We keep getting bless with kale, so we’ve had many opportunities to eat it in different ways. Kale does really well in soups! We have also received some homegrown squash. We hate any good foods going to waste, so I decided to create a soup using the two vegetables as the theme, since the soup can prolong the life of a vegetable, and you can use a lot of whatever particular vegetable you have in soups.

Now to take your crock-pot cooking from drab to fab is to sauté the onions, celery, carrots, and garlic before throwing them in the slow cooker with a couple of tablespoons of oil like grape seed, avocado, or coconut oil. Sometimes I sauté the kale and squash, too, but it’s not necessary. As you cook the kale overtime it becomes darker. If you want it to be greener and more raw-like, place the kale in the crock-pot during the last half hour of cooking. I cook the kale all day, but since I live in the Pacific Northwest in the fall, I took these pictures at the beginning of cooking right after sautéing the kale so I could use natural lighting.

The Verdict: This is such a tasty soup, and this was a great way to incorporate different vegetables! I love how vegetable dense the soup is. We like to serve it with sourdough bread and a salad.  Yum!

If the soup is too vegetable dense for your liking, add more broth or water, and then add additional seasonings to taste.

This is a naturally vegetarian or vegan recipe if you use vegetable broth, but you could easily add ground beef, turkey or sausage to this soup if you like.