Nourishing Zucchini Tarragon Soup
Cookbook author and clean eating expert Amie Valpone shares her nourishing Zucchini Tarragon Soup recipe along with the story of her extensive healing journey.
After healing from 10 years of chronic illness, I’m constantly asked about what I ate and how I learned to slow down, love my body, and nourish myself.
Diving into an anti-inflammatory lifestyle and eating superfoods while taking supplements and doing every protocol under the sun to heal me, I soon realized that all the kale in the world wasn’t going to fix me.
I started to understand that when we’re blocked and can’t seem to make headway with obstacles in our lives, it’s simply an opportunity to practice gentleness with ourselves and to show ourselves kindness and self-love. Being hard on ourselves and staying disappointed won’t do us any good.
I had to honestly look at the reasons for why my body wasn’t healing – aside from the food and supplements, and make different choices to learn how to love myself, take care of myself on a daily basis, start saying no to things and people that drained me, take quiet (alone) time for myself and learn how to create balance in my life.
Listening to Your Body
This is the main struggle I see with my readers and clients. We’re all running around trying to do everything and be everything, but our health is failing. When we try to band-aid it with a drug or supplements or a superfood, it’s not enough. The body is trying to tell us something. It’s nudging us to slow down.
And that’s just what I did.
Was it easy?
No. But if I can do it living in NYC, you surely can, too.
I made a promise to be gentle with myself throughout this process and to take it slow. I started setting aside days for no meetings or conference calls. I started taking baths. I stopped trying to make everyone happy, and I started to listen to my body.
I stopped being so strict with trying to eat perfectly. I stopped taking all my supplements. I stopped obsessing over superfoods. I stopped going from doctor to healer to energy worker to workshop to try to fix myself.
Taking Time to Just Be
I started to allow my nervous system to rest and reboot. This is what has truly been healing my body. In terms of my food – as my family and friends know – I lived off of green veggies and organic chicken for years, because it was too hard for me to digest anything else without getting sick.
That’s when I befriended my food processor, as I talk about in my cookbook, Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body and I started pureeing everything to digest it easier, which also helped me absorb and assimilate the nutrients in the foods I was eating.
The healing benefits of this full life approach – not just worrying about food – were remarkable. Now that I’ve had time to live with these changes and see how impactful they were, I’m encouraging everyone I know to take this holistic approach.
So, what will you do? I encourage you to take some time for yourself this week or weekend and start bringing in self-love and self-care to your days.
I assure you, your body will thank you.
Nourishing Zucchini Tarragon Soup Recipe
As we learn more about how to nourish ourselves, I’m happy to share one of my favorite nourishing recipes with you. This Zucchini Tarragon Soup is simple, delicious, and can be served anytime of the year.
Try bone broth in place of chicken broth if you are looking for more gut-healing and immune system boosting properties.
Ingredients
- 4 large zucchini diced and ends trimmed
- 3 cups vegetable chicken, or bone broth
- 2 Tbsp. coconut oil
- ½ small red onion diced
- Sea salt and pepper to taste
- 4 Tbsp. pumpkin seeds for garnish
- 1 tsp. finely chopped fresh tarragon or 2 fresh basil leaves for garnish
- Fresh lemon zest for garnish
Instructions
- Cook zucchini in a medium pot over medium heat with the coconut oil, red onion, sea salt and pepper, until very tender, about 10-15 minutes.
- Add the vegetable broth and continue to cook for another 5 minutes or until the soup is warm throughout.
- Remove from the heat and transfer to a food processor and puree until smooth.
- Divide into serving bowls and serve warm with almonds, tarragon and lemon zest for garnish.
