The Soup That Passeth Understanding

Ok, now I'm really getting a swelled head about my cooking. Jenny calling my salmon "life-changing" earlier this week, and another success tonight.

Lately I've been craving the soups I used to eat when I was doing my MA at the University of Limerick. Every week, the choices were fairly predictable: two or three days of vegetable soup, one of either carrot-coriander or carrot-ginger, and then usually potato-leek. The soup was the one reliable menu item, and the best value, as it came with a couple of pieces of brown bread, all for something like 2 pounds, or 3 Euro (this was the year of the Euro changeover). Along with a cup of "machine coffee" (basically an Americano--saying just "coffee" produced a murky swill that had been sitting on the burner since the cafe opened at 9am) or tea, this was my classmates' and my staple food...except on the days when we all went to the sports bar and got tanked before going back to class, but that's another story altogether....

Anyway, I'd been thinking about carrot-coriander soup, which is something we don't get here in the States at all, as far as I have ever seen. So I dug up this recipe from the BBC website, and it was gorgeous. I added a regular potato and a sweet potato to give it more body, especially since I didn't measure the vegetable stock (homemade last week from leftover bits of celery & carrot, plus an onion). To part of it I added a little bit of milk--perhaps half a cup--but left Jenny's part vegan.

'Twas a grand success altogether, and we had it with nice bread and a gorgeous Belgian beer (Tripel Karmeliet) our delightful dinner guest brought along. To finish off, we had bananas fried in butter & a little bit of sugar, with ice cream on top. Mmmmmm.