food blog: Carrot raisin salad SOUP

so the wife was at work today, and I was left home, unsupervised. while digging through the refrigerator to come up with something to make for dinner, i noticed a 1 pound bag of carrots in the crisper. they were still firm, but it didn't take a nuclear scientist to figure out they were almost past their prime.
hmmmmmm. carrot and raisin salad. di likes that, i like that, why not? well, i'll tell you why not. i didn't have a can of pineapple in the pantry, and i was not leaving the house today just to gather ingredients for a salad.
so, what's a nuke to do? let's see, di loves butternut squash soup, and kale soup, and BHD's celery and stilton soup and broccoli and cheese soup, and baked potato soup, and lentil soup, and black bean soup... get the pattern here? by the way, all of these recipes are either linked, or can be found on my recipe page
well, what the hell. so i couldn't make carrot raisin salad, but i COULD make a great carrot soup with most of the ingredients found in the salad.
Ingredients:

• 1 pound of carrots, peeled and cut into approximately 1/2 to 3/4 inch chunks
• 1/2 white onion, roughly chopped (leftover from the crisper drawer, more is always ok
• 4 cloves garlic, smashed and roughly chopped
• 1 apple peeled, cored, and roughly chopped (i used a gala apple, because that's what is in the fruit bowl. a granny smith would have been awesome too)
• 2 stalks of celery, peeled with a veggie peeler to get rid of the strings and cut into about 1 inch pieces... peeling celery is a trick i learned from watching Jacques Pepin cook with Julia Child on PBS over the years
• 1 cup white wine (i used Fetzer's Gewurztraminer because it is really sweet, like raisins)
• 2 14.5 oz cans of low sodium chicken broth, and 1 can of water
• 1 palm full of oregano (probably around a tablespoon or so)
• about a teaspoon of dried basil
• a couple of shakes of coriander
• salt and ground pepper to taste
• olive oil, enough to lightly cover the bottom of the pot

so, mister wizard, how do you make this soup?
first, heat the olive oil in the pot over medium heat until it is almost smoking. toss in the carrots, celery, and onion. add a couple of pinches of salt and a few twists of coarsely ground black pepper. sweat until the onion starts to turn translucent, between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on how attentive you are. i went almost 10. then add the garlic. continue sweating the veggies until you can smell the garlic, which will only take a minute or two.
then add the stock, wine, and water, enough to cover the veggies. bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. add the herbs and apple when you turn down the heat. i used herbs to make the soup savory, otherwise i'm thinking it would be too sweet for a dinner soup. let this simmer for 20 or 30 minutes, until the carrots are nice and soft.
remove from the stove and puree with an immersion blender, or allow it to cool a bit, and run it through a regular blender.
put it back on the stove to reheat if necessary, and then EAT!
pretty tasty. i thought the basil was a bit much, Di disagrees.
so there you have it. a carrot soup inspired by carrot, raisin, and apple salad. i probably wouldn't have made this if we'd had crushed pineapple in the pantry. lucky for me that we didn't.
we WILL be having this again

as always, if you try this recipe, or it inspires you to try something different, please let me know how it turned out. i'm always looking for fresh and clever ideas to improve my own cooking skills and recipes.

for a complete list of my online recipes, follow the link here