So Much Soup - but first, here's a sandwich!

It was not so many years ago that my New Year's Day would be spent with a very large bottle of water, pain relievers for my very large headache - and my bed. It wasn't so much that I was hungover per se, well... yes. It was because I was hung over.

I don't want to think it is because I got old (although I did) but instead, that I got, you know... a teensy bit wiser. Plus, when your kids get board games for Christmas, it is much easier and more fun to play them when you aren't wondering if it would be appropriate to wear sunglasses in the dining room.

In any case, this morning I decided I would get some cooking started so we could have supper on hockey nights. I had the foresight to defrost stewing beef and got to it. Instead of a traditional Beef Bouruignon, I did a make-shift version with things in my house on January 1.

There were sweet potatoes to turn into soup, mushrooms to turn into another soup - and a last minute decision to make one of my old favourites - Southwestern Sweet Potato and Black Bean Soup. I shall get to those recipes peeps - but for today, I thought I'd share our lunch choice.

We decided on sandwiches. I had croissants. There was ham. Our friends regularly make fun of the number of condiments in my fridge. There was arugula. How could we NOT make a sandwich!

Caramelizing onions and adding them to pretty much everything always seems like the obvious choice for me. We usually have some in the fridge. However, if you don't have the time or the inclination, you can buy some at most grocery stores now.

I imagine lots of us have leftover ham in our fridges. If not, then you should. ;)

Arugula, aged cheddar and some Applewood Smoked Bacon Mustard and we have ourselves a sandwich!

Applewood Smoked Bacon Mustard = yum

I love making sandwiches for just the two of us at home. We can go crazy with condiments - or just do something plain. Regardless, they're still one of my favourite lunches on a lazy day.

*Note: I wrote this New Year's Day but forgot to hit post. Oops. I haven't blogged in a while. That's my excuse. ;)

Weather Talk Stops Now - I'm Declaring Spring HERE

OMG, can you believe the weather?

It is so cold/windy/awful out! When is this going to end?

I can't remember a season that has affected so many of us in such an icky and never-ending way. Even this morning, as the kids and I left for the cafe, my usually upbeat and winter loving 8 year old son took a look at the dusting of snow we got overnight and looked at the sky and muttered, "Really?"

So... that's it. I'm done now. The end of March is long enough. We're done. I'm planning my spring menu. I'm looking at seed catalogues. I'm perusing photos I took at farmers' markets and our garden last summer.

Remember Tomatoes on the Vine?

My teeny tiny silver lining in all this was my "spring cleaning" of my freezer. I discovered some of the strawberries I froze at the end of our strawberry season last year. I know they're not as good as fresh strawberries - but it snowed like a zillion feet here and the temperature was as cold as I imagine it is on the moon - so... they tasted pretty fantastic.

Last year's strawberries from the freezer

We decided to do something simple. I made tea biscuits and some maple whipped cream and that was it! (Sadly... we ate them all and... I forgot to take a pic - sorry. I temporarily thought of taking a photo of the empty plate - but decided that might be a bit mean.)

You may or may not know that while I have certain things I'm pretty good at baking, cooking is really more my deal. However, it just so happens that tea biscuits ARE one of my things! Mom taught me how to make these a ridiculously long time ago before I found out that baking was a science. When I thought it was easy I did a lot more of it. Later on, after the advent of the Food Network and hearing countless celebrity chefs go on about not touching dough, making sure cold water was COLD and a thousand other things, I sort of found my niche in cooking and left most of the baking to other people.

Tea Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour

4 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

½ tsp salt

1/3 cup butter

½ - ¾ c milk/ginger ale**

Preheat oven to 350. Combine all ingredients mixing as little as possible. Lightly flour a flat surface and roll out the dough until it is about an inch thick. Take a cookie cutter (or, in a pinch, a drinking glass) and flour it. Cut the biscuits and place on baking sheet. (I always use parchment paper.) Bake 12 to 15 minutes and remove from oven.

**The original recipe for tea biscuits calls for milk - but one of Mom's friends always uses ginger ale when she makes hers. I usually do now too - they are definitely less dense this way!

I've Been Here All Along!

People have been asking about where the Lunch Tramp has disappeared to lately. Fear not, I have not left town. (Well, sometimes I leave town - I mean, a girl's gotta travel, you know?) 

The awesome business card I made when I "lunch trampin'"

Most of you know that I'm making lunch now more than I'm dining out with friends - but that doesn't mean I'm giving up my moniker. In fact, I'd say the opposite is more often true. Now, instead of a few lunch dates a week, I'm hanging out with all the cool kids every day!

