Really Good Curried Carrot Soup
Submitted by: SARAH WARBURTON, for New River Valley, VA
“Orange is the happiest color.”~Frank Kin
Sometimes on a grey day, the only things that brightens things up is a really good soup. If that soup is a cheerful color, even better. And if (as a bonus) the soup is good for you, chock full of vitamins and fiber and even protein, well, that can turn a dark day around.
When my kids were in elementary school, I was struggling with the old “put a veggie on the plate” issue at dinner…and I served little bowls of this soup as our veg. Turns out my husband, who doesn’t like carrots (cooked or raw) liked it very much and my son cleaned his bowl. (My daughter wouldn’t try it, but that’s par for the course. Now that she's a teenager, she loves it!)
Really Good Curried Carrot Soup
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Cooking Time: 45 minutes
Ingredients:
Diced carrots-about 3 cups or 1 lb (or as many as you want to get rid of)
1 sweetish onion or 5 shallots, diced
1 T minced garlic
3 C broth (chicken or veg)
1 15 oz can Cannellini Beans, drained and rinsed
1 C almond milk (I used no sugar added vanilla) or coconut milk
2 T Thai Red Curry Paste
2 T Olive Oil
Plain Fat Free Yogurt for garnish
Chopped Fresh Cilantro for garnish
Instructions:
Pour in 2 T of olive oil or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your soup pot and put it on medium heat.
Add the onion and garlic and saute for 3 min, then add the carrots and saute for another 10 min or until they start to soften.
Add the broth (you can add more or less depending on how thick or thin you like your soup, just remember you’ll be adding the milk near the end) and the curry paste.
Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for at least 20 more minutes.
Add the drained and rinsed Cannellini beans. Use an immersion blender (or ladle it into a regular blender) and puree the soup until it’s smooth.
Add the milk and stir.
Serve with a dollop of yogurt and a generous pinch of cilantro (unless you either don’t like it in which case leave it out or you love it excessively like me in which case stir a bunch in at the end and then top with an additional bunch).