Guest Post: Maple Parsnip Soup

I could think of nobody more suited to guest post about a parsnip dish than my husband. He's a charming fellow, with his own angle on the world. I think we'll enjoy!

And so there we were, my horrorshow starries, an evening after a large lunch that stuffed us well into the evening. Good thing, too, because I'm rather slow at chopping things, and turned a 15-minute chopping job into a 45-minute one.

5 parsnips, sliced and chopped again: check.
2 garlic cloves minced: check.

2 onions chopped... well, obviously, I eventually managed it. I don't know if it was my slow chopping technique or they were simply oni-yons (鬼 四, demon four), but it was emanating strongly enough into the other room that my wife and brother-in-law's eyes started hurting, too.

Finally, when I got that done, I put 3tbsp butter into this giant pot of ours, and started it melting/browning. Before it burned, I put the chopped ingredients in, let the onions cook until translucent, and then poured in our 1.5L of chicken broth. On a side note, one hand-sized bottle of Dr. Pepper is 500mL. Not that I used one for measuring.

Cooking for 40 minutes left me time to discover wormux, xscorched, and lostlabyrinth, and download them. I got to start playing wormux, which isn't quite as sleek in actual gameplay as the commercial Worms games I've played, but at least it's got a decent menu interface, plays nice in a window (doesn't screw up your video or freeze when you try to switch away), and it's got at least the basic gameplay there. And it's free, so if you want to play it with friends at a LAN, you can do it without stealing.

I also set up my first Windows virtual machine using QEMU/KVM rather than VirtualBox. I want to know how to do it in as many formats as possible. Maybe I'll set up a miniature domain one of these times.

That took longer than expected, but I was reminded by the timer I set, so that's fine. I went back, took it off the heat, and added a cup of milk (subsituted for a half cup of evaporated milk). Then I proceeded to... look at the instructions and re-read the next section. I wasn't sure I was reading it right - blend it? Yup, blend it. So there I go and blend it, as much as I could reasonably fit into the blender/food processor at a time. Then stir in 1/3 cup of maple-y syrup and garnish with cashews (geseundheit). The recipe suggested pine nuts, but any nuts should do. Maybe not coconuts, though. That might have to be an experiment.

Quite tasty already, it didn't need the recommended salt, but I'm a salt junkie and still put some in. The sweet-but-earthy taste of that prince of root vegetables, the parsnip, was not lost. In the future, if I were to do this again, I would a) try to get better at chopping more quickly, and b) try leaving 1/3 of the soup unblended.

All in all, a nice experience and a tasty soup!

For your listening pleasure: Amy Beach- Dreaming