We social creatures like to, you know, be social. We like to talk about things: local politics, new businesses opening nearby, what ridiculous drama we saw on the weekly installments of Come Dine With Me Canada - you know, important stuff. (I'm not sure if you can tell but I was using my sarcasm font there.)

One of the advantages of having a cafe is the conversation. It is a really rare day when I'm not fascinated by the things people talk about here. There are those who suggest we should install a hidden camera and then have some sort of closed circuit feed to entertain the masses but I suspect that privacy violations aside, we might not be as entertaining to the masses as some would have us think. (In related news, if the masses were tens of people, MAYBE we would be a hit - but I still doubt it.)

In any case, I thought today I would talk about how the Lunch Tramp came to be in the first place - and why I'm such an advocate for social media . I joke that social media is part of my job as a business owner - but I'm only half joking. MANY of my devoted peeps come to the cafe because they found out about me via social media. More often than not, people who are newcomers tell me about seeing a funny coffee pic on a friend's Facebook page or they liked my pics on Instagram. But (I know you're not supposed to start a sentence with but - but I felt like I could be colloquial) the even cooler part about social media for me is the actual friendships I now have as a direct result of... Twitter!

The Lunch Tramp came about because I tweeted one fine day in 2011, I had three lunch dates. To be fair, my social media maven friend invited me and two other people to lunch but one of them ditched us. Several people commented that they felt excluded and then joined in - and the Lunch Tramp (and Cornwall Tweetup) was born. I designed business cards, got teased a bit on Facebook and went on with my life. The next week there were over a dozen people at our lunch table - and several of them were people I had never met before. (Truth be told, I wasn't even married to Twitter at the time. When one person commented on my business card pic about a weekly tweet-up, I didn't even know what that was!)

Now, a couple of years later, my family and I have gone on vacation with friends we didn't know before tweet-ups and the Lunch Tramp. We have entertained at our home and been invited to spend time with others. Social media is what you make it - and I'm thrilled to say we have made it a great place to hang out. If you're on the fence, I say, give it a try. Pick one form of social media and try it on for size. You can learn stuff about a hobby, interact with fellow foodies, find business contacts and more. Or... follow a celebrity. It isn't my bag but I'm not here to judge. I am here to say I have friends today I didn't even know a couple of years ago. I have laughed until I've cried (today in fact) with someone I may never have come across otherwise. Social media is not the tool of the devil. (Except for the games. Those are terrible.)

March (Break) Madness

My daughter was bummed that she didn't get to attend the cooking class I gave at the Boys And Girls Club on one of their recent PD Days. She told me she wanted "at least two cooking classes" over the March Break to make up for it.

When she found out I had to cook for a client yesterday, she wanted to come to the shop to cook with me. I was hoping to finish in under 45 hours so I suggested I would instead go early to the cafe, make food there - and then come back and we could do the same things at home.

She decided on Chicken Pot Pie, Chocolate Chip Cookies and Rice Krispy Treats. Full disclosure: She asked for Salad instead of the Chicken Pot Pie but is snowed over a foot yesterday. I was not in a salad frame of mind.

Here she is reading a cookbook while wearing her shirt to show her support for a Bully-Free environment. She pointed out that it was important she wear this shirt on other days too as a reminder that she supports it "not just on the day."

When I make Chicken Pot Pie, I like to use pie crust. I know some people are fans of puff pastry - but my mom always used crust (as did my Nanny) so... pie crust it is. I'll have to give you the recipe for it another day since we had some already made (Thanks Mom!). If you don't have a crust recipe of your own and/or you REALLY like puff pastry, you could definitely use it here.

This recipe is definitely more "quick cooking" than the traditional way I made it in the past where I poached a whole chicken and shredded it first. I still make it that way sometimes - but now when there's an 8yr old involved.

As for the "insides" of the pie, it is a pretty classic mix of:

Abt 1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup flour**
1 Onion, chopped (If you're really not an onion fan you could use leeks or pearl onions if you want to peel them!)
1 cup Carrots
1 cup Celery
1 cup Potatoes
few handfuls of Peas
Chicken* (Normally, I use the whole chicken but I had chicken breasts and used 4)
about 8 cups Chicken Stock
1 teaspoon dried sage (or 4 or 5 leaves if you have fresh)
1 teaspoon dried thyme (or 2 or 3 sprigs if you have fresh)
Salt and Pepper to taste (I find you need less if you're using store-bought stock than house-made)

Sometimes, I use mushrooms and I have used cream in a few recipes too - but not today.

