Gypsy Soup!

I do not know about you, but come the Winter, I am all about homemade soup. I am content to eat soup morning, day and night...as long as it is accompanied by some crusty bread and/or crackers. One of my top ten soups is Gypsy soup. The reason being; no matter what you have in way of veggies and spices, as long as you have chickpeas(staple ingredient, otherwise you cannot refer to it as Gypsy soup. I did not make the rules) the end result will be fantastic. The other night I was feeling uninspired to cook, but then remembered I had a can of chickpeas, and ended up whipping up this incredible soup. I threw together some sweet peppers, parsnips, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, garlic, onions, chickpeas, corn and then added a sprinkle of chili peppers, garam masala, herbs de provence, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper and a dash of sea salt and voila! Unfortunately I was out of sweet potatoes, otherwise I would have thrown those in as well. A very hearty soup. In our house, there is always some variety of soup in the fridge. Another favourite of mine is Miso soup. I generally add 4 cups of water, 3 tablespoons or so of brown rice miso paste and then throw in some carrots(optional), green onions, shitake mushrooms, cubed tofu, and either seaweed or bok choy and a dash of pepper. My dream is to accompany the miso soup with some homemade sushi, but have yet to try my hand at sushi. Now my thoughts have turned to sweet potato sushi. If you haven't tried it, you really ought to.