Sweet potato and kale soup

So, I told you that you would be with me on this vegan journey through my successes and failures, right? Well…this is a failure. Not so much a failure, as it’s inedible, I will definitely still eat it, but a failure as in it’s not as good as the original. Sometimes tweaking a recipe to make it my own really works, and I am proud of what I have done and proud that I was able to take something good, and make it even better. This was not the case. Now, the original recipe truly is amazing, and I want to share it with you, and then I am going to tell you how I failed. So this http://joythebaker.com/2010/11/kale-and-sweet-potato-soup/ is the original recipe, and damn it’s good. So good. Plus I love her blog. It’s fun to read, kind of like how I hope mine is. The original is so good, I am not quite sure why I decided to mess with it, but I did.

So, I essentially followed that recipe, except instead of a quart and a half of vegetable broth, I thought…oooh, I will add some beer! Beer makes everything better, right? WRONG! It doesn’t make this soup better. So I did one bottle of a blonde ale, and then the rest of the liquid was veggie broth. Like I said, it is still really good, just not as good. But the beer isn’t what completely ruined it. I blame that on the quinoa. What did I just say? Quinoa ruined something? No! Surely you jest. No, I don’t jest, and stop calling me Shirley. I love quinoa and think of it as an almost perfect grain. I have swapped it for rice in many, many things and it works fantastically, but not in soup. Nope, not in soup. It just has a weird texture that makes the soup a little harder to eat. Look at the picture, the quinoa just looks like it doesn’t belong. But rice does. Still tasty, but not as pleasing of a texture as the rice has. So, here is my failure. It wasn’t a total loss. I still ate it, and I will continue to eat it for lunch for a few days until it’s gone because I don’t waste food. But you have to try the original recipe. It is amazing. So good. The flavors are so delicious and it’s a perfect cool weather soup.