I don't usually measure my ingredients (I know... I know...) this is pretty close to what I would say the amounts were.

In the interest of not boring my 8yr old kid, I started with melting the butter and adding the vegetables to saute before adding the flour. I knew she wouldn't be cool with me making the roux on my own and I was pretty sure she wasn't up to whisking on her first try.

 I added the flour next and then the broth. It was perhaps not the way they taught me in culinary school but it worked out pretty well! I cubed the chicken since raw chicken and added it in along with the herbs and let the whole thing simmer about 25 minutes.

Once the filling is done, I spoon it into the container we're using (usually a glass casserole but in the interest of no dishes I totally took some containers from the shop - don't judge me) and top it with the pie crust.

Bake in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes or until the crust is brown. (This would probably be a few minutes less for the puff pastry.)

If you were making this ahead of time you could either make it to completion OR wait to cook it - totally your call.

**If you are eating this it is assumed you're using the pie crust and are therefore not gluten-free. However, for my gluten-free peeps, you COULD omit the flour and make this as a stew. (For my non-potato eating peeps, switch out the potato for sweet potato but be aware that there is not as much of a thickening that will occur this way. It will still taste awesome but won't be as thick.)

National Soup Month?

As my Dishtastic Peeps know, I make a lot of soup. I take pictures of my soup and I sometimes (although infrequently) blog about it.

While looking for inspiration to blog more regularly, I thought about the "Days of the Month" food options. It seems there's not a lot of science behind said "national (insert food) day" selections. If you google chocolate cake, it could be tomorrow and also four other times in the year. That said, it's chocolate cake people! I'm almost positive there could be a justified movement for making that an every day of the year sort of thing - but maybe that's just me. In any case, I've discovered a few different sites that list a special food day for every day of the year. Some of them are a bit far-reaching (like Groundhog Day on, well, on Groundhog Day) - BUT a few of them said that January is National Soup Month.

Now, I know that January is coming to a close but it is starting to look like the cold weather never will. Cold weather screams, "Make Soup!" to me. Even though I typically make two different soups a day at the cafe, I find that lately, I've been feeling like I could run a Soup Only business.

The Original Soup Only Guy

At the cafe, I make almost everything from scratch - and with the advent of the Polar Vortex and all of the other (less SFW) names people are giving the weather phenomenons, there has been a bit of an influx in people braving the cold because they know there are hot pots of soup waiting for them.


With that in mind, today's blog isn't so much a recipe but rather some of my non-recipe comments about making soup. For the sake of photos, we'll go with the Tomato Soup I made yesterday.

Tomato Soup!

• Caramelize onions! Almost everything in the universe tastes better when you add caramelized onions to it (except maybe, chocolate cake). I get that we're busy and that we are looking to save steps but I'm telling you that taking a little bit longer to bring out the flavour in simple and inexpensive ingredients will make you glad you took the time. 

The beginning of caramelzation magic

• It does not have to be complicated! Use ingredients you already have on hand. Don't stress out about finding a rare kind of saffron or panicking because your paprika is not Hungarian.
• Having the right tools makes your life easy. See the onions and garlic in the pic above? They're HUGE! They will cook down and get brown and delicious and when I add the other ingredients and they simmer I will use my immersion blender to puree them and make everything smooth and ready for dipping that grilled cheese sandwich you ordered to go alongside it.

Imersion blender - blending

Tomato Soup is the most popular soup at the cafe - and I make it several different ways. The tomatoes can be roasted; they can be green ones that didn't ripen in the fall. Perhaps you have some grape tomatoes you think have seen fresher days in the fridge - add them in with a couple of your favourite cans. You can use fresh from your garden, crushed, diced, whole, even tomato juice - but make sure they taste good because there aren't a lot of other ingredients being added to hide potentially un-delicious flavours. Like cream in your soup? Okay. Watching your dairy intake? Don't use it. See? Uncomplicated! The photo below shows what went into the Tomato Soup offering I gave to peeps yesterday. I also added some salt, pepper, thyme and water.

There you have it. Tomato Soup for a Polar Vortex Cold kind of day. Serve it with Grilled Cheese and people from all around will think you're fantastic.

