or natto, well before grinding to be incorporated into the cream, or in cubes as a topping.
• Adding peanut butter, with creams such as pumpkin or carrot creams, gives a very good flavor.
• Add hemp seeds before grinding
• Make the creams with legumes, not just vegetables.
• Sprinkle one or two tablespoons per plate of brewer’s yeast (or integrate it into the cream). This would also work for the soup.
• Add unsweetened soy yogurt, once crushed, which also makes a much creamier puree.
• It’s also a quick option, adding unflavored vegan protein powder.

If we finish with some nuts and seeds, and a drizzle of raw extra virgin olive oil, we will have a perfect dinner for this season.