Category: holiday

Our Thanksgiving meal this year featured much food from the family garden: sweet potatoes, potatoes, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, rosemary. Let’s not forget the pickled eggs, courtesy of mom’s chickens.

As an experiment I am concocting a new dish for Christmas Eve dinner with my family. Because we have church services at 7 p.m., the plan was to keep it simple and make some sort of a soup. As I was deciding what ingredients to include, I noticed that, quite by accident, the colors of my vegetables were traditional Christmas colors. I immediately decided to limit my color palette to these colors. Can you identify my ingredients?

My red ingredient is sweet red bell pepper. Green veggies include broccoli, brussels sprouts, and the white colors come from cauliflower, leek, fennel, and garlic. These are all tossed together with olive oil, herbs de provence, and salt and pepper, and then roasted in the oven for one hour at 350 degrees. (Next time, however, I will roast until the pepper skins are crackled–for easier removal.) Below you can see the oven-roasted vegetables.

I could have just used the food processor to chop everything, but I decided to do things as slowly as possible–very uncharacteristic of me–so I hand chopped the veggies and then put them in the food processor.

I added four containers of homemade turkey broth, which I had frozen in margarine containers–they hold about one cup.

Below is the pot of soup so far. I plan to set this outside in the garage overnight. Then I will continue “building” the soup. I’ve read that layering the ingredients in several steps creates a much more complex flavor. I am hoping that these subtleties will be . . . not so subtle!

Here is my dilemma: what else to add to this recipe? I am planning for this to be a cream soup, so I will be adding that, as well as some cheese. What kind of cheese? Well, in keeping with the color scheme, it needs to be white. I have parmesan and gruyere. But it seems to me that these flavors might conflict with those of the oven-roasted olive oil base.

Another consideration is thickening. Of course, the veggies themselves will provide that function, as I have pureed them. Since there will be cream, I’m going to make a little roux out of butter and flour to assist in the thickening–or maybe not.

Also, I am tempted to add in some roasted turkey that I have in the freezer, but Colin says no. Hmmmmmm. He must have watched the same FoodTV show that I did regarding the warning that too many ingredients make the soup’s flavors . . . “murky.”