I spent all day Sunday making soup. Partly because I was just in the mood to make soup and partly because, well, I do have a lot of vegetables around the house. I made celeriac potato soup, pumpkin soup, and roasted beet soup.

I started the day off with the celeriac potato soup. One book had suggested that celeriac should be peeled with a pairing knife, but I peeled the celeriac with my favorite vegetable peeler and that worked quite well for me. The potatoes I had were on the small side, which made for a lot of peeling. I lightly sauteed a diced onion for a few minutes, then added the celeriac and sauteed for a few minutes more. Then I added the potato chunks, about 6 cups of water and seasoned with salt and pepper. When the potatoes and celeriac were tender, I blended everything together with my trusty stick blender.

Since my large Le Creuset was busy with the celeriac potato soup, I decided to make the pumpkin soup in the pressure cooker. First step – peeling the pumpkins.

Once the pumpkins were peeled and gutted, I cut the pumpkin up into 3/4 inch cubes and roughly diced an onion. I sauteed the onion in the pressure cooker and added the pumpkin after a few minutes. I added water until the 2/3 mark in my cooker and closed the lid. I brought it up to high pressure and cooked for about 10 minutes, followed by a natural pressure release. Once the mix had cooled, I blended it up with the stick blender and seasoned with salt and pepper. This time I left out the dairy because I was planning to freeze the soup.

The last soup I made was the roasted beet soup, adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. While it was the last soup to hit the stove, it was actually started first because the first thing I did in the morning was peel the beets (messy, but fun) and roast them with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Once the beets were roasted, they hung out on the counter until I was ready to make the soup.

If memory serves me, the soup started with sauteed onions as most good soups do. In the meantime, I was busy as a bee chopping up the roasted beets in to small pieces. I added the chopped beets to the pan after cooking the onions for about 15 minutes and then followed with water. The directions had the soup cooking for a half an hour or so, but I found that it took much longer to get it to a consistency that I liked.

At the end of the day I packed all of the soup into plastic containers for the freezer. The freezer is full. It does not want me to put any more soup in it. I will probably keep trying my hand at freezer tetris. Courtney thinks I need to re-brand my freezer to give it a more enticing name, so I think I will call it ‘A Showcase of Seasonal Delights’.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under food, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.