by P Vandegrift

Created on: December 19, 2006   Last Updated: January 02, 2012

A homemade bowl of soup on a frosty day provides a loving and healthy dose of comfort for the tummy. Soup is no longer your stereotypical portrait of watery-processed-square-potato-bits-with-chicken type of meal. Soup is cool! Soup is trendy! Soup can mend a broken heart and send the taste buds into a mouth-watering frenzy! Soup can bring world peace. If everyone on this wonderful earth were to have a bowl of soup at the same time then there would be no fighting! Ah well, was just a thought. You can throw anything into soup, almost. However be sure to choose your herbs carefully. Some herbs you 'think' will boost the flavor of the soup actually do it more harm. Be gentle and frugal. You can always add more.

* POTATO AND CARDAMOM

1 bag of potatoes
1 bottle/bag of whole cardamom
Few garlic cloves
onion

In one of those big soup stock pans, coat the bottom with a little bit of oil and stir-fry a few cloves of garlic and chopped onion until the onion is brown. Peel and cut 1 bag of potatoes into chunks and add them to the pot. Add enough water just to cover them and bring to boil. Melt 5-6 veggie stock cubes (stock cube amount is based on the size of the saucepan) in 4 cups of boiling water. Pour this mixture in to the pot. Boil until potatoes are cooked all the way through.

With one of those single blade hand blenders, puree the potatoes until totally smooth. If you do not have a hand blender then let the soup cool down and use your Cuisinart or counter-top blender. When you puree the soup you will see why it is important not to have too much water. You want a nice creamy texture.

Break open your cardamom pods to find the little black seeds. Depending again on the size of your pan add the seeds to the soup, keeping it on a low simmer and stir for a minute. These whole seeds work best (as opposed to powder) as they look good in the soup, sort of like French vanilla ice cream. After it has been simmering for 1hr, it should be ready to eat. Serve with a chunk of warm bread and butter and you will really cherish the flavor! Salt and pepper to taste. Adjust your ingredients to fit your size of soup pot.

* LEMON AND PARSNIP

This one is sometimes difficult to get the lemon amount just right. Sometimes when you taste it you can not taste the lemon straight away and then you add a little more and then 2hrs later it turns into lemonade soup! It is best to start out with just the juice of 1 lemon - again depending on the size of your soup pot you might use less.

1 bag of

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