Maple Curried Pasta

Although my husband and I are not necessarily on the Gluten-Free bandwagon, we have taken a lot of bread and pasta out of our diet. However, eastern Ontario has just gone through what I can only describe as the coldest cold snap in the history of my existence. (I tend to embrace hyperbole with alarming frequency but this is just true.) The cold weather screamed for comfort food. I was in a pasta mood.

Those of you who follow my blog and/or have come to my cooking classes know that I'm more of a "use what you have" type of person more than a recipe follower. We've made various versions of this dish over the years but this is how we did it the other night.

Maple-Curried Chicken, Mushrooms, Pears and Asparagus with Fettucini

1/2 lb fettucini, cooked to al dente in a large pot of salted water

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

2 shallots, diced

handful assorted mushrooms, sliced (we had cremini and button)

yellow pepper, chopped

1 pear, peeled and diced

2 chicken breasts*

1/2 cup white wine or chicken stock

bunch asparagus, snapped in half

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1-2 teaspoons curry powder

1 cup cream

salt and pepper to taste

Add extra virgin olive oil and butter to pan. Add shallots, peppers and mushrooms and saute about 5 minutes. (*If you are using raw chicken, add it here. However, we were using leftover cooked chicken breasts so I didn't add it until later so it would heat through without getting dried out.) Add the pear and saute a few minutes more. Deglaze the pan with wine and/or stock. Add the asparagus, syrup and curry.

 Add the cream to the pan and let simmer until cream begins to thicken and reduce. Taste and season.

Meanwhile, drain your pasta and add it to to the pan. Toss and serve immediately.

 

Variations: As I mentioned above, this is a really versatile recipe. You could easily omit the chicken for a vegetarian meal. I've used apples instead of pears, thrown in fresh herbs like parsley when I had them, used red peppers (or no peppers)... 

We had no maple syrup once (I blame my children) and I used honey. It was still delicious.

For those of you who don't eat wheat, you could use the gluten-free pasta of your choice. This is also pretty darn yummy on rice - or if you are averse to all things starchy, omit the mushrooms from the mixture, roast or grill some portobellos and then top the mushrooms with the yumminess in the pan.

National Daiquiri Day!

I am not entirely sure how I have gone through my entire adult life without knowing about this day - but now that I do, you can be sure I'm going to do my best to make up for it!

It is sort of the perfect time of year for this. The local strawberries are in their last few days of availability and we're not quite sure what to do with the baskets we probably still have in our fridge. If you're like I am, you buy TONS of them because you're so exited they've finally arrived - and then eat them until you're pretty sure they are all you've consumed fruit-wise in a month. Freezing them is a great way to make sure you have fresh and delicious additions to smoothies or (ahem) adult beverages!

Fun Daiquiri Facts:
It was Ernest Hemingway's favourite drink.
The original daiquiri was pretty "meh" as far as exciting summer-tastic drinks are concerned. It was ice, lime juice and rum.
Miners (that's the dudes who work in the mines - not under-aged drinkers), were rumoured to have invented the drink in the late 1890s.



Fun Daiquiri Recipes:

Strawberry Daiquiri

1/2 cup ice
5-10 large strawberries (fresh or frozen)
1 1/2 oz rum
1/2 oz triple sec
2 tsp sugar
1 oz lime juice

Combine all ingredients in blender until ice is all crushed. Pour into a sugar rimmed glass. Garnish with a lime wedge.

Banana Daiquiri

1/2 cup ice
2 oz rum
1/2 banana (or a whole one if you prefer)
1 1/2 oz lime juice
sugar is optional here because the banana is usually really sweet

Combine all ingredients in blender until ice is all crushed. Pour into a sugar rimmed glass. Garnish with a slice of your banana.

 (Yum.)

In semi-related funny news, Kids In The Hall like fruity drinks too:

Last Second Fruit Salad

I make lunch every day for many people. I love that I get to help them through their busy days and I LOVE when they take time to give me blush-worthy praise. I also make lunch each and every day for my two small humans. H and E... well, let's just say, they don't tend to throw as much praise my way as the people who pay for their soups, sandwiches and salads.

A recent quote from my son: Well, Mom... I've HEARD your soups were delicious, but I'm still just going to not eat it. Don't feel bad. Other people will.

So... I'm not normally thrilled making lunches for the kids - that is unless I'm making lunches WITH the kids. They like to eat things they make with me, which is why I asked my daughter to help me make fruit salad Sunday morning. In the past, when I have made fruit salad, they looked at it as though I were torturing them by merely suggesting they try it. BUT... if they were the actual creators, I figured I'd have a better shot at them actually eating the salad. We had a lot of leftover fruit from school lunches and R and I were getting ready to make one of our "famous to our friends" epic Sunday brunches. A fruit salad would be a fantastic accompaniment.

