Curried Cauliflower Soup

Day 17-Yes, I did finally cook again. But first I would like to talk about our recent invite to a friend’s house for dinner. I had been admiring my friend’s pictures on Facebook of the food he has been cooking every night. The food always looks so much fancier then what I do and rightly so since it is. He uses goat cheese, shitake mushrooms and various ingredients like that. I obviously don’t. He also just throws things together, which I really wish I could do. So I mentioned that he should be writing a blog, since his food looks so much better then mine. Then I suggested that he cook for us, so I can actually try his food. This week he finally invited us over and I was not going to pass up the offer.

I won’t get the name of what he made for us exactly right, but it was along the lines of: Tri Tip Steak with Mashed Red Potatoes (there was some kind of cheese in them), Asparagus, and Shitake, Baby Bella Mushroom, Artichoke Crostini. The mushrooms and artichokes were on this bread from Wegman’s with garlic and other goodness in it. The whole meal was very good! This coming from the girl that only rarely eats beef. I don’t even know if I’ve ever had Tri Tip before. So maybe this is a beef I could actually like! The crostini was so good that I had at least 3 and these were not small. Our friend said that he is starting to write down the recipes for the meals that he makes if they are really good. He wants to open a restaurant some day and he will need to have the recipes available for that. I’ll never open a restaurant, but I sure won’t mind eating at his!

It was time for me to get cooking last night. I really wanted to try the recipe for Curried Cauliflower Soup that I had found on a blog. One, it sounds pretty healthy and two, it has curry in it and that means turmeric! (If you don’t know why I love turmeric so much please look at my post entitled “Curry Pork Sausage Couscous”) Things went pretty smoothly last night. The ingredients needing to be cut for this recipe are one apple (Golden Delicious), 1 head of cauliflower, 1 small onion, 1 clove of garlic. I wasn’t really sure how to chop the apple so I sliced it and then chopped the slices. The cauliflower took awhile since I’m not a fast chopper, but it was easy enough. No problems with the garlic and onion since I use those ingredients a lot, but I’m so tired of all the tears when I chop onions. It’s almost unbearable and then my eyes are stinging from my lotion and mascara dripping into them. Yuck.

The rest of the soup making was a breeze. That’s one of the reasons I love making soup, it’s usually fairly easy. First you heat up 2 tablespoon of olive oil, then you sauté the onions in the heated oil. Once they are soft, you add the apple, garlic, and 1 tablespoon of curry powder (this might be too much if you don’t like spicy foods, so cut that back some) and cook for 2 minutes. Then add the cauliflower and 4 cups of vegetable broth and bring that to a simmer. Once it’s simmering turn down the heat to medium-low and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes and then take it off the heat to cool for 20 minutes. Once it’s cool blend the soup in a food processor or blender and stir in 1 teaspoon of honey and 1 teaspoon of rice wine vinegar. Officially you are done after that, but I reheated the soup because Anthony wanted hot soup, not lukewarm soup.

Final Product:

My thoughts: Ah it was okay. It was nothing spectacular. Anthony said it was a boring soup. There was nothing that took it to the next level. I wouldn’t call it bland, since it was too spicy for both of us and we had to add some sour cream to it. Would I bother making it again? Probably not. Trust me I really wanted to love this since it’s healthy, but I would say there was only a mild like. I’m not sure what we could have done to this soup to make it better, but I’m not giving up on ways to add more turmeric to our diet!

Totals: 10 minutes prep, 30 minutes cooking time, 1 pot, 1 blender or food processer