Great Northern Bean - Vegetable - Hard Red Winter Wheat Berry Soup, Bagel Half w Chia "Cheez" (Almost No Added Fat)

My daughter suggested soup for tonight, and I was happy to make it on this cold day.


Ingredients

• 1/2 cup hard red winter wheat berries
• 1 1/2 cups golden beets (1 medium beet) cut into 3/8" cubes
• 1 1/2 cups carrot (2 medium carrots) cut into 1/2" slices then halved
• 1 1/2 cups Great Northern beans
• 2 1/2 cups Yukon Gold potatoes (2 medium potatoes) cut into 3/4" slices then halved
• 1 1/2 cups peas (I used frozen, but fresh would be fine)
• 1 1/2 cups chopped spinach (frozen, but fresh fine)
• 1 3/4 cup onion (about half of a medium onion) cut into 1/4" x 1" half moons
• 2 cups (or did I use 3?) fire-roasted tomatoes
• 3t chopped basil
• 2 vegan bouillon cubes
• 3 cloves garlic, finely (1/8" or so) diced
• 6 cups water (when I added this, it all added up to 9c)
• 3/4 t salt
• 2t fresh squeezed lime or lemon juice

Process

1. I put all the ingredients but the salt and lemon/lime juice into my Instant Pot pressure cooker and pressed the "Soup" button, which resulted in a 30m cook time.
2. After the cooking was done, I waited a few minutes and gently released pressure, then added the salt and lime/lemon juice.

I served the soup with a bagel half. I didn't realize that we were out of tomatoes, as I was going to serve the bagel with a slice of tomato. Instead, I put on just a light smear of Heidi Ho Chia "Cheez"; it is 4g of fat per ounce, and I put on well under an ounce, so maybe 2g of fat (hence the "almost no added fat" for dinner). We were also low on other salad ingredients, so I chopped some Napa cabbage for a simple side salad.

Results

Wow, this soup was excellent! I shouldn't take credit but rather pass it on to the Instant Pot. It's amazing what it does for soups. The flavor was rich and tasty. Yum!! I made about 9 cups of soup and my wife, daughter, and I ate 2 or 3 servings (or 4?!) each, eating up a total of 5 cups!

Ideas for the future

The soup could have used a stronger garlic flavor; I ended up adding some garlic powder and also a little more salt at the table.  The potatoes were great. A little (just a little - maybe 2 cups total) more greens might have been good; I was glad that the spinach was chopped, as a coarsely cut green would have changed the mouth feel of the soup disadvantageously. Maybe a little more beans (starting with 2 cups maybe) would be good. I could hardly tell there was wheat berries, so those could have been at least doubled. Adding a few tablespoons of wine and maybe nutritional yeast could have been nice.

But, really, this was excellent as is. I should make soups in my Instant Pot more often!