Alkaline Diet Soup Recipes: Nourishing Your Body Back to Balance

Maintaining an alkaline balance is essential for our health. Acidity reduces our body cells’ ability to absorb minerals and other nutrients, resulting in low energy production within the cells, along with a decrease in the ability to eliminate toxins, heavy metals, excess hormones, and sodium. When our cells don't have the necessary nutrients and energy to restore and repair damage, they slowly fall into fermentation and eventually into chronic diseases, like cancer.

Since our bodies need 20 parts of alkalinity to neutralize 1 part of acidity, it’s better to prevent it by including highly alkaline foods into our daily diet. Avoiding stress, negative emotions, and toxic overload is also a way to reduce the risk of decreasing the alkalinity of your system. Most vegetables are highly alkaline, but it very much depends on the soil where they’ve grown. Consuming them fresh ensures that your body gets the maximum benefit from their alkalizing properties. Lightly cooking them preserves most of their nutritional value, and soup is a great choice for healing your digestive system with the combined powers of different alkaline foods.

Embracing Alkaline Soups

Alkaline soup is one of the easiest and tastiest ways to consume the two cups of vegetables useful for alkalizing at each meal. A meat base adds protein and flavor, if desired, while a good-quality bullion or miso perks up most any vegetable soup. Lentil soup is hearty and particularly alkalizing.

Staying Alkaline in Winter

It may seem like there is less of an alkaline offering during the winter months, but the truth is we can find an abundance of delicious alkalizing meals, alkaline soups and food choices in all seasons, even in the cold.

• Enjoy steamed vegetables instead of salads: A handy steaming basket and a few minutes is all you need to produce a hot vegetable dish.
• Consume one or more baked root crops every day: Potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, kohlrabi, parsnips and winter squash are in this category.
• Try ginger tea: Ginger root has a very special quality as a substance that warms, enhances digestion and detoxifies. To warm up, try taking a thumbnail size amount of fresh ginger, mincing it up and steeping it in boiling water. Add a bit of honey or sucanat, if desired.

The Power of Alkaline Soups

To get amazing, vibrant, energized health you need to eat foods that prevent acidity, oxidative stress and inflammation. Eating alkaline foods about 80% of the time gets amazing benefits. Mood and energy typically improve right away. Pain, blood sugar and GI issues also improve quickly, and as stress comes down, fat burning goes up.

Read also: Plant-Based Alkaline Wellness

Three Popular Alkaline Soup Recipes

These three soups are most definitely highly alkaline, antioxidant-rich and hugely anti-inflammatory. They taste amazing, and they are quick to make and pretty cheap to shop for.

1. Tuscan Bean Soup

This is a fantastically filling soup, with each serve giving you a whopping 13g of fibre - that is over HALF of your recommended daily amount. It is also high in healthy fats, high in protein and full of celery, garlic and tomatoes - which give you an alkaline kick. Cannelini beans are also high in manganese, potassium and magnesium - which are highly alkaline minerals. So fibre + protein + alkaline minerals = winner.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbs (30mL) olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 stalks celery, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 3 cups (680g) chopped tomatoes
• 6 cups (900g) tinned cannelini beans
• 5 cups (1.25L) water
• 1/2 tsp (3g) Himalayan Salt
• Freshly ground pepper, to taste
• 1/2 cup (75g) quinoa
• 1/4 cup (9g) fresh basil leaves, coarsely chopped

Directions:

1. Firstly, you need to steam fry the onions, celery, and garlic until tender. Do this in a few spoons of water in a large pan.
2. Once it is all nice and tender you can add the carrot and chopped tomatoes (juice n’ all) and warm this over a medium to low heat, breaking up the tomatoes so that it is all chunked down in nice small chunks. Cook this all together for about fifteen to twenty minutes.
3. Now you can add the lovely creamy-textured cannelini beans, the water, salt, pepper and cook over a medium-low heat for another twenty minutes. Once the beans are soft you’re good.
4. Now you can add the spelt pasta and cook for another ten minutes until it is al dente.
5. Once the soup has cooled a little bit, stir in the olive oil and add the basil leaves.

2. Soothing Gut-Healing Soup

You cannot have abundant energy without a healthy gut. Period. An unhealthy gut is the #1 cause of fatigue. Gut imbalances have been linked to hormonal issues, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, anxiety, depression, eczema, rosacea, and a host of other chronic health problems. Taking steps towards soothing, healing and restoring your gut health can be quite straightforward.

