It is no secret I have been caught in the gaze of soup this season. Even though LA is not his with snow storms and it’s often warm enough to go outside without a jacket, I still caught the soup bug. Lately I’ve been all about creamy vegetable soups, and using my Immersion Blender whenever possible.
I recently ordered a soup cookbook, that’s taking it’s sweet time getting to me. In the meantime, I’ve just been looking on the internet. It’s difficult for me to trust recipes I find online because I always want it to be perfect the first time around. I find myself looking to chefs from the Food Network, even though I know most of those recipes don’t come from them. From my experiences working in Reality TV, I know other people are cooking up these recipes (yeah, I just made that pun). But even so, I’m probably always going to trust Emeril. The guy says ‘Bam!’ all the time. How can you go wrong?
So after the mind blowing Asparagus Soup recipes of his, I decided to go back for my next endeavor. I give you: Roasted Garlic Soup.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this soup. I LOVE garlic. So this was kind of a no brainer for me to try, but I didn’t realize how amazing such a simple soup could be.
Tanning.
I put a link to the recipe if you want exact measurements. To begin, I roasted 5 heads of garlic. Not only do I have a huge soft spot for roasted garlic, but I think the smell that fills my kitchen is fantastic. It’s not that stinky, I’m stuck inside someone’s mouth of bad breath smell. It’s just clean, roasting garlic. Mmm.
Salty goodness.
I let those puppies go for about an hour while I started chopping my vegetables. When those were ready to go, I moved on to the pancetta. I need to stop here for a dramatic pause. Pancetta. In soup. !!!!
Thyme
Parsley
I love adding a hint of meaty saltiness to straight up vegetable soups like this. It really adds a whole other level of flavor. So I happily cut these beauties into small squares and threw them in a pot where I had melted the butter. I let those simmer for a bit before adding my vegetables and herbs. A lot of these steps started happening rather quickly, so pictures didn’t happen as often as I liked.
Garlic Paste.
While all of that was going on, I was letting my garlic cool. Like the risky wannabe chef that I am, I went for it before they were cooled completely and could be seen hopping around my kitchen in pain from time to time.
But garlic was calling and I couldn’t say no. The tips had been cut off for the roasting, so I was able to squeeze out all the roasted goodness. It was a very simple and wonderfully stinky process. I stirred them all together and added to my vegetable mixture on the stove.
I added some white wine, let that boil off for a minute, then threw in the chicken stock. That simmered for half an hour. This recipe has you adding cubes of bread to thicken.
Cubes of bread in soup!
I’d never even considered that before and was
super excited by the idea. I heart bread. I threw in my cubes. Then I got to blend! Ah, my favorite part. By the time I was done, my kitchen was smelling fantastic and my soup was like velvet.
Power Tool!
I added the cream (which I replaced with half and half), and the remaining ingredients and let that simmer for a couple minutes.
I’m going to admit that part of me chose to make this soup because I wanted to eat healthy for the week. Emeril tells you to make Goat Cheese toast with this, and OF COURSE I did. A good friend had bought my some Italian Bread from Bay Cities for my birthday. Everyone from LA will immediately salivate when they read that. For those of you who do not know, Bay Cities is the best Italian Market and Sandwich place in LA. Awesome. I used this bread for the cubes in the soup, but saved a few slices to toast in the oven with some Olive Oil. Then I spread the Goat Cheese on and let them broil to toast the tops. Excellent addition to this soup!
I had decided that I was going to stretch the soup and eat it as a side all week. For my main course I would have Broiled Portabella Mushrooms. This is a recipe my family kind of threw together when we were all dieting back in the day. We would ‘detox’ from time to time, which meant only eating raw fruits and vegetables for a week. When that hell was over, we moved on to grilled fruits and vegetables, and so on. By the second week, the idea of grilled vegetables was as excitable as steak is to me now. So I tweaked this recipe a bit.
I bought a large Portabella Mushroom, cleaned it and put it on a baking tray, drizzling with Olive Oil, salt and pepper. I cut a few slices of tomato and added them to the tray as well. I broiled those for about 10- 15 minutes
on 350. When they were done I assembled my dish. Fresh Basil was cleaned and put on top of the mushroom (cap down of course). Then the tomatoes, followed by crumbles of goat cheese. I put all of that back in the oven to broil for another 5- 10 minutes.
Upon completion, I drizzled aged Balsamic Vinegar over the whole thing.
This was an excellent addition to the soup, as they were all very basic and fresh notes mixing together.
Roaring Tiger 
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