Cooking Tip - Tomato Basil Pot Soup

Soup Ingredients
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

In Questions from the Class - Honored Guests, I mentioned the utility of having a Pot Dinner. A pot dinner is a recipe you can make in large quantity in your pressure cooker using ingredients you can stow aboard for weeks or even months. You pull this dinner out at the end of a long stretch when provisions are scarce or when you come into an anchorage and need to throw something together quickly to be social. The pot dinner recipe should be something you can throw into the pot and pressure cook for a half hour while the rest of the family is frantically scraping sand and hair out of the cockpit.

Our pot dinner is an essentially vegetarian tomato basil soup. While it benefits from using fresh ingredients, you can make it entirely from stuff stowed deep in a locker under spare printer cartridges, rainy day activities, and fabric for projects you’ve forgotten.

Tomato Basil Pot Dinner
1 lg chopped onion
2 tbs olive oil
2 tsps garlic powder (use the real stuff if you still have it)
1 jug or can (64 oz) of tomato vegetable juice -- We use V8.
2 chicken buillion cubes -- Optional so if you’re feeding a vegan, add salt instead.
1 lg can of diced or whole tomatoes
1 cup dried bean thing -- Black eyed peas are the healthiest but we’ve also done this with navy beans, white beans, pinto, kidney, and lentil.
1 cup dried grain thing -- My favorite are the little shells, but again, use whatever you have handy.
2 tbs of dried basil
2 cps vegetables -- This is the perfect time to get rid of end of provision mankies such as limp carrots, tired cabbage, and sad celery. It’ll taste fine. However, if you’ve got nothing else, chuck in a can of green beens, corn, or carrots. Even VegAll works.

Basil in a Pot
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Sauté the olive oil and onions in your pressure cooker. If you’ve got real garlic left, sauté it with the onions. Throw into the pot absolutely everything else. My cooker is a 6 qt so I add water until I get to the “no higher or it will explode” line. Basically, you’ll need at least 4 cups or the soup will be stew. Bring to pressure and cook until beans are done. In my cooker, this takes about 20 minutes at pressure. Let the pot depressurize until the guests arrive. Serve with crackers, bread, or something your guests bring. Tell them to make it fresh-made bread. That’ll take enough time for you to give yourself a bit of a bath before they arrive in addition to scrubbing the mud out of the cockpit.