Healing Carrot Soup

For our second post during Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’ve noted a series of time saving techniques to make your recovery easier.

Use a food processor at the beginning and let the dishwasher do the rest:

If you don’t feel like chopping and sautéing your vegetables first, use a food processor to roughly chop all the vegetable base ingredients – onion, celery, garlic and ginger before putting into your slow cooker. Add the remaining ingredients straight to the pot.

Make a big batch:

Prepare and cook a good quantity to freeze for days when you don’t feel like cooking.

Add vitality, nutrients and freshness:

Just before serving add a handful of chopped parsley or other herbs.

Invest in an immersion stick blender:

Easy to wash and store, an immersion blender quickly turns any chunky soup into a velvety smooth fusion.

The second soup recipe in our series this month series is a sweet and gingery carrot soup. Carrots are the richest source of carotenes which not only makes them orange, but more importantly these compounds help protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer. While they won’t help you see in the dark, the vitamin A content is vital for healthy eye function. Ginger is a useful botanical with numerous therapeutic properties from nausea relief to intestinal calm. It also gives this soup an aromatic and zesty Asian kick.

Ingredients
2 tbsp light olive oil
1 cup/1 large onion, chopped
1 cup/2 sticks celery, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp/2” piece ginger, minced
1 ½ lbs carrots peeled and diced
2 tbsp coriander powder
5 cups chicken or vegetable broth

Heat the oil in a skillet and gently fry the onions, celery, garlic and ginger and carrots for 3 minutes to release some of the sugars.

Transfer to your slow cooker and stir in the coriander powder and the chicken broth.

Cover and cook on low for 6 hours or high for 3.

When the soup is cooked, puree in situ using an immersion stick blender.

We understand tastes vary so to add extra vitamin C at the end, stir in a handful of chopped parsley. To make it creamier, spoon in ½ cup sour cream.

Zen Toolkit

When freezing soups or any liquids for that matter, once sealed in a ziploc bag lay the bag flat on a freezer shelf to ensure an even thickness. This will make defrosting easier and optimize freezer space.

Zen Moment

“Time is a gift, use it well”

– Doug Barnhart