Experimental Broccoli Soup

AHH! Once again I realized I should be posting a recipe half way though making it. But this time I bit the bullet and just photographed half of the process instead. I promise I'll do better next time. This week I bought 3 stalks of broccoli to steam in salt water for side dishes. After cooking the florets, I decided to save the stalks and see if I could make soup with them. My original plan was to make chicken noodle soup, but I decided I wanted chicken tortilla instead. I'm a bit obsessed with chicken tortilla soup right now. You can see my recipe here: http://chickensintheroad.com/farm-bell-recipes/mexi-bean-soup/

At the grocery yesterday, they didn't have any non factory chicken (Angry Eyebrows!!!) so today's soup is actually black bean tortilla soup. That's fine, I love black beans.

Except for the chicken, I followed the usual directions on the FarmBell website. Then, after I had the other vegetables chopped, I got out the broccoli stalks and gave them a good scrub in the sink.

I chopped them into disks.

Including the skinny bits at the tops.

And then quartered the disks. My hope was that DH wouldn't notice the small pieces of broccoli among the small pieces of green pepper.

When I got to the tough bottoms of the stalks, I stopped. Towards the bottom of each stalk there was an area where I almost had to force my knife through. When I got to this point in the stalk I decided to stop.

This is the soup after it's been simmering in the crock pot for only an hour before the milk and corn starch has been added. At this point, it smells WONDERFUL!

And this is after the milk and corn starch.

Ready to eat!

DH quiz time: "What do you think is in this soup?"

And his answer: "Broccoli." So he could taste it but he told me he didn't care because he likes broccoli. And it's a very nutritious vegetable. We should all have more broccoli in our diets.