Vegan Mofo #15 - Heidi’s Garlic Scapes Soup...

Vegan Mofo #15 - Heidi’s Garlic Scapes Soup

The Book - Super Natural Cooking
The Author - Heidi Swanson
The Recipe -
Page #
Difficulty - Easy
Duration 45-60 minutes

Super Natural Cooking is a vegetarian cook book, but many of the recipes - such as this one - can easily be veganized with a few painless substitutions. I was actually quite excited about getting this cook book. In fact it was my first ever vegetarian cook book. I purchased it more then a year ago, back when I was still an omnivore, only a couple of months away from transitioning to a vegetarian diet. There are a lot of inspired dishes in this book, and some really delicious ones too. Unfortunately I went form vegetarian to vegan so fast I hardly had any time to use it. In the beginning I wasn’t as savvy about subbing vegan ingredients for non-vegan ones, but now that I am I’d like to use this book a little more.

When I first purchased this book, the Garlic Scapes Soup recipe was one of the first to pop out at me. The picture was just so beautiful, so green! So mouth watering! I wanted to make the soup right away except I’d never heard of garlic scapes before let alone seen them anywhere. I looked around but to no avail I guess garlic scape season either hadn’t yet begun or was just over. The season for garlic scapes you see is very short indeed, and if you miss it you miss it until next year.

It wasn’t until this June that I found garlic scapes at my local market, and I was very excited about them. They look so neat, so bright and curly. I immediately picked up a few dozen and went straight home to make this soup.

The soup was certainly tasty, and worth the wait, but it was a lot milder then I thought it would be. The scape it seems has quite a mild flavor, so if you’re like me and like a really strong garlic taste I would suggest either using 3-4 dozen scapes rather then just 2, or adding in some cloves of garlic as well. There is one thing about this soup, a taste - a flavor that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s a flavor very reminiscent of a soup my Oma use to make when I was younger and now I can’t for the life of me remember what that soup might have been. In any case the soup was very good, and I quite enjoyed it. Garlic scapes are amazing, and I highly suggest that if you ever see them in the market you pick up a couple dozen without the slightest bit of hesitation.

As far as changes to this soup go, veganizing it was very easy. Instead of clarified butter I used olive oil, and instead of heavy cream I used unsweetened almond milk. Presto Changeo - easy as pie. Also for some reason she says to not peel the potatoes, but I did because I wanted a smoother consistency, and it was grand.

PS: Remember today is going to be my last Vegan Mofo Post until Sunday October 23^rd. That is 15 days away from now. During that time I’ll be on vacation without access to the internet. I’m very excited about my little vacation but at the same time sad to be leaving during the middle of Mofo when things are really starting to rev up. I am going to have so many blogs to catch up on when I return but I will catch up. Also when I return I’ll have a lot more great posts ready for you guys. A lot more great meals cooked from a lot of great cook books. I can’t wait to share it all, and of course after Mofo is over I’ll have to post about traveling in ‘remote’ areas as a vegan and how it is to be on vacation as a vegan. Looking forward to seeing you all back here for some exciting stuff on October 23^rd. Happy Mofo to everyone! See you soon!
Peace!