Pink Soup

Pink Soup
Originally uploaded by V'ron.

This week, I made the pink soup. It's a fall treat I make every year that's basically a root vegetable soup that becomes pink because beets are among the root vegetables. This year's concoction came completely from organic roots sourced from both the South Shore and the West Allis Farmers' markets. If you only care about organic vegetables in a passing way, well, if you don't insist on organic on anything else, you want organic root vegetables: onions, potatoes, carrots. And I wish I liked radishes. Lots of people don't like my pink soup because, as pretty as it is, they can't stand beets. Well, as pretty as they are, I can't stand radishes. (I do, however, enjoy horseradish). I was at the 'Stallis Farmer's market last week, and this one organic farmer had the most beautiful radishes in a variety of colors. He emphasized that some of them weren't as harsh as regular radishes. I asked if I could buy just one though, and he would only sell as a set. Oy.

But my pink soup is based on a root vegetable soup in SallySchneider's A New Way To Cook. Following her basic lead, here's what I did:

• Went to the market and bought some fresh leeks, onions, garlic, celery root, a bunch of gorgeous parsnips, potatoes and of course, beets.
• Cut up the leeks and a few onions and sauteed them in some Wisconsin butter. (This is truly a locavore recipe).
• Peeled and cut up the celery root, two small potatoes (one red and one yellow), and the parsnips and the beets and dumped them in and sauteed a bit just to get a bit of carmelized flavor
• Dumped in about 4 cups of chicken stock (that I had in the freezer, made of course, with chicken carcasses and vegetable scraps from local sources)
• let this cook for 2 hours until the vegetables were all soft
• Grabbed my handy stick blender (as Steve Albini asks, how did people make soup before stick blenders?) and pureed it down.
• Stirred in about a cup of skim milk to lighten the color a bit.
• Garnished and plated my completed pink soup.

This came in at about 150 calories for a bowl. And I came in a pound down this week.