Skip to main content

Carrot Soup Car Wreck...One in Which The Car Actually Turns Out Okay

I love carrots.  I always have...

oooh, wait.  Raw carrots.  I have always loved raw carrots.  From birth, practically.  Even now, almost forty years later, I rarely pass up the carrot sticks on a relish tray in my vicinity.  I love the vibrancy, the color, and the health value (something I was unaware in my early, early years, alas).

Cooked carrots, though, I feel very differently about.  I have young-person memories of pot roast with potatoes and carrots, and I distinctly remember eating with a 1:2 carrot-potato ratio mindest.  One carrot piece for every potato piece.  It helped me cope with what I felt was a great loss in taste and texture during the cooking process..

While I'm confessing my neuroses, I'm the exact same way about cooked green peppers, peas, and green beans.  Raw, definitely...cooked, uh, only if I have to.

To present day. I have an excess of carrots these days around Chez Nelson.  And there are only so many sticks I can chop up for snacking, so I turned to Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food for help.  Carrot soup is a pretty simple thing: One sliced onion, two pounds of peeled and chopped carrots, salt and pepper, thyme, and chicken or vegetable broth.  Sweat onions in butter or olive oil until tender, add carrots and seasonings, add broth.  Simmer until carrots are soft.  Puree and serve, heated through.  So easy.

Naturally, I was dubious.  After all, I am well-aware of my aversion to cooked carrots...which is probably why I opted for I did one of her "variations" that she lists after nearly every recipe.  I added a jalapeño in with the onion-carrot mix, and I tossed in a handful of cilantro just before pureeing.  In the end, I got this freshly flavored soup that had a hint of heat (should have added more jalapeño).  Waters didn't include straining the soup, and I wish wish wish I would have.


Because this carrot soup here is roughly the consistency of Gerber's baby food.  Not what I was shooting for. I'd prefer something a little more velvety here, and that wouldn't happen unless I ran it through a strainer or tamis or whathaveyou.  And maybe a little more heat in the form of cayenne, maybe some lime juice, I think would have really made this soup spectacular.

So now I have this soup that I'm pretty lukewarm about eating by itself, but I really don't want to throw it out.  So...what do I do in the particular predicament?

Well, since you asked...


This was breakfast this morning.  Scrambled eggs with a nice generous dollop of the carrot soup thrown in.  Obviously, the texture I disliked so much was lost in the fluff of the egg, so, yay.  And, the color change was nice.  But, I lost most of the flavor.  This soup was pretty subtle anyway, so it's no surprising I couldn't taste them in the eggs.

Then, for dinner tonight, I did a chicken noodle soup, and guess what I added to the broth base?  Carrot soup.  Again, loss of texture (good), but no discernible color or flavor of carrots (bad).  I should have added more, maybe.

And for dessert tonight...


Haha!  Carrot cake! A favorite here at home, but I figured the herby spice of the soup would alter the cake's sweet profile in an undesirable way.  Why?  Because I'd tasted the batter, and there was a definite weirdness to it...not the usual nutmeg-cinnamon-carrot culprits.  However, some kind of strange magic happened in my oven during the baking, because that unusual flavor was NOT present in the final product.  Or maybe it was the cream cheese frosting and almond side-masking that distracted my family from the weird flavor.  Sugar does that sometimes.

What started as a mediocre-ish vegetable puree actually turned into a fun kitchen game of Hide The Carrot Soup.  I think I will try straining it tomorrow and reheating it for a straight up bowl of soup to see if I like it better.  After all, I really did spend too much time chopping and sweating and simmering and pureeing to be throwing it into a cake where it loses much of its integrity. No matter HOW much fun that is.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Garden Party, Pt. 2

6:30 is too early for a Sunday, ne c'est pas?  Alas, that is the time I arose this morning, and while my body wanted to fall back asleep, my mind was already off and running.  So, up I got. Something tells me I'm going to regret this later...like when I'm trying to watch the new Avengers movie tonight. Last Sunday was my last day off, and that was only at my request.  There are no more days off in the foreseeable future, between the part-time bar job and the near-40 hour demands of the restaurant.  It's a hard-knock life, I reckon, but that's how it goes when you're in search of The Dream.  So we savor the tranquil moments while we can.  Like yesterday, for example.  By some stroke of excellent luck, it was just me and the youngest son in the house for a few hours.  I took him out for lunch, and then I made him do yardwork with me.  I showed him how to mow the yard, and he discovered it's not terribly fun nor easy.  Ah, yes. Tranq...

Go Placidly

My food truck business started back up this past weekend, and from here until November, the weeks will be packed.  Sandwich-slinging Thursday-Saturday and bartending work Monday-Wednesday.  And Sunday, I guess, is the day to sleep in and hide in my house. Hiding out is the one thing I feel like doing a lot of these days.  My food truck's ReOpening wasn't the only thing happening in my hometown this weekend past.  A 13-year-old boy was accidentally shot and killed on Saturday and then yesterday, the police department busted one of the biggest meth labs in a long time. Both are tragic...one is a sad loss, one that will devastate a loving family for the rest of their lives.  One is tragic only because of the profound stupidity/ignorance/addiction of a few people who happen to be living in a town mostly filled with good-hearted, hard-working people. And if it's not drama at the local level, then there's the constant bombardment of news that seems to be vividly...

Groceries This Week and The Three-Week Challenge!

Now, this is what I'd like my pie charts to look like every week: Somehow, I just can't get around buying condiments!  That's been a slice in my chart the last several weeks...this week, it was jelly for my kids' lunchtime PB & Js. The snacks slice is a bit bigger than I'd like, but I took advantage of the 2/$4 deal on graham crackers (got some frozen homemade cream cheese frosting I need to use up - hence, improviso s'mores!).  Also, Ritz crackers to substitute in for the "Lunchables" my daughter wanted to buy for her soccer games on Saturday. But, fresh produce at nearly a quarter of spending?  Yes, that's awesome.  My cart was laden with watermelon, apples, oranges, and muskmelon.  YUM!  The significantly smaller 'Meat' slice is due to a small purchase of lunchmeat for weekly wraps and sandwiches. I am pleased with the variety of spending, as well as the low receipt total this week. Spending This Week: $60.86  -  Total Expe...