When the team at Sustainable Verona told us about the people at Field Goods I jumped at the opportunity to have sustainable, locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables delivered once a week. What I loved about it was that fresh, organic fruits and vegetables ended up on my door without any additional work on my part. What I didn’t’ like about it was that on a regular basis there were items delivered with which I was unfamiliar. So, I changed my delivery to every other week and vowed to get creative with food.
As the fall moths passed to early winter I was curious to see what would arrive and how this could possibly include fresh items in the winter months.
Then the root vegetables started arriving. And kept arriving. In some cases I had to refer to the sheet with the order and Google for pictures to know what I had received. Many of these I had heard of but not ever made before. Not wanting them to go to waste, I needed some ideas; and this is when my cookbook collection paid off. While searching for something new and interesting to make for holiday parties, I found inspiration from a Roasted Vegetable Soup recipe in Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook. My aunt and cousin always have amazing recipes from Garten so I figured it was a good place to start. And it was.
The idea is very simple: Make roasted vegetables and use the leftovers in a soup. I love roasted vegetables so rarely have any left over for another use, but roasting vegetables, adding chicken stock, and pureeing into a soup was simple enough and from what I read, offered a lot of flexibility with the vegetables. Just what I needed. I had a random mix of items from the previous weeks–fingerling sweet potatoes, shallots, beets, carrots and several heads of garlic. All of these together seemed like the perfect mix for a soup.
Roasted Root Vegetable Soup
Ingredients:
5 small beets
2 medium shallots
5 fingerling sweet potatoes
4 small carrots
3 large garlic cloves
6 cups of chicken stock
What’s Next:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Peel all of the vegetables and then cut into mostly the same size pieces, but leave garlic cloves whole and set aside.
Toss vegetables in olive oil and place on a baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper.
Place garlic cloves in a piece of foil, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper and tie ends of foil up together to make a small pouch.
Bake vegetables and garlic in oven until soft, about 45 minutes.
When vegetables have cooled a bit, place a spoonful into the bowl of a food processor with about 1/2 cup of chicken stock. You may be able to add a little more stock here, but watch the liquid level in the bowl because it splatters very easily. Add pureed vegetables and broth into a large sauce pan.
Repeat the above step several times until all of the vegetables are pureed. Add any remaining broth to the saucepan and heat through. More stock may be needed for thinning- be sure the consistency is more like soup than pureed vegetables.
Serve with bacon bits and croutons or crusty bread. Or both.
Notes from my experience:
The first time I ate this I made the mistake of not including the bacon bits. I won’t make that mistake again- they would be an amazing compliment.
The soup is red, which is just what I was looking for–I didn’t want just another version of butternut squash soup.
Because of the roasted garlic, it has a strong garlic smell, but the flavor of roasted garlic is sweet so don’t be terribly worried about an overpowering garlic flavor.
