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INTRODUCTION

Throughout my twenty-year culinary consulting and cooking career in the food-as-medicine movement, I’ve been, first and foremost,
a soup-maker. I’ve practiced my craft in kitchens as diverse as the Chopra
Center for Wellbeing, Dr. Andrew Weil’s Arizona Center for Integrative
Medicine’s annual Nutrition and Health Conference, and the Commonweal
Retreat Center in Bolinas, California. It was at Commonweal’s retreats,
when I was often cooking for seriously ill people, that I realized how energizing a nutrient-dense, delicious soup could be. It was amazing:
people who could barely eat would return again and again to the soup pot.
I was doling out a little liquid health with each dip of the ladle.

I guess that makes me just the latest in a very long line of soup shamans.
Some people may think of soup-making for health purposes as a trend.
But the truth is, from the Baha’i to the Buddhists, and from the Christians to the simply curious, using soup to help the body detoxify and renew itself is as old as humankind. Hippocrates and Greek physicians used bone broths as a curative for the sick and fatigued.

Flash forward a couple of millenia, and you’ve got companies coming out of the woodwork promoting their healthy soups. Sure, if you want to spend up to $300 for a week’s worth of commercially made soups, this is a possible option, but wouldn’t you rather learn from a master how to make healthy soups on your own? Delicious soups that you can pull together in a half hour or less can lead you to true soup empowerment.

It’s really that easy, as you’ll see in this book. And it’s really that healthy.
Eating soup is a way to hit the body’s reset button, to allow internal organs devoted to detoxification the rest and nutrients necessary to successfully do their job. The result, from a health viewpoint, is often startling, but no one should really be surprised. Soup, after all, is life distilled into a bowl.
Unlike juicing, nothing is lost in the stockpot; indeed, just the opposite takes place. The heat of the pot slowly breaks down nutrients to a more digestible state, simultaneously releasing outrageous flavors that create heady aromas that magnetically draw us to the broth.

This book is dedicated to the proposition that everyone can enjoy making soup, whether the goal is a full-blown, two-day, nothing-but-soup cleanse,
or a more general commitment to incorporate soup on a daily or weekly basis. Believe me, the ability to create culinary alchemy in a pot can be learned (I’m living proof), and the payoff is so high: when you’re feeling out of sorts, and your appetite or digestion may be off, soup is the absolutely best way to make a healthy reconnection with food. It’s like taking your body to a spa. You’ll come out feeling marvelous.

KALE SOUP WITH COCONUT AND LIME

Talk about counterbalancing tastes: here the überhealthy kale and coconut milk are a magical pairing, with the sweetness of the coconut neutralizing the natural bitterness of the kale. The ginger and lime are like Fourth of July sparklers on top of the flavor profile. The soup is purposely a bit thin, and many people enjoy it as a broth in a cup or take it to go in a thermos. If you want to give it a little heft, try adding glass noodles or shredded sweet potato.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil or coconut oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
2 bunches kale, stemmed and cut into bite-size pieces
Sea salt
6 cups Thai Coconut Broth
1 1/2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
2 1/2 teaspoons dark maple syrup
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh Thai basil, for garnish

Heat the oil in a soup pot over medium-high heat, then add the garlic and ginger, stir, and cook for about 1 minute. Add the kale and 1/2 teaspoon sea salt and saute for 3 minutes, or just until emerald green. Add the broth and cook until the kale is tender, about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat.

Pour 2 cups of the broth into a blender, add one-third of the kale mixture, and blend until smooth. Transfer to a soup pot over low heat, and repeat the process two more times. Stir in the lime juice, maple syrup and . teaspoon sea salt. Serve garnished with the basil, or store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 5 days or in the freezer for up to 3 months.