- Cleaning Out My Fridge Soup
- Dwight Schrute Soup
- The Plague Soup (I'll explain this one later)
- This Would Be Easier with an Immersion Blender Soup - I think that name explains itself. :)
Here is the recipe:
1) I put a pat of butter and some olive oil in a soup pot on medium low heat.
2) I added a half of an onion diced up (only half b/c that is all I had skulking around in the back of my fridge. How a girl who likes to cook ever runs out of onions is beyond me, but somehow it happened and I am fresh out of onions and garlic!) and the last three cloves of garlic in my house, minced, to the olive oil/butter combo.
3) They hung out there for a few minutes while I peeled, washed and diced three beets. (hence the name Dwight Schrute Soup) - there was a good amount of beets in the soup, b/c one of the beets happened to be the Goliath beet. It was huge. It was like the Shaq of beets. So really, my three beets were probably the equivalent of five normal beets.
4) I added the beets to the soup pot and got to work on the turnips. I just used the rest that I didn't use in my turnip gratin the other night. Probably about two lbs total. BTW - a handy turnip peeling tip. It goes a lot faster if you grip the turnip greens, peel the turnip FIRST, then lop off the top and bottom, wash it and finally dice it. It only took me about fifty turnips to figure this one out, and the second half of turnip chopping happened much faster.
5) Somewhere in the middle of all the turnip chopping, I got bored and threw in one random carrot. The last carrot in my fridge (....Cleaning Out My Fridge Soup).
6) Then I added salt, thyme, oregano and marjoram soup. Who uses Marjoram? I think that I've had marjoram in my pantry forever - but the smell was appealing tonight, so I threw some in there. I also added probably a good 1/4 or 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar.
7) Just because I felt like it, after I added all the spices, I decided to throw in a couple red potatoes, skin on. (Diced, of course)
8) Finally I poured in several cups - perhaps somewhere between five and six cups of chicken broth.
9) Let it come up to a bubble, reduce heat, then go for a walk with your kids.
10) Keep letting it bubble away even after your husband comes home and you become distracted by finding your favorite Dwight Schrute quotes online.
11) Finally remember that there are 3 hungry people in the house and you had better get crackin if you want to get to zumba on time, so get off your duff, and go back into the kitchen.
12) If you are not an idiot who goes through immersion blenders like the Snickers in a halloween candy haul, bust it out and puree your soup right there in the pot (take it off the heat first, though). If you are an idiot, who in the course of 7 years of marriage, has gone through THREE immersion blenders, you will have to use the food processor. (Luckily the food processor HAS survived all seven years of marriage, plus some - otherwise, you'd be out of luck!) Puree the soup in batches if you don't own a commercial grade/size food processor. This takes a long time is really a pain, but the finished creamy soup is worth it, I think....Don't overfill it or you will have bright red beet soup staining every surface in the kitchen. Be careful when pureeing hot liquids. Actually, I'm not sure why - I think something about the steam. I just always see those instructions when it is in a formal recipe, so I thought I'd repeat them here.
13) Finally, take it off the heat, stir in good pour of cream (probably about 1/3 of a cup - have I mentioned that I RARELY measure stuff?) and serve. (Sour Cream would have also been good here)
14) Tonight I put in some goldfish crackers on top of the kid's soup - and they loved it. I told Alex it looked like one of the plagues when the river turned to blood and all the fish in the Nile died - which is why I'm considering the name "Plague Soup" - but the goldfish crackers were a nice pairing with the soup. (haha, only a mom would use that phrase!)
It seems like lately, I'm only blogging about what I'm making and eating. Truth is, I had not REALLY cooked in a couple of weeks - we were doing lots of grilled cheese, freezer pizza, etc...That's definitely not the norm for me, and it has been so refreshing to be back in the kitchen! Plus I was so inspired by my turnip haul from my wonderful aunt that I almost HAD to write about it. :)
So, here is a palatable beet soup recipe - good for when you want to try something new, or when you are going to be watching an office marathon. If I were REALLY awesome, I would have planned ahead and made homemade bread to go with the soup, but the pre-planning involved in making homemade bread was just not there today. Next time, though, for sure!
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