Nothing clears those odds and ends out of the fridge like a big pot of vegetable soup! It’s also the perfect thing to have for dinner when nearly all of your coworkers are sick with some sort of monstrous cold and you spend all day surrounded by various degrees of sniffling, coughing and throat-clearing and wondering if you’re just a little tired and headachey, or if you too are about to succumb to the Monstrous Cold.

Ingredients for this soup were: onion, garlic, shallot, celery, sweet potato, carrot, kohlrabi, fresh tomato, a little bit of jalapeno pepper, the remnants of a can of tomato sauce used a few days ago for pizza, baby red lentils, the remnants of a can of coconut milk used for Thai food, a dried chipotle pepper, Better then Bouillon, marmite, black pepper, and a rather sad-looking bunch of kale I found lurking at the back of the crisper drawer.

I also made biscuits with dill and green onions in them. They’re loosely based on the Fancy Biscuits recipe in How it All Vegan, except I used fresh dill, and Earth Balance instead of the oil. How it All Vegan is a weird book- the only things I ever make from it are the biscuits! I think it’s a pretty basic book that probably would have been great to have when I was just starting out learning how to cook vegan food, but most of the recipes don’t seem that interesting to me at this point. Except the biscuits, which are really good.

I partially pureed the soup and topped it with some julienned kohlrabi and scallions dressed with rice vinegar and agave nectar. I used this cool julienne peeler that I just got. I was a bit annoyed by it at first since it seemed to only work right-handedly, but then I took a closer look and it turns out you can flip the blade around for left-handed use. It was perfect for making a small amount of garnish, when breaking out the big mandoline or food processor is excessive, but julienning by hand is a bit time-consuming.