Creamy Vegetable Soup

I was originally going to post this recipe yesterday, but I ran into a bit of a problem. And got four plus hours sucked out of my life that I will never get back.

I take all the pictures for my blog (and Instagram) with my iPhone.  But I can’t publish from my phone, so for that I need my iPad and/or my computer.  Yesterday, my iPhone and my iPad stopped speaking to each other. (They both stopped speaking to my computer last September).

I don’t really know what happened.  Was it over money?  A menage a trois gone wrong? Maybe it was over screen time or data usage?  Whatever it was, it was bad.  They all collectively refused to share photos, and no amount of rebooting, troubleshooting, and just plain cussing could make them go back to playing nicely with each other.

Finally, I had to throw in the towel and call Apple.  The first woman tried to talk me into updating my phone, but I explained that the last time I did that, my phone did not react well and took revenge on me.  “Oh, you want to find someone in your contacts list?  Good luck with that.  I just changed a few people’s names…and some of them I renamed with only a single initial. Mwhahahahaha.”  “Oh yeah, and BTW, your emails are all messed up too.  We lumped a bunch of them together so you can’t even find the original in the chain.”

She tried this and that, told me to click the first thing, the third thing and the last thing, put me on hold sixteen times, and finally called her supervisor.

The supervisor tried that and this, told me to click on the last thing, the third thing  and the first thing, put me on hold seventeen times, and finally told me that I had to, simply had to update my phone.  Grrrrrrrrr.

So after crossing my fingers, toes, arms, legs, chanting, smudging the house with sage, sprinkling holy water on all three of my devices and considering calling a psychiatrist for my eventual, but guaranteed breakdown when everything got messed up again, I updated my phone.

An hour later, I got a call from Apple checking to see if it worked (not that there was anything more they could do, they just wanted to know out of morbid curiosity).  And the answer?  Sort of.

Apparently, the phone and iPad are on speaking terms again, but only as much as absolutely necessary.  My phone has flatly refused to accept several thousand photos from the cloud, that it chose at random…not the latest, not the oldest, but rather a random sample.

And the computer?  They did everything they could, but there was no hope for it.  RIP my friend.

Ingredients:

• 4-5 carrots (2 cups roughly chopped)
• 2 onions (3 cups roughly chopped)
• 2 heads of garlic, smashed
• 2 stalks of celery (sliced)
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 3-4 sprigs of thyme (about 1/2 of a pack)
• 3 sprigs of rosemary
• 2 bay leaves
• 8 cups of water
• 8 cups of whatever vegetable or vegetables you’d like.  I use a frozen mix of carrots, broccoli and cauliflower)

Directions:

1.  Heat 1 Tablespoon of olive oil in a large pot over medium low heat. Add the carrots, onions, celery, garlic and salt and stir to combine.  You want the vegetables to be chopped into smallish pieces, but you don’t have to worry about them all being the exact same size.  To smash garlic cloves, separate the cloves and, one at a time, place them on the cutting board.  Put the flat side of your knife on top and give it a good whack (I make a fist and bang the pinky side of it down on the knife).  The garlic clove will be smashed and the paper will peel off easily.  Put the lid on the pot and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until the bottom of the pot has some brown on it.  Make sure you don’t have the heat too high or the veggies will burn.
2. Add the thyme, rosemary and bay leaves (or whatever spices you like), along with the water and vegetable(s) of your choice. It can be a single veggie like asparagus, or broccoli, or a mix.  I use a frozen bag of mixed veggies that I defrost, but don’t cook before putting them into the soup.  Put the lid back on and let the broth simmer for about an hour and a half till you have a rich broth and fully cooked veggies. Don’t be tempted to speed up the process and boil it, the veggies will get all soggy and droopy and the broth will be weak and reduced.
3. Carefully pick out the bay leaves and stems from the sprigs of thyme and rosemary (you don’t need to fish out the actual pieces of thyme and rosemary, just the stems.  Using an immersion blender, a blender or a processor (you will need to work in batches if you are using a blender or processor), puree until the soup reaches the desired consistency.  With 8 cups of water, the soup will be creamy but not thick.  If you’d like to make a thicker soup, reduce the water by a cup or you can add some silken tofu (start with 1/4 of a cup and work up to desired consistency) when you puree it.  Alternatively, you could add some white beans, but they will change the flavor a bit.

Enjoy!