Carrot Ginger Soup

Jeff was cleaning out his refrigerator. Big bag of carrots - not really old, but not young, either. "Do you want these?" Well, I hate to see food thrown away, so of course I said yes. But what do you do with just under 2# of carrots? The only thing that made any sense to me was to make carrot ginger soup . I haven't had that in a long time, and I absolutely adore it! The color alone makes my mouth water!

So I started with onion and garlic - of course. A whole onion, and 3 cloves of garlic. I chopped them up and threw them into a large pot with about a tablespoon of my Earth Balance. (Butter, if your cholesterol levels can handle it.) When the onion had wilted and was translucent, I added the carrots - peeled and sliced - and the ginger - diced - and turned the heat down to simmer them for about 20 minutes.

Then I added a little over 5 cups of chicken stock - maybe closer to 6. (Not all of it had thawed before I added it, so it was hard to measure.) I brought it to a boil, then reduced the heat and simmered it for about a half an hour. Working with about a quarter of the mixture at a time, I blended the soup in my blender. (A food processerwould probably have done it more quickly and perhaps better, but the blender was in the front and the processer was in the back of the cabinet. So......)

When I had the whole batch blended, I put it back in the pot and turned the heat up a bit. Just when it started to simmer, I turned the heat off, added what I had left in my yogurt container - maybe a half a cup? - and whisked it in. Ahhhhh......That and a good levain bread from my local bakery (Bread & Cie), and I was in heaven!

From a health standpoint, everyone knows about carrots and vitamin A. But in Chinese medicine , the color and flavor of carrots (orange and sweet) make them beneficial for the digestive system. In the 5 element paradigm, the Spleen/Pancrease (translation here is "digestive system") is the Earth element, and the color associated with this element is yellow (or anything really close to it, like orange.) The flavor associated with it is sweet. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean cholcolate, but rather fruits and vegetables that are naturally sweet, such as carrots, butternut squash, (which could have made a terrific addition to this soup), oranges etc. So to benefit your digestive system, you need to incorporate things that are yellow or orange and naturally sweet.

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