French Vegetable Stew (AKA Toot-a-lot Soup AKA Tutelage Soup)

Matt and I were looking for something fairly tasty, but easy, for a sunday night dinner. Matt always knows where to look for recipes. This time we chose a recipe from notakeout.com, a website with a somewhat different approach to cooking. The basic idea is that they give you a recipe for an entire meal, but the whole thing is written in a timeline format so that you can easily juggle several dishes at once without having to worry about what should be cooked and when. Its an interesting idea in theory, and *almost* works in practice.

In any case, we chose the "French Vegetable Stew."

 The recipe looked easy enough, not a lot of ingredients and not a lot of preparation involved.  We did make a few changes to the recipe - A little concerned that the broth might be bland, we chose to replace half the water with 4 cups chicken broth. We also couldn't find regular thyme at the store, so had to use lemon thyme instead.

Here are some fun pictures of the process:

Matt chopping the yukon gold potato. He was also nice enough to take on the job of onion-chopper; I don't tolerate the fumes well.

Potatoes, leeks, onions, and turnips in the pot. 

The secret ingredient (psst... its chicken broth!)

This is the pot prior to STAGE I of cooking, which is boiling the majority of the vegetables for 15 minutes, i.e. until they are pretty much all the same color and taste. After that, you reduce the temp to a slow boil and add the cabbage. After another 15 minutes you add white beans, parsley, and garlic.

The end result (Sorry, no picture; we were too hungry!) was not very exciting, but had a lot of potential. We ended up adding a bunch more salt and pepper than the recipe called for. Also, the cabbage wedges totally fell apart and just ended up mixing in with the rest of the vegetables.

Pros:
Once you get the timing down, it is very easy to make.
Ingredients cost less than $20 total!! Super cheap.
Quite healthy, assuming you don't drown it in salt and slather butter all over the baguette, which we definitely did.
Hearty, fills the tummy.

Cons:
Bland, bland, bland... needs something. What?
Cabbage wedges fall apart and don't look pretty like the picture
Easy to overcook
Minimal protein

Some ideas for how to improve this recipe:
-Add carrots
-Replace the almost tasteless turnips with sweet potatoes (Although there may be a timing issue here. I can imagine if we put the sweet potatoes in too soon, they'd disintegrate. I'm guessing 10 minutes before its done cooking?)
-Add pre-cooked chicken

Any other suggestions?

Would I make this soup again? Yes, but I'd experiment with different vegetables and seasoning. This soup needs a kick!

ps. Check out my use of the semicolon in this post! I'm so proud of myself!