Flo’s Carrot Soup

Its been a couple of frustrating days here in the kitchen, but Flo’s Carrot Soup is a keeper. I have created and tested recipes for stuffed mushrooms and queso blanco cheese dip (thinking about Super Bowl food). Neither are worthy of sharing yet. But, this carrot soup, well I just spent the last few minutes scraping every last bit of it out of the cooking pot. YUM!  The flavors are very subtile. No one flavor jumps out at you but the combination is intriguingly delicious. This soup is gluten free, dairy free and vegan if you leave out the butter.

This recipe is somewhat inspired by the carrot soup from Simple Eatery in Buena Vista, Colorado. I was looking for something that was right in between savory and sweet like theirs. I had not intended to use cardamom so it’s not pictured with the ingredients, but as recipe development goes, sometimes at the end there is just something else that is needed. In this case it was the cardamom. It is the final flavor that takes this soup from pretty good to, wow, I need some more of that! So, don’t leave it out. It is a spice that we here in the US don’t use enough of.

Flo’s Carrot Soup Ingredients

Start out by scrubbing your carrots really well with a vegetable brush. Everything else comes in a can so the prep is minimal. If you have homemade vegetable broth, by all means use it. Fresh ginger would work in this but I didn’t have any on hand. The ground spice worked out fine.

Chop the carrots pretty small so they cook evenly and pretty quickly. Heat a good size soup pot or dutch oven over medium heat. Add equal parts olive oil and butter to the pot, and once the butter is bubbling, add the carrots and a pinch of salt. Cook them until they are soft. Add the broth and cook uncovered for about 10 minutes or until the carrots are well cooked and soft all the way through. Turn down the heat to simmer and add the coconut milk. Let it all simmer uncovered for another 10 minutes or so. You want to cook it uncovered because the vegetable broth needs to reduce down a bit. Add the spices and the zest of one orange. Turn off the heat and get out you immersion blender. Puree the soup right in the pot you cooked it in. If you don’t have an immersion blender,(really every cook needs one) you can use a regular blender. Let the soup cool down a bit before you add it to the blender.

That’s it. This would be really nice as a starter for a fancy dinner party, but it’s also an awesome lunch soup or a nice vegetable side. Make it ahead, it only gets better.