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I’m going to dice an onion, that’s always good.
Now I’m just going to out a little olive oil in the pot.
You’ve just heard all the virtues of olive oil.
Not even a tenth of the virtues of olive oil but a couple of them.
Oh I forgot to put pepper in the salad.
Put pepper in it too if you want,
fresh ground don’t use the stuff that you just toss in.
So cutting off the end away from the root,
I’m going to cut through it.
Peel back the skin part which you don’t need,
it’s been protecting it against all the little bugs as it grows.
We like to recommend that most of the root vegetables
that we use are produced organically because of the high pesticide residue.
Then I’m going to cut in pretty much slightly angled line
straight down to the board almost all the way through to the root end.
Now this is a beautiful big onion,
I’m going to turn this up a bit.
And again as Kathy was saying we like to do things assembly line style.
If you find that onions, particularly at this time of year,
before the new season onions are in the market,
they tend to make you cry.
So if you have that problem,
put them in the fridge 10-15 minutes before you cut them
and that will reduce the allele sulfites from escaping and making you cry.
But do not keep them in the refrigerator.
Now I’m going to cut across.
If you keep them in the refrigerator
the texture becomes sort of course and that is not very nice.
Now we don’t have to worry too much about how fantastically we cut these onions,
I might just get these into the pot.
We want it to sizzle so we’re developing a delicious carmalization,
there’s quite a lot of sugar in onions,
good sugar that gives you energy.
And this is more than a cup and a half,
but if you’ve got a big onion and you don’t have another purpose for it,
go for it and use the whole thing.
Or if you want to put it aside for something else,
at this point by all means refrigerate it-
just don’t store them in the refrigerator.
Also don’t store them near your potatoes
because one will increase the deterioration of the other.
And store them out of light in a cool area.
So there we have our fabulous onions.
So we’re just going to speed this process up
so you’re not here for all the minutes that it takes.
Normally they would sauté for 5 minutes
so let’s pretend that happened.
So now in goes the garlic.
If you chop your garlic up a little in advance,
you get more benefits from the nutrients in it.
We’ve just learned that.
Nutrition is such an evolving science,
it’s great to learn all these tips to get the very, very best out of our food.
Then after that has sautéed for 5 more minutes,
zoom zoom, in goes the celery.
Then we’ll stir that around and develop all of these delicious flavors.
This is cooking in the French style of layering
which is also very similar to the Asian style.
Then in goes our chopped fresh ginger root.
It’s wonderful for sea-sickness or cleaning out your sinuses.
It’s always available in the market, delicious.
So, zoom zoom, that all happened and through the magic of television
we have it all and you can see the volume that was just there, now look.
This is what happens when you use the increments of cooking time
that you will do when you make this at home.
It really cooks down.
Oops it went off, there it’s back on, tricky little thing.
So now we’re going to start seasoning it.
To this beautiful warm mélange of sautéed vegetables
we’re going to add some curry powder.
This is a wonderful way to slightly cook the curry powder
without too much liquid to bring out the flavor
and you get it into the vegetables,
absorbed into the vegetables.
Now we’re going to add the carrots, and this is 8 carrots.
They go in there and then that gets stirred around.
Carrots are a fabulous source of beta carotene.
Delicious, wonderful, crunchy, cooked or raw.
And to that we’re going to add our 6 cups of vegetable broth.
We like to look at the label particularly for the sodium in vegetable broth.
They can be really, really high.
This is quite a good one, Kitchen Basics,
and it is on the lower side of sodium.
You can also make your own,
that would be the best scenario entirely, making your own.
And it really doesn’t take a lot.
You could sort of devote a couple of hours a weekend
once every few months
and you can have some fabulous homemade chicken and vegetable stock.
Now I’m going to add just a quarter cup of long grain rice.
And we do choose the white rice.
This amount of rice is not going to impact the benefits from the fiber
and we really don’t want you having to wait 40 minutes for this to cook
when really the vegetables only take 20 minutes.
It acts as a thickener,
it acts as sort of a binder to keep-
instead of using wheat flour or something like that
the rice just sort of hold it all together.
Or egg yolks, which the French do, we don’t do that.
So anyway, zoom zoom, guess what happened?
Don’t you love it.
So this is all ready and I will turn it off.
Can you see that? It’s all cooked and readied.
Ready to puree.
And we want it warm, we don’t want it steaming hot.
You can use an immersion blender
which is what I’m going to do today.
You’ll get more of a country version of the soup
with a few chunks here and there.
Or you can pop it in a blender,
but do take care when blending hot liquids
because it can shoot up and burn you
and put a stain on the ceiling and God knows what else.
So I’m starting on low.
Since it didn’t explode I went on high.
This is a great tool, really worth investing.
We got this one from Gordon Foods.
This is a great tool because you don’t have to transfer it into another bowl
and then into a blender and into another thing,
back into the pot to heat it up,
it really works wonderfully for soups and sauces.
I make all my tomato sauce like that.
Like I said this is a little more on the country side.
So now in goes the wonderful creamy texture of the coconut milk.
And for people who are sensitive to soy milk
or are lactose intolerant,
this is a wonderful option.
Delicious, creamy, this is the reduced fat one.
But the fat in coconut, which is a saturated fat,
is a medium chain fat and has actually been shown to have very good health benefits,
it doesn’t cause plaque formation in your arteries.
Coconut used to get a bad rep.
Now this soup freezes magnificently.
It is vegetarian.
So now it’s nice to do a little garnish.
You could do a little swirl of,
if you want to keep it dairy free you don’t want to put the yogurt in there.
But if you didn’t want to keep it dairy free
you could put a pretty little swirl of yogurt on top.
But even just a sprinkle of cilantro
or parsley if you hate cilantro, or chives.
That's what we are going to do on the next soup.
It’s beautiful, it’s delicious, it’s quick, it freezes well.
One of our favorite things to do
is to pack soups in these types of freezable containers.
They have these at Costco now for 4 or 6 for 17 dollars
and they have snap on lids.
And these can go right from the freezer into the oven or microwave
and they’re great and hold a pretty good size serving.
So we love things like this.
What I meant to show you earlier is this is what a ginger root looks like.
You should always choose a really firm one
without wrinkles and you peel it and then chop it up
or you can use your little micro plane grater and grate it.
Any questions?
How do you peel the ginger root?
You scrape it with a little paring knife
just to get the very thin skin off of it.
Or a vegetable peeler works great.