The Best Vegetable Beef Soup Ever. Yep.

OK, so I know that the rest of the Internets is (are?) all aflutter about Thanksgiving and turkey and wearing a pie on your head (wuv you Lady Lino!), but here at Finny's house, we're still all caught up in the 80s and pot roast and crockpots.

So, forgive me if I don't share my favorite Thanksgiving recipes with you and instead tell you how to make The Best Vegetable Beef Soup Ever. Yep. from that leftover pot roast.

Also, I've never really made Thanksgiving dinner before, so I doubt I'm to be trusted with such a traditional, anticipated, this is no time for abominations in the kitchen kind of meal. You want fabulous Thanksgiving, you go see Ree at Pioneer Woman Cooks and she'll set you up. She's fancy like that.

Meanwhile, if you want a very efficient and FUH-king delicious soup recipe that'll use up your leftover pot roast and every other random thing in your freezer/fridge, you stay here with Finny and I'll tell you my ways with the pot roast.

Just so you know, these are not the "sexy" kind of ways, so don't be afraid or feel like you need to close your office door from the prying eyes of your young ones or dog. (I get afraid of traumatizing the dog. Is that weird? Anyway.)

Let me first also tell you that this is not a fancy recipe. Nor did it appear all brand-new and original like in my brain. I started to make it from a recipe on Allrecipes.com, but then realized in the comments that every single person that commented (there were a lot, I was surprised) had made it a different way.

SO - because of that, I'm not crediting them with much except giving me the idea to use tomato juice. Which was a good idea. An idea I immediately bastardized when I decided to use vegetable juice instead because that is what they had at TJ's.

ANYWAY. About that soup.

Yeah, I'm using the same photo twice. Wanna fight about it?

Finny's The Best Vegetable Beef Soup Ever. Yep.
From my own pea brain + the tomato juice from allrecipes.com
My changes are the whole thing, so no bolding this time.

Ingredients

Whatever's left of your Simple Pot Roast (I had about 1.5 lbs left from the 3 lb roast), chopped into bite-ish sized pieces
1 medium celery root, peeled and chopped into bite sized pieces
1 bag of mixed frozen vegetables from the bottom of the freezer drawer OR Trader Joe's OR wherever. (Mine had peas, corn, green beans and carrots in it. In case you wanted to know.)
2 head's worth of broccoli florets
1 quart of vegetable juice (again, I used TJ's Garden Patch Vegetable juice)
1 can of beef consume
Whatever's left of your Pretty Fucking Good Gravy (I had about 1 cup)
4 cups of water
1 T dried oregano
1 T ground thyme
Lots of fresh ground pepper


To make

In a big stock pot, pour in your vegetable juice, consume, gravy leavin's and water. Then add in your chopped meat, celery root, frozen vegetables, herbs and broccoli. Stir it together well and cover.

Bring to a boil and then reduce to low to simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour. Before you serve, give it a taste and add as much pepper as you like. We like a lot, so I added a good bit. You may be surprised that this recipe doesn't call for salt, since I LOVE salt, but with the vegetable juice (I don't say "veggie" because it sounds stupid. To me.) and gravy and pot roast, it's PLENTY salty. But, if you must, go ahead. I won't laugh and point when your fingers swell into hot dogs.

Serve with a few challah bread rolls which you also got from TJ's thinking they'd be AWESOME but actually turned out to be meh.

I don't think that goyim understand that challah is egg bread. And egg bread should have a yellowish hue which is the direct result of having lots of EGGS IN IT and if the bread is not all yellow-hued, we all know you're barely using any eggs and the bread isn't going to be as good as it should be. Also, it should have poppy seeds on top, but I'm not going to push my luck.

I'm just saying is all. Because I'm barely a Jew anymore, but I know my challah (thanks mom for making it every Friday when I was a kid!) and this is not challah. Someone else tried to pass off some very white and unpoppy seeded bread as challah recently and it made my wee inner Jew soul very angry.

So, please, don't call your bread challah unless one of the main ingredients is eggs. And if you're looking at the package of challah bread rolls and "eggs" are one of the last ingredients, save yourself the pining and wanting for challah and just, in your head, remove the "challah" part from the name so that you can eat without sadness.

Or perhaps you're less dramatic and attached to things as bizarre as egg bread, in which case you won't have these issues and will just be able to enjoy your dinner without hysterics and swearing.
Some good parings with this meal are, from my experience, a 10+Diet Tonic and A River Runs Through It.

We're at least into the 90s on this one, folks. What's next? High Fidelity anyone?