Lurid Soup
Beet Soup! It’s so gorgeous that it is right up there with the Oxford Magazine Music Issue. It’s a soup that will make you do the snoopy dance all over the room. It’s absolutely fuschia (which, by the way, is soon to be the color of my office), and tastes good, and generally is just so beautiful that it will make you happy.
Now, I was a beet-a-phobe for a long time. It was those nasty pickled beet slices you’d sometimes get as a kid — the ones that leak nasty canned pickled-beet juice onto the perfectly innocent other foods on the plate. But then I discovered the wonder of roasted beets, and started making Laurie Colwin’s great beet pasta (“weird, but good”). Now I really like beets a lot, and this soup takes my beet-madness to a whole new level.
Here’s the “recipe”:
Take equal amounts beets and potatoes (I used about six smallish beets from my garden and one big potato cut into chunks) and put in a pot. Coarsley chop an onion and smash a few garlic cloves. Cover with chicken broth (or in my case, 1/2 chicken broth 1/2 water as my stock was pretty strong). Add some salt. Bring to a boil and simmer until the root vegetables are tender. Get out the immersion blender and blend to a gorgeous, dark-raspberry puree. Taste for seasoning. Serve with a big dollop of sour cream and chopped chives (some basil is also good).
