I told you before about my affinity for vegetarian soup recipes because they tend to also be low fat soup recipes, which can be pretty healthy.

Yesterday, knowing that I would have no time in the evening to make dinner, I pulled out my trusty slow cooker (the best kept secret to good parenting!) and one of my favorite cookbooks that is full of excellent vegetarian slow cooker recipes - Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, and got to work.

For some reason, I was feeling a little wild and crazy and decided to try something new. My family is pretty vegetable-ly adventurous and there was a little recipe for white bean and cabbage soup that was beckoning. Hmmm…you see where this is headed.

No one here is a big fan of white beans or cabbage. Separately, I might be able to disguise them enough to trick the troops into a favorable review. But together..? However, I did have both white beans and cabbage on hand this particular day.

Well as the D-hour approached I was almost convinced that my vegetarian soup recipes experiment would be a success - it did smell good. And surprisingly everyone tried it without any coercion. But it really did fall short of yum, even I had to admit that. Tactfully, I was being told that this vegetarian soup recipe wasn’t going to cut it - “It’s really good but I’m not hungry…can I have dessert?” or a more direct “I don’t really like this soup.”

But in the background what did I hear? Clink, clink, clink. The musical sound of spoon against bowl. My son, the “ketchup is a vegetable, isn’t it?” son, the one who won’t try anything if it is any shade of green (candy aisle items, excluded), was ravenously consuming bowl after bowl - “This soup is delicious, mom!” - “This is the best soup ever!”. We all stared at him in amazement. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

I wonder which of the low fat soup recipes I will have to try for dinner tonight?

No, I am not vegetarian. Yes, there are those of you who say I should be. But that argument aside, I found this wonderful cookbook called Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson. I have made a few of the vegetarian slow cooker recipes out of this book and have been very impressed.

I happen to be a big slow cooker fan. In my house, if dinner isn’t prepared by 2:00 pm then it’s a cereal night. Once the kids get home from school my time disappears. With a slow cooker I can prepare dinner in the morning and a hot meal is ready at dinner time.

However, many slow cooker recipes are not that healthy. And I want more flavor than food cooked in a can of cream of something soup provides.

Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker offers many healthy and delicious recipes using beans and vegetables - something that many of us don’t eat enough of .

The two recipes that I made last week were Black Bean Soup and Tuscan White Bean and Escarole Soup. Both soups were delicious. And the white bean soup used escarole, I have never made anything with that before. I wasn’t sure the kids would try it but they liked it too.

I will definitely be making more recipes from this book.

One other benefit of these recipes is that many of them are dairy free. My son is allergic to dairy products and there are a lot of recipes here that he can eat as well.

You can read more about my experiences withvegetarian soup recipes here.