Spanish Vegetable Soup With Chickpeas and Chard

It's a quarter To 3 (a.m.), there's no one in the place (my office at home) except me and a seemingly boneless cat draped over my thigh, as I go through my overflowing email box with a late rainstorm pounding on the roof.

Email from the Hubba-Hubba (my husband, asleep down the hall in our bedroom) includes Kim Kommando links, a clip from a television program that his brother sent to him (a .wmv file his brother sent him, with David Hasselhoff, Sharon Osborne and Drew Carey o watching a magician cut a man in half with a chain saw and put him back together) and this link to a NYT recipe, Vegetable Soups Ideal for Late Winter:

Vegetable soups are a great way to incorporate into our diets some of those three to five daily servings of vegetables that the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends. Finding a variety of vegetables is particularly challenging at this time of year in many parts of the country, where the farmers’ markets are often bare despite the fact that the calendar says it’s spring. Still, it’s easy make delicious combinations of onions, garlic, carrots, celery, turnips and canned tomatoes, all vegetables that are easy to keep on hand even in the depths of winter.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons the French diet is such a healthy one, despite the butter and cheese, is that dinner in France is so often a simple vegetable soup made with whatever ingredients are fresh. Soups fill you up, they’re comforting, and they offer a lot of concentrated nutrition in a bowl at a reasonable cost, both caloric and monetary. They’re simple to make and forgiving.

Despite the fact that chefs use the chicken stock made daily, I’ve never met a French homemaker who did so. Water will be just fine for this week’s offerings.

This thick meal brims with vegetables. The tang comes from a spoonful of vinegar that is tossed with toasted bread and added to the soup at the end of cooking.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups chickpeas, washed, picked over, and soaked for six hours or overnight in 1 quart water
salt, preferably kosher salt, to taste
4 1/2-inch thick slices baguette
3-4 garlic cloves, 1 cut in half, the rest minced
1 1/2 T sherry vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 lb. carrots, peeled and diced
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
1 (28-ounce) can chopped tomatoes, with liquid
1/2 lb. turnips, peeled and diced
2 cups shredded cabbage
3/4 lb. Swiss chard, stemmed, washed and chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped flat leaf parsley leaves
pinch of saffron threads

Drain the chickpeas and combine with 1 1/2 quarts fresh water in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, add salt to taste, cover and simmer 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until tender.

Toast the bread until golden. Remove from the heat and rub with the cut clove of garlic, then tear the bread into smaller pieces. Place in a small bowl, and douse with the vinegar. Toss in the bowl, and set aside.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy soup pan, and add the onion and carrots. Cook, stirring, until the onion is tender, about five minutes. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt, half the garlic and all the paprika, and stir together for a minute. Add the tomatoes and cook, stirring often until the tomatoes cook down and thicken, 10 to 15 minutes.

Add the chickpeas with their liquid, the turnips, cabbage and 2 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil, add salt to taste, reduce the heat to low, and cook until the turnips are tender, about 20 minutes. Stir in the chard and the remaining garlic, and simmer another 10 minutes. Add lots of pepper, taste and adjust salt.

Add the parsley, bread and saffron. Stir, turn off the heat, and let the soup rest for 10 minutes. Serve hot.

Serves 8

Advance preparation:
You can make this through to just before adding the parsley, bread and saffon, up to a day ahead of serving. You might want to hold off adding the chard until you reheat if you want it to have a nice color. Bring the soup to a simmer, add the chard and simmer 10 minutes, then proceed with the rest of the recipe.