Ingredients:

• 200g lentils (or one can, drained and washed)
• 1 avocado
• 1 large sweet potato
• 1 large handful of spinach
• 2 carrots
• 1 red bell pepper (capsicum)
• 2 tbsp chopped dill
• 1 handful of cashews (roughly chopped)
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 brown onion
• 200ml yeast-free, MSG-free vegetable stock
• 1 tbsp coconut oil

Instructions:

1. Prepare the lentils, if dried and set aside. This takes the longest!
2. Next, roughly chop the onion and garlic and warm gently in a very large saucepan with the coconut oil
3. While these are browning and flavouring up, chop the peel and chop the sweet potato and carrots roughly, and once chopped, add to the pan and get it all mixed together and coated in oil. Stir for about 2 minutes to start to warm the root veg and get the flavours of the garlic and onion onto and into them
4. Now add the vegetable stock, and simmer for 10 minutes, until the vegetables are just warmed through but not overcooked - we want to maintain as much of the nutrients as possible.
5. Add the lentils in now for the last five minutes to get these warmed through too
6. Next, transfer to a blender or food processor (do in batches if your blender isn’t big enough to do all of this at once) and add in the avocado, capsicum (roughly chopped and deseeded), spinach and dill. Keep just a few sprigs of dill back if you want to garnish.
7. Blend until smooth and serve with those sprigs of dill, sprinkle with the chopped cashews and drizzle with a little olive oil at the end.

3. Turmeric & Lentil Anti-Inflammatory Soup

Turmeric is scientifically proven to fight fatigue, heart and cardiovascular conditions, various cancers, inflammation, immune system issues and more.

Ingredients:

Soup:

Read also: Foods for Alkaline Diet

• 200g Pumpkin, roughly chopped
• 4 Carrots, roughly chopped
• 1 Sweet Red Potato, roughly chopped
• 4 Tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 3 Cloves Garlic
• 1tsp Mustard Seeds
• 1 Red Onion
• 300ml Vegetable Stock
• 200ml Coconut Cream
• 1 Handful of Fresh Coriander (Cilantro), roughly chopped
• 1 Inch Fresh Turmeric Root
• 1 Inch Fresh Ginger Root
• 1/2 Red Pepper (Capsicum/Bell Pepper)
• 1 Cup of Lentils
• Coconut Oil

Optional Topping:

• 1/2 Cup Cashews
• 2 Tbsp Pumpkin Seeds
• 1 Clove Garlic, minced
• Optional: thinly sliced red chilli

Instructions:

1. Start by chopping the red onion, garlic, ginger (peeled) and turmeric (peeled) roughly.
2. Gently heat a little coconut oil in a pan and very gently get the onion started, and once it’s cooking a little, add the turmeric, ginger, mustard seeds and garlic - being careful not to burn the garlic.
3. Now add the root veggies (carrot, pumpkin, sweet potato), the red pepper and the tomatoes and stir it all around to coat the veggies in the oil and flavours (you should be able to smell that delicious turmeric now)
4. Add the stock and then add the lentils. If you’re using dried lentils, you will need to add an extra 50ml of stock to allow for an additional 10 mins cooking time, but if you’re using tinned lentils (please buy organic), add them now and move onto the next step.
5. Turn the heat down to simmer and let all of the veggies soften and the lentils cook.
6. Once everything has softened, add the coconut cream and chopped cilantro (coriander) and then transfer to a blender and blend until smooth
7. This will stay nice and warm for about an hour in the blender jug, but if you want, you can return to the pan to keep warm
8. To make the optional topping (which I’ve found really nice and a delicious extra texture to the soup), simply roughly smash up the cashews on a chopping board under a knife, and cook with the pumpkin seeds in a little coconut oil with the minced garlic until it’s warmed through and a little browned.
9. Serve the soup in bowls with a sprig of cilantro, a drizzle of coconut cream and the cashew topping (with optional chilli).

Additional Alkaline Soup Inspirations

• Cracker Barrel-style veggie soup: Packed with ingredients that lower acid in your body.

General Tips for Incorporating Alkaline Foods

• Lemons: Drink a lot of lemon water.
• Fresh Vegetables: Eat a lot of fresh vegetables.
• Organic Choices: Choose organic as often as possible, especially when you are trying to cure a disease by switching to a plant-rich diet.
• Green Smoothies and Salads: Incorporate green smoothies and salads into your diet.

Read also: Foods for an Alkaline Vegan Diet

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