Meat-free soup recipes can be roughly divided into a few categories: - With mushrooms. Forest ones are ideal: porcini, honey mushrooms, slippery jacks. Store-bought oyster mushrooms and button mushrooms will do too — the latter are sold fresh year-round, while wild ones out of season can only be found dried. A note for the cook: a portion of dried mushrooms should be about two to three times smaller than fresh, and they should be soaked in water for several hours first. Fresh mushrooms are dropped into the pot and boiled together with the potatoes, or sautéed with onions and carrots in a skillet. - Vegetable.
The five most commonly used ingredients in these recipes:
Every gift of the garden gets used: potatoes, onions, carrots, zucchini, cabbage, celery, tomatoes, bell peppers, pumpkin, broccoli… The cooking method varies: slowly stewing the vegetables in a pot – like minestrone; boiling them in water and then pureeing – for a cream soup; sautéing in sunflower oil, sour cream or cream and seasoning with sausages for flavor. - With fish. Fish soup and ukha are different dishes. Any varieties with large bones will do, so you can clean them thoroughly and boil only the flesh: cod, walleye, sterlet, pike, catfish, trout… You could just as well use canned fish.