I had some watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple and fresh berries in the fridge. I got H a cutting board, a bowl and a kid-friendly knife and told her to start chopping. (She's not exactly into long term commitments to helping me so I also got out a knife and cutting board and was in charge of the melons.)

 Within minutes, we had a fresh fruit salad that was perfect JUST like that! In the past, I've added fruit juice (I like to go with Cranberry juice but you could use whatever you felt like), and a variety of other fruits. I'm not a huge fan of putting apples and oranges in my fruit salad - but my mom does all the time so you can definitely use what you have on hand and end up with something delicious. I think some recipes call for some sort of sugar to be added. I tend to think fruit is sweet enough without it - but perhaps if it were under-ripe, you might want to add some honey or maple syrup.

That's it! Fruit Salad - in minutes - mostly made by a seven year old. Yum.

Black Bean Soup

The weather is still not cooperating with me for the Gazpacho I wanted to blog about this week - but chilly weather means I can still justify writing about cold weather soups. (I'm looking for the silver lining here peeps - don't mistake my positive spin as actual happiness about the weather.)

Black Bean Soup is one of those things that is now a staple in my go-to soup repertoire because it is delicious, easy and adaptable.

I used to avoid making soup with dried beans because I wasn't organized enough to pre-soak the beans for 24 hours before I needed them. Even the "quick soak" methods weren't really my thing - BUT one day I decided to try to make the soup without pre-soaking just to see if it would work... And... success! This might not work for some applications but it works fine for a soup that you're expecting to be thick. (If you're a stickler for the rules, by all means soak the beans first. I'm not here to judge your excellent organizational skills.) If you were in a serious hurry, you could also just used canned black beans. You'll definitely need to rinse them until the water runs clear - but I use them for lots of recipes and they're great in a pinch for soup too.

Today's soup is vegetarian and seasoned with cumin, chilies and lime - but I've made it with Chorizo, chicken stock, with tomatoes and without. There are tons of options.

Black Bean Soup

Here's what I did today:

1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
16 oz bag dried black beans, rinsed
about 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Vegetable stock and/or water (I used about 16 cups)
about 1 tablespoon cumin
about 2 teaspoons chili powder
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in soup pot and add onions, carrots and celery. Saute about 5 minutes. Add the cumin and chili powder and rinsed black beans. After about one minute, add about 8 cups water. Keep checking water levels. You want the beans to cook and they'll absorb a LOT of water. You can gauge the amount of water you want to add based on the thickness you like your soup.

Let simmer on medium-high for about 3 hours, adding water as necessary. Add lime juice (and, if you're feeling citrus-y you could zest the lime as well) and season to taste.

There was some soup leftover at the end of the day and I decided to switch it up and turn it into a Southwestern Tomato, Corn and Black Bean Soup. I added frozen corn, canned diced tomatoes, some more vegetable stock and garnished with cilantro and shredded cheddar cheese. Had I left out the vegetable stock, it could have easily been Black Bean Chili.

Southwest Black Bean, Tomato and Corn Soup

Turn Your Fridge Into A Salad Bar - Part 1

I just finished writing a Salad Bar article for The Seeker and it gave me pause to scroll through the numerous food pics I have stored on my phone. (Yes, I'm one of those people.)

We eat a lot of salad at home - but always more when the vegetables are in season. For a long time I worked in restaurants where a salad came with your meal. When I say salad, I mean a pile of iceberg lettuce with a cucumber slice, a tomato wedge and some shredded carrot with your choice of bottled dressing. We don't eat those kinds of salad at our house and I certainly don't do them at Dish Cafe and Food Shop. (I DO make a "Mixed Greens" salad that includes mesclun mix, cucumbers, carrots and grape tomatoes - because it is sort of a timeless classic that people can build on.)

When I want to make this salad a bit more fantastic, I switch out the Balsamic Vinaigrette  for one that's more Greek Dressing-esque (recipe follows) and add a scoop of Lentil Couscous Salad (which is already tossed with said Greek dressing).

Now, because we're salad people, we have this stuff in the fridge already (and/or I steal it from the shop. Shhhh - don't tell). BUT, this is a really simple salad to make and it can be varied in a zillion different ways.

