- TLC >
- Guides >
- Food >
- Recipes >
- Courses & Dishes >
- Soups & Chilis >
- Chilis
Spiced Carrot Soup
Difficulty Level Easy
Yesterday I took my daughter back to the beautiful historic town where she goes to university. It is a town with many grand 19th century stone buildings in the downtown area, and gracious homes from another era. We were going to have her send-off lunch, so we were looking for someplace nice. We decided to have lunch in a little restaurant called The Cornerstone in one of those renovated historic buildings. It turned out to be vegetarian restaurant and I had one of the best lunches I've had in a very long time. Anyone who thinks that vegetarian food is boring or tasteless would do well to visit this little restaurant.
It's not very often that I eat in a restaurant and want to go home and try to duplicate the recipe, but this spiced carrot soup was so delicious I just had to try. The soup was really dense with a pronounced curry flavour and undercurrent of fennel. I made a version today which wasn't quite what I had, but pretty close. I was a bit afraid of overwhelming the soup with fennel, so in the end I didn't add enough and I couldn't really taste it. I also realized that the only texture in their soup was the fennel, so they must have added it after it was pureed. I'm going to continue to work on this to try and get it closer to what I had.
All of the measurements for this recipe are really approximate, so make it the way you want. I've increased the amount of fennel in the recipe to what I think it should be. I started out with very little stock because I was trying to get the same thickness, so I pureed the soup and then added liquid until it was the consistency I wanted.
INGREDIENTS
| 1 tbsp | olive oil |
| 5 | carrots, sliced |
| 1 | potato, peeled and diced |
| 1 tsp | curry powder |
| 1/2 tsp | ground cumin |
| 1/2 tsp | salt |
| 1 ‑ 1/2 cups | vegetable stock |
| 1/2 cup | fennel, finely chopped |
PREPARATION:
- Heat olive oil in a pot. Add carrots, potato, curry powder, cumin and salt and stir to coat. Add about 1/2 cup stock to the vegetables and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, cover and cook until the vegetables are very tender, about 15 minutes. Check occasionally and add more stock if it is drying out.
- In the meantime, steam the fennel until tender, about 10 minutes. Set aside.
- Puree soup using a blender or an immersion blender adding more liquid as required. Add reserved fennel and liquid until it reaches consistency you desire. The soup should be very thick. Heat through and serve.