I’m fairly competent with the pureed soups, and so I try to mix one up every
now and again, especially when D. or Ph. mention it (and it’s also my week for
meals). Today it was a finely blended
Tuber
Taproot
Rhizome (aka, Sweet Potato
Carrot Ginger) Soup garnished with chopped honey roasted peanuts and set
alongside thin-sliced sourdough from Panera. It’s really a fortunate accident of
fate that I can cook much of anything (i.e., lots of kitchen time as a kid), but
this one turned out okay. Edible-plus.

Today’s soup was inspired by a fancy-schmancy luncheon I attended a few years
ago (the semi-pro hoops team in KC was pitching the idea of using our facilities
for their practices). More quickly to the point: there was a sweet potato
and ginger soup at that lunch meeting, and I haven’t had anything like it since.
Until today.

Guessing at quantities, I worked with two medium sized onions, 12-14 carrots,
2.5 sweet potatoes, and a hunk of fresh ginger root the size of two fingers
(pointer and bird, to be exact). I set the carrots and onions and peeled
ginger root to a low boil so they would soften (enough water just to cover
things up); meanwhile, I nuked the sweet potatoes. Next, I peeled the
softened potatoes, lowered the heat on the stove, and threw them in along with a
pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, two chicken bouillon cubes, and a pinch of
nutmeg. (Note that this is a rather large batch; half the qty. of carrots,
onions, and sw. potatoes would be just fine for a meal).

At this point, everything is stewing together, softening up, making friends.
Next, I ladled it into the blender (we don’t have a submersible stick-blender!),
added a cup or so of half-n-half, and blended it smooth. Then back into
the pan (before doing this, I emptied the kettle into a bowl to avoid any chance
of unincorporated solids lingering in the puree). Again and again. I used
between a pint and a quart of half-n-half (any other sort of milk or cream would
be fine, I suppose, although cooking with skim can make a mess of things I
think; might be wrong about that). At the end, in the final blender-full,
I included a cup of plain yogurt. I have no good reason why (did I see
some other recipe like this?), and I’m not convinced it improved the T-T-R soup.
Your call.

I see now that this delectable improvisation doesn’t resemble a recipe. So

here’s an approximation of what I mixed. It’s a recipe I Googled when I was
halfway through the process of softening the vegetables and thinking about how
to season such an unplanned thing.