Steamed Kale meets Spicy Mushrooms

A bit spicy & very light kale and mushroom soup

This is one of my vegan improvisations in the kitchen that I made during my last ever exam session 🌱

The soup is quite spicy, but it is very easy to adjust the recipe and make it milder if you wish!

If you love kale and mushrooms but are looking for some new ideas of how to prepare them, this post is just for you! Click to read more!

A little bit about my final uni exams and this recipe

As you all know, this month was really hard for me. Not that I don't like exams, but at the end of exam session, it felt like this whole year in University was very demanding. On top of that, I had more exams than I would normally have, so that was a bit challenging as well. I never had so many "all nighters", energy drinks and coffees in my entire life. 

After one of the exams I came back home and thought that I need some distraction from studying, so I decided to experiment with vegan cooking a bit. I remember that it was really hard day for me -- before the international finance exam I ran 10km and after it I was learning about corporate investments, and I just really felt like I need to stop and chill for a moment. I love how simple things like cooking can make me so much happier and relaxed 😀 And that is how this recipe was born. It doesn't require many ingredients, but is delicious, light, healthy and fun to make!

​Anyways, enough about me & my moaning about exams -- let's have a look at how to make this soup work! 🌿

You will need the following:

​🌿 1 large bag of curly kale
🌿 350g of mushrooms
🌿 1 l water
🌿 1 table spoon of olive oil
🌿 3 tea spoons of chilli powder
🌿 some salt + pepper
🌿 1 large garlic
🌿 fresh coriander
🌿 dry parsley

The Soup

Step 1 -- the Kale

In a large pot, boil about one litre of water. Wash curly kale and add it in the pot when the water is bubbling. Cook for about 5 minutes and then turn off the heat. Leave kale in a covered pot for about 20 minutes to steam.

Step 2 -- the Mushrooms

Prepare mushrooms. Wash and slice them up and scatter on a large baking tray. Sprinkle some sea salt and chilli powder (put less chilli powder if you are going for milder taste) and finish with finely sliced garlic cloves.

Put the tray with mushrooms into pre-heated grill. Grill for 7 minutes, then take the tray away, mix mushrooms a bit and put it back for 10 minutes. 

After that, your mushrooms will be dry, and the water form them will be on the tray. Pour the liquid from the tray to kale pot and turn the hob on medium heat. The wonderful thing about this recipe is that you don't need to add any artificial stock cubes, because you have your spicy mushroom stock from the tray!

Put mushrooms back to the oven for about 5 more minutes, meanwhile keep stirring kale.

Step 3 -- the Easy Part

And now the easy bit. Add dry spicy mushrooms to the kale pot, sprinkle some salt and pepper according to taste, add some parsley and coriander and mix everything well. Turn the hob off once more and leave soup covered in a pot for 15-20 minutes. Pour yourself a glass of wine and relax.  

Few words from Me

I hope that you enjoyed reading this. As I said, my exams are done, so I will have as much time as I want for my vegan kitchen inventions and writing! 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

Thank you once again for joining my vegan food journey, and see you very very soon! I think I will be sharing one more soup recipe next time, as I am about to go and make one just now 😀

Love you all,
VK