Classic Tuscan Vegetable Soup

Classic Tuscan Vegetable Soup 329/365

It's soup weather in Santa Cruz Mountains: wet, foggy and cold. I bought a fantastic new Italian cook book, Every Night Italian, by Giuliano Hazan, the son of my favorite Italian cookbook author, Marcella Hazan. This is a fantastic hearty soup that could be made vegetarian by using vegetable broth, but I of course use home-made bone broth, which I make weekly. Bone broth is one of the cornerstones to healing the GI after years of antibiotics. I drink a cup every day and feels amazing on my GI. Not to mention my hair and nails are getting thicker. 

This is the soup as it's cooking. It has two cabbages, swiss chard, zucchini, beans, carrots, celery, onion and potatoes in it.

While I cook ours, I also have a smaller pot going for the dogs. Yes, I cook for my dogs. In fact, they pretty much eat whatever we eat. They always get a portion of our dinner and sometimes I skip their typical raw meat/bone/veggie meal in place of something I cook if it's balanced (usually I'll add raw bone meal to whatever I cook for them). But since this is a veggie soup, they ate their own meaty dinner and I cooked them up a batch of their own veggies in meat broth for their veggies this night. The only difference is I leave out the things that are harmful, like onion and beans. Some beans cause Loki's GI to get so gassy he's in pain so I don't take any chances with beans with him for fear of bloat. But basically they can eat every thing else so I cook them up their own version of the soup.

And yes, they gobbled it up. The advantages of feeding dogs a variety of food versus the same food day in and day out is they like eating their vegetables as much as they like eating their raw bones, meat and fish.

Veggies are supper healthy for dogs. They're full of nutrients but since dogs really can't digest them raw, they should be cooked like in a soup or juiced raw. I used to juice their veggies daily when living in Switzerland, but now we have access to Honest Kitchen's dehydrated vegetable base, I use that daily, unless I cook a soup like this. They love it!

I love sharing our dinners with the dogs. They never beg at the dinner table. They wait patiently for us to finish and since we eat healthy, so do they!