Carrot Ginger Soup for the Paper Pushers

It finally got cold in Philadelphia. Break out the crock pot! You have to wait till it got cold enough to feel the need to "shake off the chill" before you can start making soups and whatnots. Who wants to eat soup in a t-shirt?

And another thing. I'm sick of HEAVY CREAM soups. It's cheating. Why? Because the addition of any fat or any salt to ANYTHING makes it automatically taste better. Sugar is similar, but not as potent. So, if you want insta delish soup, just add tons of salt or heavy cream. But I think it's time we let the ingredients stand for themselves. Seriously, we don't need the calories anyway... we have parkas and heated buildings. If we were Eskimos that'd be a different story. We'd be eating straight whale blubber. But we're not. We write emails, essays, have conference calls, and get lost in black holes searching for answers on Google ... all from our chairs. And to those who don't do this... kudos... you deserve some heavy cream.

So, this is a light, bright carrot soup with enough kick to oust the chill. It's VERY simple, horray!

Ingredients:

3 large local carrots

~3/8" ~1/2" of fresh ginger (say, a piece with the length of your thumbnail plus the volume that section of your thumb. if you have big thumbs, use your pointer finger)

1/4 cup of broth

1/2 of an onion, vidalla would be good

salt to taste

1. Peel the carrots. Look, do yourself a favor and refrain from peeling your carrots into the dishwasher disposal. My former housemate Alison did this and we had to pull a mysterious alien orange mass from beyond the kitchen sink trap 2 weeks later. Then again, she peeled like 10 carrots, not 3. I'm still afraid so I peel straight into the actual garbage.

2. Slice carrots. Medium width is fine.
3. Chop onion into medium-fine pieces
4. Peel ginger then finely chop or grate
5. Dump into a crock pot
6. Add 1/4 cup of broth

7. Add water til it just about covers the mass of veggies

8. Add a few rotations of ground sea salt to the mix
9. Cook on high until the carrots are soft when poked with a fork. (If you don't have a crock pot, simmering on a stove would probably have similar effects.)
10. Remove from pot, put everything into a food processor. Blend until very smooth.
11. Add salt to taste

Makes ~4, 8 oz servings, which = ~2 meals


I was literally burning the midnight wax for this one... finals are around the corner.)

I found this soup to be very modular. Meaning, I added different stuff to it each time I ate it. I highly recommend grating sharp white cheddar cheese and raw beets on top. It was refreshing, spicy from the ginger, complemented by sweet crunchy bits of beet as well as the soft fatty goodness from the cheese.

Check it ->>> Modular soup!

(A short illustrative story about fat, salt, and sweets: Yesterday I was sitting behind a mom and a tiny girl on the subway. Mom obliviously yabbering away on the cell, child holding a big Philly pretzel in wax paper. I notice that she peels back the paper, puts the pretzel to her mouth, then pulls it away, but without biting it. She pulls the paper back more and repeats. 'Poor girl,' I think. 'The paper's getting in her way of eating the pretzel.' This continues for 4 or 5 more times... and then I realize... she's just licking the salt and sugar combo off the sweet cinnamon dosed pretzel. Priceless.)

Super Salad

It was a rainy week in Philadelphia. Everything turned green, including my lunch. Marked as the first week of the 'I need to stop buying so much bread because it's comforting, cheap, hassle free, and relatively skimpy on the plastic packaging' campaign, I tried to make a salad every day out of kale. (It also became a weapon in the 'I love buying Matzos, because it's cheap and makes me feel like I'm not eating bread' war.)

Turns out, kale was a green worthy of the task. Kale: it's pretty high on the super food scale with lots of vitamins (beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin -whatever that is), cancer fighting trolls, and all that jazz. You can read about it in it's wiki page. I'll put it nicely and say that it's a 'rugged' or 'hearty' green, and requires a little rough housing before eating. You can cook your kale, for sure, but as the raw-foodists point out, you loose some nutritional value that way. And in today's world of hormone-dosed drinking water, hand-held wireless appendages, and food with 'carrageen' and 'high fructose' wrapped in PVC, you can't afford to leave a cancer-fighting troll behind.

This recipe is pretty hassle free, kind of fun, and really really good for you.

You need:

• Kale (try to buy at a farmer's market, it's only ~$2.50 a bunch, and makes ~5 servings)
• Avocado (try this for yourself, but I think I'd omit it from this salad. I don't think the avocado works well with the vinegar. Maybe replace with some chunks of cheese.)
• Rasins
• Tomatos (not pictured here, was out for the first making of this salad... was definitely IN for the subsequent versions)
• Vinegar (regular white vinegar, try to use a decent brand)
• Coarse sea salt or kosher, whatever salt doesn't have iodine in it. I was fortunate enough to use New Zealand organic sea salt. holler.

Rinse the kale if you care about that sort of thing.

Rip it into bite sized pieces and throw into a bowl.

Pour about 2 capfuls of vinegar onto the kale, and sprinkle two pinches of salt.

Now for the fun part: rub the kale between your fingers, distributing the vinegar while you work. The goal is to break down a the kale a little bit so you don't feel like an animal grazing on wild cabbage. All of your kale should become wet and wilty with this process, so if it's not, add a little more vinegar. I have no idea how long this takes. I want to say a steady 3 minutes. But basically you'll know when the texture goes from squeaky, rubbery, and unruly to wet, wilty, and tender.

Add your choice additives... the good kind, not xanatham or absorbic acid.

Add a drizzle of olive oil.

That's it!

Now you have a delicious, superfood salad. (Uh, well, I added some leftover teff from the Ethiopian... does that count as bread?)

I owe this recipe to the brilliance of my good friend, Alex, who I may or may not be able to coax into guest posting. He's pretty good at rough-housing when it's necessary, which is where the vinegar idea came from. I hope he's not mad that I'm stealing his idea and writing about it. But good ideas need to be shared, right? Anyway, thanks Alex!