Time for beautiful soup

I’m making a lot of soup these days, a fine way to use up all the butternut and buttercup squash from my garden. I’m cleaning heads of cauliflower, cloves of garlic, sheaves of carrots out of the produce drawer (where they’ve been lying, forgotten, since I picked them a couple weeks ago).

No matter what kind of soup I make, I seem to start with sautéed leeks, onions and garlic. Then everything else gets roasted.

Roasting seems to be the cooking method that is now in vogue with health experts — especially when you are roasting without any oil, fat or butter.

I’m a fairly heavy abuser of butter and olive oil, but even I find that a roasted root vegetable doesn’t need any help if you do it right. And by that, I mean you really need to crank the oven up to at least 375 degrees (try 425 if you feel bold and are fairly familiar with your oven).

In theory, you want to cut your root veggies up into batons that are of more or less equal size. I usually don’t; I often toss them in whole. With carrots, I often leave a little tuft of greenery up at the top, for no reason other than that it’s pretty.

Leave a little space around your parsnips, carrots, turnips, leeks (clean them well before you cook them).

And if you keep an eye on them so they don’t turn into charcoal, you’ll be rewarded with rich, sweet, flavorful root vegetables that have a caramelized taste and texture, brown and sticky and lovely.

You can eat them as is. Or, once you get bored with that, you can chop them up and make soup out of them.

For butternut squash, I usually use roasted or sautéed leeks, onions,carrots, apples and (of course) squash. Let them all simmer on the stovetop for a while in some broth. Add nutmeg, paprika, a little swipe of curry powder.

I do more or less the same thing for cauliflower soup, but I flavor it with a little cumin.

Marsden Epworth, an exceptionally good cook in addition to being the prize-winning editor of The Lakeville Journal Company’s Compass arts and entertainment section, added her root vegetables to white navy beans. She ended up throwing in a little beer and said the taste was phenomenal.

Navy beans, like white beans, are an outstanding source of folate and manganese. Together with the roasted vegetables, they create a powerhouse combination of cancer-fighting antioxidants (from the veggies) and fiber (from the veggies and the beans).
 

Navy bean soup with roasted vegetables

Dried beans slow everything down. Yes. You can boil them for a minute or two and let them sit for an hour, but an overnight soak in cold water is best.

1 pound soaked navy beans;  2 carrots, roasted along with 2 stalks of celery;  2 large onions;  1 parsnip; 1 whole garlic

When nicely browned, place vegetables in the soup pot with soaked beans, slipping the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins, cover with water or stock or half of each, add two bay leaves and simmer, covered until beans are close to tender.

Then add a bottle of beer, salt to taste (some say adding salt earlier toughens the beans. I don’t know if this is so, but like Pascal, I do it anyway), more liquid, if necessary, and 1 whole lemon, squeezed and tossed into the pot.

When the beans are tender, taste, add salt, if necessary, and pepper and process most of the beans and vegetables  (excepting the lemon and bay leaves) for a soup with plenty of body and good texture.