Carrot, Coconut & Lime Soup

I've had a week off -- while a new hard drive was being installed in my computer -- and during the week, I made healthful, seasonal soups.

Like cooling fruit smoothies in summer, fall / winter soups are choc full of nutritive and satisfying, warming seasonal vegetables.

Preparing soup can be quite effortless; you don't need a lot of time, nor complicated recipes to create something

original and delicious.

What you do need is a sense of adventure, and an active imagination and by that I mean the ability to imagine what flavors will go well together once cooked and blended.

If you're a smoothie fan, you'll know that soft summer fruits automatically taste great when blended together either with water or with juice or milk.

In-season fruits and vegetables have an uncanny knack of complimenting one another. It's nature's way of ensuring that we make the most of the variety of fresh produce available.

In fall and winter, root vegetables, like soft summer fruits, are great flavor pals to one another. In other words, toss lots of chopped root veggies into a pot with either water or stock, simmer gently for an hour, and voila, delicious soup! It's hard to go wrong.

I like to experiment with flavor and texture, and still I find it's hard to go wrong -- so long as I taste-test along the way to ensure that I'm not being too heavy-handed with one flavor over another.

For instance, the soup idea I'll share today is a variation on a red Thai curry but with apple added. Apple compliments carrot and celery, plus it smoothes the texture of the soup which might otherwise be quite chunky and fibrous due to the carrot and celery.

To finish, I added coconut milk to taste. It enriches the soup with its creaminess, plus it's a staple in Thai cooking, as is lime, which I squeezed into the soup at the very end to counteract the sweetness of the apple and carrot.

Do you see how easy it is to create a unique soup by simply matching flavors and textures?

Drawing on your taste memory also helps. When I decided on the ingredients for today's soup, I visualized the red Thai curry I enjoy at my favorite Thai restaurant, recalling the texture, flavors, the vegetables in the dish, and then I improvised with the ingredients in my fridge and pantry.

Here's the basic recipe; feel free to experiment, improvising according to the ingredients you have on hand.

Carrot, Coconut & Lime Soup

1) Wash several organic carrots, scraping them with a knife to sloth off any dirt or debris.

2) Wash several stalks of celery, leaving the leaves on for extra celery flavor (the bitterness of the celery leaves will compliment the sweetness of the apple and carrot).

3) Wash and chop one or two apples. I leave on the skin, but you can peel them if you wish.

4) Wash and chop either a leek or white onion, toss into a pot with a little oil, and saute on med heat.

5) Add a teaspoon of Thai Red Curry Paste or if you use Thai Kitchen Original Pad Thai sauce, add a tablespoon (it's not hot like the paste).

6) Toss in chopped carrot, celery and finally the apple. Use a wooden spoon to gently stir ingredients over a med-low heat.

7) Add either water or chicken stock, enough to cover vegetables, cover pot with lid and cook contents gently for about 45 mins or until vegetables are soft.

8) Blend soup in a food processor or blender, pouring blended ingredients back into soup pot.

9) Taste-test and add salt if you wish. Pour in coconut milk to your liking while soup pot is on low heat.

To Serve: Squeeze lime into soup, taste-test to ensure the flavor is to your liking. This is a fairly sweet soup so it can withstand a good amount of lime juice. Ladle soup into individual bowls and serve with a chunk of lime on the side, and a sprig of green in the center, i.e. basil, Thai basil, parsley, lemon grass, or chives.

Soups with Apples, Leeks, Cabbage & Beets

Remember the Chicken with Foraged Apples post from last week?

Well, I have plenty of foraged apples still and though I'm a fan of stewed apples, apple butter, apple crumble, apple pie etc., these are all sweet variations and I love apples in savory dishes.

Do you also remember I talked about making stock from the chicken bones I froze with the intention of making soup?

Well, I didn't make chicken stock, but I did make several soups, and I used some of those foraged apples.

In the pic above you can see the ingredients I used in one of my soups. The apples, leeks, and cabbage also featured in the Chicken with Foraged Apples I link to at the top so in effect, soup could easily be made with leftovers from that casserole.

Simply add water to the leftovers and simmer the contents in a pot for about 30 mins and then run the lot through a blender.

I chose to add a large beetroot to the above mix. I love the combination of apple and beetroot, and the addition of leeks and cabbage make this quite a hearty soup that can be eaten chunky or blended to a smooth consistency.

Because it cooks into a lovely purplish-red color, a la Borscht, topping it with a spoon of sour cream or yogurt is a natural. The sourness of the cream or yogurt compliments the sweetness of the apple and beet. Adding a sprinkle of chopped dill is optional, but if you do have some dill it's a delicious compliment.

Using chicken stock as a base will certainly add richness to the soup, but you don't have to use stock, you can simply use water -- the flavor will still be full and delicious.

If you're not a big fan of beetroot and cabbage, you might like to try the combination of soup ingredients to the left: apples, leeks, celery and rutabaga, which is a cross between a turnip and cabbage.

Celery can be bitter, but add apples to celery and you have sweet plus slight bitterness -- a great combination.

Obviously a soup just of celery and apples is lacking so the addition of the leeks and rutabaga adds an earthiness to the sweet/bitter. I also added a sprig of rosemary to this combination which added a delicious fragrant note.

If you choose to blend the ingredients, take the rosemary sprig out. You may find you'll need to strain the blended liquid because of the copious celery fiber.

The resulting soup is thick, and it's a subtle green. Salt and pepper it to your liking, and finish it with a spoon of (real) whipped cream or a drizzle of half and half and some chopped parsley.

Perhaps you don't fancy the idea of apples in your soup. If not, the combination of green, purple, and red-root vegetables (pic to left) creates a spectacularly colorful and hearty, stew-like soup.

So that's purple cabbage, celery, leeks, beetroot and rutabaga. I cooked this combination of veggies with some leftover beef ribs which I'd bought home in a doggy bag from a recent dinner out.

It was more convenient for me to just pop the leftover beef ribs into the pot with the veggies and water than make a beef stock from scratch. And the meat from the leftover ribs came off the bone and became an additional ingredient in the soup, adding richness and flavor to the veggie combination.

I also added a couple dried bay leaves and a few whole peppercorns. Though don't dash out and buy these two ingredients; they're optional. You could add thyme if you have it. Fresh or dried herbs add a subtle flavor, however, salting and peppering before serving is often enough to enhance the natural flavors inherent in soup.

Serve this soup chunky rather than blended, since blended meat is often unappetizing in appearance. And because this one is sans apple, you may consider making apple and corn bread to serve as an accompaniment.