While turning my beds over this past weekend, I found a small crop of carrots that somehow managed to escape last year’s harvest. Those stubborn little things survived the winter and were just waiting for me like an impatient child. “It’s about time,” they said, “It’s been freezing out here!”
OK, admittedly not the prettiest carrots you've ever seen, but they will make great soup!
These carrots had, indeed, frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, over and over throughout the winter. As a result, the skinny ones were flimsy, and the large ones were very woody in the middle. I couldn’t possibly chop them up to put on a salad, but they had too much life left to be doomed to the compost bin. The solution? Soup! Soups and stews are always a great way to take advantage of veggies that aren’t bad, but aren’t quite at their freshest, either.
Yesterday it snowed, and the temperatures dipped to a chilly 32 during the day. It seemed the perfect time to turn my tenacious carrots into a belly-warming dinner. I happened to also have a head of not-so-fresh cauliflower on hand, so I supplemented my carrot crop with some of that, but you could easily make this recipe with 4 cups of carrots (or 4 cups of cauliflower). Although I think 2 teaspoons of curry powder is just about right for this amount of soup, you will probably want to add 1 teaspoon and taste it before dumping the whole amount in–we tend to eat spicy! (more…)
Raising the Root 