Easy Instant Pot Vegetable Soup — A Frugal Homemade Recipe

Easy Instant Pot Vegetable Soup: Good for what ails ya, and comes together quickly!

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I’ve been sick since Thursday, which is much better now but started out as the kind of bone-rattling, coughing, feverish, dizzy, aching sick where you just want to curl up in bed and have someone take care of you and bring you soup.

The unfortunate thing about being an adult, though, is that sometimes there’s no one around to take care of you and bring you soup… and sometimes you’re instead sitting at home coughing in harmony with the sick kid who brought the plague into the house in the first place.

Usually homemade chicken soup is my go-to in this sort of situation, but I’d already mentally earmarked my thawed chicken for sheet pan chicken thighs with green beans & red potatoes. (Yes, I’m a nut, and made that too…)

So, I was looking at last week’s batch of Instant Pot vegetable broth, and at what else I had handy in the fridge and pantry, and decided to make a quick batch of homemade vegetable soup in the Instant Pot. Fortuitously, it came out really well! And by the way? This recipe has to be darn easy to make, given the state I was in when I threw it together.

This big batch of comforting homemade vegetable soup fed both me and the coughing kid for several meals and still tasted good by the time we were feeling more human, which makes me think it came out well enough to tell you about. So… here goes!

Easy Instant Pot Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

1 Tbsp olive oil
3 large garlic cloves, minced
3 large carrots, chopped
1 small yellow onion, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
8 oz white mushrooms, coarsely chopped
10 cups vegetable broth — preferably homemade!
1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes
1 can cannellini beans, drained
1 can kidney beans, drained
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
1 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp basil
black pepper, to taste
sea salt, to taste
4-5 oz fresh spinach
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to top (optional)

Directions

Turn the Instant Pot on saute and heat olive oil for one minute, until shimmering. Add carrots, onion, and celery, and saute for about five minutes until veggies begin to soften, stirring frequently. Stir in garlic and mushrooms and saute for another minute, then hit cancel.

Add broth, tomatoes, beans, and spices. Stir, close lid, and set valve to sealing. Set Instant Pot for manual high pressure for 10 minutes. (Hit the manual button, use the + – buttons to bring the time to 10 minutes, then hit the manual button again to start.)

When the Instant Pot beeps, quick release the pressure. When it’s finished releasing and the pin drops, open lid and stir in spinach until wilted.

Serve this easy vegetable soup topped with freshly grated Parmesan (optional, but recommended).

Now that’s a frugal homemade vegetable soup…

I made the original broth from veggie scraps, and will estimate that all the other ingredients combined ran well under $5.00 for this nice large batch of soup! (Green beans would be good in here too, but I didn’t think of that in my fog — and you could certainly cook in some little macaroni noodles at the end for a minestrone-ish soup, but will want to add more broth if you decide to give that a try.)

Easy Instant Pot vegetable soup is soothing and filling when you’re sick, but serves equally well as a hearty vegetarian comfort food dinner when you’re better. Give it a try on your next Meatless Monday! 🙂 This recipe is naturally gluten free, and is also dairy free if you don’t choose to top with Parmesan. Unlike many canned varieties, this homemade vegetable soup contains no added sugar or MSG.

No Instant Pot?

If you don’t have an Instant Pot but would instead like to try this recipe on the stove top, I’d do the sauteing steps in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add broth, tomatoes, beans, and spices and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for about an hour uncovered, stirring occasionally, before wilting in the spinach. Caveat: I haven’t tried this myself, but can’t see why it wouldn’t work nicely.

In all honesty: The Instant Pot doesn’t really save that much time here, because it takes a while for it to come to pressure and release the steam with so much liquid — but after the initial sauteing and dumping ingredients in step, that’s all hands-off time. (Speaking of which, yes: I did wash my hands thoroughly before cooking anything this week…)

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Easy Instant Pot Vegetable Soup — A Frugal Homemade Recipe

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Easy Instant Pot vegetable soup is soothing and filling when you’re sick, but serves equally well as a hearty vegetarian comfort food dinner when you’re better. Give it a try on your next Meatless Monday!

Course Soup

Cuisine soup

Keyword instant pot, soup, vegetable soup, vegetarian

Total Time 30 minutes minutes

Servings 0

Author Rachel Singer

Equipment

instant pot

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 3 large garlic cloves minced
• 3 large carrots roughly chopped
• 1 small yellow onion chopped
• 2 ribs celery chopped
• 8 oz white mushrooms coarsely chopped
• 10 cups vegetable broth
• 1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes
• 1 can cannellini beans drained
• 1 can kidney beans drained
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp basil
• black pepper to taste
• sea salt to taste
• 4-5 oz fresh spinach
• Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to top optional

Instructions

• Turn the Instant Pot on saute and heat olive oil for one minute, until shimmering.
• Add carrots, onion, and celery, and saute for about five minutes until veggies begin to soften, stirring frequently.
• Stir in garlic and mushrooms and saute for another minute, then hit cancel.
• Add broth, tomatoes, beans, and spices.
• Stir, close lid, and set valve to sealing.
• Set Instant Pot for manual high pressure for 10 minutes. (Hit the manual button, use the + – buttons to bring the time to 10 minutes, then hit the manual button again to start.)
• When the Instant Pot beeps, quick release the pressure.
• When it’s finished releasing and the pin drops, open lid and stir in spinach until wilted.

Notes

Serve this easy vegetable soup topped with freshly grated Parmesan (optional, but recommended).

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