Kitchen Trails - Vegetable soup with beans and roasted chicken breast

This is a pretty versatile and simple to prepare dish. Basically, you put in whatever you want and just boil and simmer away. This time I used:

Garlic

Onions

Kale

Celery

Carrots

French beans

Tomatoes

Black eye peas (pre-soaked)

Roasted chicken breast slices

Dried bay leaf

Dried sweet basil

Dried parsley

Salt to taste

Water

My personal take on this recipe is that I use whatever vegetables I have in the fridge, or if I intended to cook this soup and have bought whatever vegetables I want to put in along with whatever I have in the fridge.

Sometimes, I add some chicken or fish or soybean products, and sometimes I don't. This time I have some roasted chicken breast, so I added that into the soup as well.

I added black eye peas which I've pre soaked for 6 hours. I normally pre soak my beans or lentils or legumes or nuts or seeds overnight, but this time I only had the urge to make this soup in the morning, so I quickly soaked the black eye peas and cooked the soup in the late afternoon. Black eye peas takes about 1.5 hours to cook to my preferred tenderness. 

When it comes to boiling the soup and which to put in first, common sense applies lah. The harder veggies goes in first, or if I like my tomatoes to be mushy, I put them in the beginning as well. It's up to your own personal preferences.