Carrot Soup with Phil

In 2009 when I first started to properly live with my husband, we bought tuna steaks, before that to be honest the closest I got to tuna was out of a can. So I bought these steaks and had no idea how to cook them, so I googled how to cook tuna, which brought me to the Allrecipes website and I became addicted straight away, no surprises there, I loved that it was made of ordinary cooks and chefs putting up their recipes and I loved the blogs section too, I think what I loved most in the beginning was the friendships formed with like minded people, sharing a love of food. It was rather unfortunate when in mid 2010 things got a little ugly. Probably partly due to my own doing, but I wasn’t the only one being bullied, anyway I found it necessary to leave the AR world, although not entirely because I do have the AR full version App on my iPad, I don’t blog over there anymore and there is no communication abilities, I can only access and save recipes. I didn’t however give up on my new friends and we moved over to Facebook. One of those friendships is with a man called Phil and we met face to face last year for lunch. He came baring gifts, of the best kind books.. The fun part is that he also has the same book, so we hatched a plan to cook some of the same dishes and compare notes, this is definitely a fun way to cook. That I would recommend to anyone, I am not suggesting you must go out and buy the same cookbooks as your friend, but maybe you could choose a recipe from the internet and print enough copies for you and your friends.. You might even choose to make a game of it, of sorts. With enough people involved you could each choose a recipe every month and set out to cook each one during the month, either have a schedule to stick by and report back regularly or just work through them in your own time during the month, maybe making a recipe evening of it at the end of each month, a few drinks and some nibbles, giggles and stories over how the recipes went, even more interestingly would be to see how you each altered the same recipe to suit your own tastes! This would also be a good time to select the new recipes.

Carrot Soup

2 carrots

2 medium potatoes

1 ½ turnips

1 litre cold water (extra possibly if needed)

Salt and pepper to taste

3 shallots

75ml white wine

70g butter (from the fridge)

Croutons for serving

1. Peel the carrots, potatoes and turnips, chopping them up into little pieces. Put them into a large saucepan and cover them with the cold water, the litre should be enough but add a little extra if your veggies aren’t covered, season with the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and then gently simmer for a half an hour. Top tip for simmering if you have one of those electric hobs, bring the water to a boil on the medium to high heat (or the one you usually use) then set another ring to a lower heat for simmering, I find the electric hobs take far too long to cool down. I’ve burnt stuff plenty of times because the hobs are still pushing out too much heat.
2. In the meantime, peel and finely dice the shallots, pour the wine into a small frying pan adding the shallots and reduce to about a 1/3 over a moderate heat. You could use the first hob you used to bring the veggies to a boil.
3. Cut the butter into cubes about an 1” in size, and all at the same time add the butter cubes to the shallots. Use a whisk to beat the mixture. Then using a wooden spoon stir continuously over a gentle heat until pale and thickened.
4. Puree the soup in a blender or food processor until smooth and then return to the saucepan, I realise not everyone will have one, but I do prefer to use my handheld blender, it can prove to be a bit more laborious if you want a perfectly smooth soup but it does mean less mess and less faff. I think if I was having a posh dinner party and using this recipe I would probably use the food processor, but for just two of you a few lumps aren’t going to hurt…. If you did use the food processor, return the soup to the pan.
5. Gradually stir in your butter and shallot mixture and cook for another 20 minutes over a gentle heat, season again with salt and pepper to taste.
6. Serve with homemade croutons….
    
   I have halved this mixture and I found it worked well, for my tastes the only two ingredients I didn’t half exactly were the shallots, original recipe calls for 5 and the butter which is 125g. Everything else was split right down the middle.