Lentil Couscous Salad
 1 cup couscous
1 cup boiling water
1/2 can lentils, rinsed
1/2 cucumber, quartered and sliced
1 cup grape tomatoes, sliced in half
about 1/4 feta, crumbled
handful parsley, chopped
Vinaigrette (recipe follows)
salt and pepper to taste

I'm going to just post the basic vinaigrette recipe I use here. (Fun fact: I wrote a whole article a couple of weeks ago about making vinaigrette that I somehow didn't send in. I found it in my drafts folder today. On the plus side, there'll be a new blog post soon!) It is likely the same as one you'll find in about a thousand cookbooks and blogs. The difference you may notice is I use olive oil instead of "salad oil" or "vegetable oil" which don't really have any delicious flavour and aren't as healthy.

Basic Vinaigrette

1/3 cup vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon

1 teaspoon honey

1 clove garlic, minced

¾ cup extra virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper, to taste

Add vinegar, mustard, honey and garlic in a small bowl. Slowly whisk in the olive oil. Season to taste. 

Now... this is a GUIDELINE. Taste as you go! Vary this in a zillion ways. (Part 2 will have suggestions.) For the Greek-style dressing I use in the Lentil Couscous salad, I use half red wine vinegar and half lemon juice. I add a bit more garlic and dried oregano.

This is the most basic of starting points for your own personal salad bar. You can switch it up with a Mixed Bean Salad, grilled chicken, etc. Stay tuned to Part 2 for more vinaigrette recipes and other great additions.

 

Honey-Lime Salmon

My husband and I like to grill. A lot. As in, we could discard our stove during warmer weather. Having said that, we also grill throughout the winter. (When I say we, I mean I send my husband outside and I watch from the warm side of the door.) The point is, things we like to prepare indoors, we love even more outside on the grill.

This is one of those suppers that can come together with almost no work - but that tastes so delicious that you could easily use it for anything from a weeknight meal to a fancy-pants dinner party - and when you use the grill outside, there are almost no dishes!

It is also one of those recipes that isn't so much a recipe as something you throw together.

When I go shopping for salmon, I tend to buy a whole side (or two), package some in freezer bags with marinade and use the rest - but that is totally optional.

For the marinade, I zested 2 limes, added about 1/4 honey and grated a thumb-sized chunk of ginger.

Add the salmon and the marinade to a freezer bag. (I know it isn't the most environmental way to marinade the fish - but it is the best way to make sure all the fish touches all the marinade.) If you're making the salmon fresh, don't let it marinade in the citrus for longer than a half hour. Fish is delicate and tends to start "cooking" from the lime juice.

As you might imagine from my grill tribute above, we grilled our salmon - but a) if you're not in a grilling kind of mood b) it is winter c) you don't have a grill, you could absolutely bake it in the oven (or use an indoor grill). 

 

We had mushrooms, red onions and peppers that day so that is what we put on a grill rack while the salmon was cooking. The total cooking time is less than 15 minutes so there's really no excuse not to make it even on busy weeknights. (Garnish is optional.) ;)

Caribbean Carrot Soup

We make two soups every day at Dish... Real Food. It is how I start my day at the shop. I've been making soup forever - but it wasn't until it became one of the main focuses of my "to do" list that I realized how much I like making it. We may come to a point where I don't have the luxury of using what inspires me on a daily basis but for now, I simply look around the kitchen and use what's on hand to start.

We try to make at least one of our daily soups Gluten-Free and/or Paleo and this soup definitely fits both of those categories. Because carrots have a bit of starchiness to them, they have soup thickening qualities you would normally use flour (an obvious gluten-free and Paleo no-no) or potatoes (a Paleo rule-breaker) for thickening. We have made this soup with carrots and also with sweet potatoes. Both are delish - but the sweet potato tends to be a bit more popular at the shop.

This recipe falls in the "few simple ingredients" category. The carrots are obviously the star of the show - but you can absolutely use another vegetable (possibly with a few additional spices).

2 cups onions, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 inch piece ginger
2 whole cloves garlic
1 teaspoon curry
3-4 cups stock, vegetable or chicken
4 cups carrots (or sweet potatoes)
1 cup orange juice
1 can coconut milk

In a heavy stock pot, saute the onions, garlic and ginger about 10 minutes. 


Add the curry, stock and vegetables and bring to boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook until the vegetables are fork-tender, about 20 minutes.

Add the orange juice and coconut milk. Puree with a hand blender and season to taste.