Heavy Soup

Things to do when it's snowing out (ok, it's already stopped snowing and I made this last night, but whatever): make ginger carrot soup.

Ingredients:

• Four or five cloves of garlic
• One large onion
• 6-8 cups of chicken stock
• 1/2 cup cream
• Two large carrots
• One large potato
• A medium piece of ginger root
• Chives
• Butter
• Salt
• Pepper

Equipment (aka gadgets):

• A stockpot
• An immersion blender (henceforth referred to as "the stick")
• A sharp knife
• A sieve (optional)
• A ladle

First, peel and crush the garlic and roughly chop the onion. Add about a tablespoon of butter (or you can substitute olive oil) to the bottom of the stockpot, add the onions and the garlic, and heat over a medium flame until the onions have turned translucent.

While you're waiting for the onions, cut the potato into slices, between 3/4 and 1 inch thick, and roughly chop the carrots. Peeling the potato is optional, though if you want a nice-looking soup, you should probably peel it. In either case, make sure that your vegetables are, of course, thoroughly washed. Thinly slice the ginger against the grain. You want to slice the ginger thin because the fibers in the ginger root will survive being pulverized by the blender blade, and coming across them when you're eating the soup isn't what you would call a great mouth-feel experience.

When the onions have turned translucent (if you want, you can brown -- but not burn -- them a bit), add the chicken stock (6 cups if you like a thicker soup; 8 cups if you like a more fluid soup), the carrots, and the ginger. Let simmer until the carrots are soft (about, say, 45 minutes or more).

Then add the cream (or you can use milk, if you're not into all that fat).

Put the stick in the pot, and blend until smooth.

This can be a little trickier than it sounds -- first of all, the soup is really hot, and these sorts of blenders really like making a big mess. I've found that putting it on the bottom of the pot at an angle works well for me. Move it around a bit to make sure that you get all the solids in the soup -- you want the soup to be nice and smooth.

Optional: pass the soup through a fine sieve to make it even smoother and to take out any large bits that might have survived the blender. This is something of a pain, though, and is only recommended if you really want to impress someone. Like, say, Julia Child. Or Amanda Hesser.

Season with salt and pepper. Ladle into bowls, garnish with chopped chives (or a sprig of parsley, or green onions, or whatever), and serve.

This is a pretty straighforward soup that can be used with many different kinds of vegetables: broccoli, cucumbers, asparagus, and so on. Just substitute the carrots and ginger with the vegetable of your choice, and blend when it's cooked. With faster cooking vegetables like broccoli and asparagus, add those after the potatoes are soft.