Carrot Soup

It has been raining. All last night. Most of yesterday. Part of the night before. All day today. The constant rain has not only started to dampen my mood (except for the ocaisional pun hee hee) but it has created a soup out of our backyard. Our basement hasn't flooded so far. It's only a little damp around the edges. Our garage however is leaking.

When the Brain and I got married, I moved from a 1200 square foot apartment and he moved from a 1100 square foot house to lovely Nowhere, Ohio. Right into a 700 square foot house. So pretty much over the course of the last year we have been in the process of removing 1600 extra square foot of crap out of the garage. We've been doing pretty good at it. We've donated some stuff. We threw some stuff out. We've "oops" broken stuff. We've put up shelves to stash some of our stuff. We still can't get a car in our garage. But we can make a path to the beer fridge so it'll be okay in the end.

So there's a vent in the top of the garage. I guess that's so if we ever could get a car in the garage, we couldn't leave it running and kill ourselves with carbon monoxide poisoning. Anyway, I checked to see if the lake taking over the backyard was invading the garage only to find dripping from the vent through my sleeping bag, through the Brain's sleeping bag, on some of the boat cushions, down to the Brain's weight bench. I pulled over an empty garbage can to catch the drips and called the Brain to come fix it.

Then I made some soup. This soup recipe came from my brand spanking new vegetable cookbook. Who would have thought there would be more than one cookbook dedicated to vegetables that wasn't necessarily a "vegetarian cookbook". Now I have nothing against vegetarians, it's just that I can't digest soy and it gets a little ugly when I eat some. So this new book is Vegetable Love by Barbara Kafka. It's not quite as easy to find vegetables as my beloved Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop, but it does have them grouped by regions and by family so I'm learning some stuff there. With such a miserable day, I decided to go with good old familiar carrots and a lovely creamy carrot soup. It was warming and delicious and went great with some shavings of Grana Padano cheese and fresh cracked pepper ontop.


Creamy Carrot Soup
adapted from Vegetable Love by Barbara Kafka

2 tsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
3/4 pound carrots (2 very large), peeled, trimmed and cut across into 1 inch rounds
2 3/4 cups vegetable stock
1 cup fat free ricotta cheese
1 tsp kosher salt
1 Tbsp lemon juice

Grana Padano
Black pepper

Cook the oil and cumin in a medium saucepan over medium heat for 1 minute to release the flavor of the cumin. Add the carrots and vegetable stock. Cover and bring to a boil until the carrots are very soft (about 30-40 minutes). Remove from heat. Puree with an immersion blender until smooth. Stir in ricotta. Season with salt and lemon juice.
Garnish with Grana Padano and black pepper.