Carrot Soup and the Power of Friendship

I made carrot soup for a school assignment earlier this year. As a person who has never been particularly science minded or inclined towards cooking, getting a science based degree in nutrition felt like an uphill battle most days, but especially when confronted with carrot soup. As a person who doesn’t like cooked carrots, I pondered the assignment of making carrot soup (twice!!) and nearly quailed. Luckily for me, I live with my best friend, Eleanor, who loves cooked carrots and loves me enough to commit to eating mystery soup for me.

Once I had secured her promise to fall upon the sword of cooked carrots, I set out to make the inimitable Alice Waters’ Carrot Soup. And then we made another version with different flavors. And then we made the original version again and served it to friends with grilled cheese sandwiches. Now, imagine my shock and delight when it turned out to be some tasty shit. Nothing like the mushy carrots I had been braced for, Alice Waters’ carrot soup is light and vegetal, flavorsome without being overwhelming, an amazing compliment to a dish or a base to build a dish on. Seriously, so good.

When Eleanor and I first moved to Portland, we packed as many books (and clothes and pots and pans, I guess) as would fit in my beat up Civic and set out to move hundreds of miles away from our families more than a decade ago, the results were surprisingly amazing. Not unlike the carrot soup. And, much like the carrot soup, it’s possible that there were people who doubted the outcome of two young women from SoCal moving to the PNW without even winter coats to aid them.

Having crash landed in Portland, even with the doubts and fears, (our apartment contract fell through the day before we arrived and we lived at a Days Inn for a week) it was still somehow amazing. We made it through the rain and the cold (seriously so cold, don’t move to Portland from San Diego in November you WILL NOT BE EQUIPPED) because at the end of each day we came back to the home that we were creating. A home that we were able to create just as we wanted, a sanctuary to be ourselves and spend innumerable amounts of quality time together.

We talked and laughed and grew and all of those moments together in our home warmed the rest of our lives with the sort of golden glow one might expect from, say, carrot soup. Away from our friends and our family, in a new city with new jobs and a new home, we reached out with the blindness of someone making a new recipe for the first time and they don’t know how it’s going to turn out but they have to eat and then- and then it’s amazing. It works. You make changes to it over time, because who makes a recipe for the first time and doesn’t think about tweaks that they would make, and over time it grows and changes and becomes a part of you that you treasure and keep close.

Eleanor and I still live together, 11 years later, in a house rather than a tiny but well-loved apartment, along with my husband, a small army of small dogs, and books and plants as far as the eye can see. We love our house and our dogs and our books and our garden, and every day we are grateful for the decision to pull up roots and plant ourselves here. The results were so much better than I could have imagined.

So, in honor of 11 years of friendship, and the changes it has wrought along the way, please enjoy two variations of carrot soup.

Carrot Soup topped with soft cheese and thyme, paired with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Carrot Soup (OG Version)

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons butter

1 sprig thyme

2 onions, sliced

2 ½ pounds carrots

Salt

6 cups of broth

Instructions: Start by melting the butter in a heavy bottomed pot, add the onions and thyme, and saute for 5 to 10 minutes, or until the onions are getting to be translucent.

Add the carrots and season and saute for another 5 to 10 minutes, until the carrots get tender and the flavors are melded.

Add the broth, bring everything up to a boil, and then let it all simmer for 30 minutes or so. I like to simmer my soup uncovered because I prefer a slightly thicker more flavorful soup, but I trust you to make your own decisions here.

You can eat the soup as it is here if you want? But for a seriously improved texture I recommend giving it a blend, either with an immersion blender or by tipping the whole mixture into the basin of a standard blender.

Not only is this a hecking tasty soup, it also makes a superlative template for other soups of this ilk. The assignment for school was to make it twice, once as the original, and once as a different kind of soup, and both soups were so good. Just by varying the ingredients you can change the type of soup you want- looking for something very light, as an accompaniment to salad or fish? Get some young fresh carrots, use ghee instead of butter, and strain your broth. You’ll end up with a very orange and delicate soup, perfect to accompany many things. We also tried making it with rainbow carrots but that pic didn’t make the cut because you know what happens when you mix rainbow colors together? Yeah, you get a murky brown color. Still tasty though!

Want something a little more robust, to stand up to red meats or the like? Try more aggressive seasonings, amp it up with bone broth and throw some shrimp on top, as we did for our second iteration. The OG recipe is fantastic, but the versions you can make up yourself are just as good, albeit it in a very different way. Here’s the second recipe we made, with more assertive flavors. We both agreed it was delicious, not necessarily better than the original, but an excellent soup on its own merits.

Spiced Up Carrot Soup served with naan and topped with shrampies and a little sour cream.

Carrot Soup (Spiced Up Version)

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons of grass fed butter

2 onions, sliced

4 cloves garlic, crushed

1 inch grated ginger

¼ tsp crushed red pepper

Salt and pepper

2 ½ pounds of carrots

6 cups of ginger turmeric chicken bone broth

Instructions: Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan and add the onions, garlic, and ginger.. Saute for 5 to 10 minutes or until onions are translucent, add the carrots and seasonings, and saute for another 5 to 10 minutes, or until the carrots are tender. Cover with bone broth, bring to a boil, and then let the whole thing simmer for 30 minutes or so.

I used ginger turmeric bone broth for amped up flavor, but any would work! Try some veggie broth with dashi or another umami booster for a vegetarian option, there are so many directions to go with this. As before, you can eat it here, but for a smooth texture and richer flavor blend the soup with either a standard or immersion blender.

Whichever version of the carrot soup you try, I hope it brings you the kind of pleasure that it brought us. I hope that you enjoy recipes that are simple and full of vegetables and flavor. Most importantly, I hope that you have good friends to eat said soup with, as it is made immeasurably better in the sharing. This blog is intended to be a little bit of commentary, a little bit of recipe sharing, a little bit of health science, a little bit of yoga, and whole lot of fun. If these sound like things that you would also love to enjoy, then welcome. You are already among friends.