Sep 26, 2009
Super Healthy Root Vegetable Cream Soup
Cream soup is a balsam to the palate – soothingly soft and silky, it’s usually packed with well-preserved vitamins – be it made of spinach, root vegetables or seafood. One of my favourite kinds of cream soup is sweetcorn soup with crabs. It’s sweet and very, very creamy.
But the soup we are going to talk about today is no less delicious or healthy than that made of sweetcorn. Just take that beta-carotene-loaded pumpkin and carrot, the vitamin K-packed white turnip and parsley root, kick in some vitamin C from the red paprika, finally add some iron and vitamin B6 from the potato, and potassium from the zucchini. Doesn’t this sound wonderful?
Another thing we love about root vegetable soup is that it’s very versatile ingredient-wise. You can actually use any kind of your favourite root vegetables: for example, why not try sweet potatoes in place of plain potatoes? Or experiment with the garnish: this time we served the soup with croutons, thyme and fresh chili, but it can be just as good with black olives, fresh dill, grated Parmesan, or even pine nuts.
I wouldn’t have said cream soups are very typical for Russian/Slavic cuisine, but vegetables like potatoes, white turnip, carrots and parsley definitely are very popular ingredients in Eastern European cooking.
Ingredients
5 medium-sized potatoes
1 large carrot
1 red paprika
1 small zucchini
1 white turnip
1 large parsley root
500 g pumpkin
100 g butter
Fresh thyme
1 fresh chili pepper
1 ½ cup croutons
Salt
Serves 8
Chop carrots and parsley root in circles. Chop zucchini, unpeeled, and potatoes into medium-sized pieces. Chop white turnip coarsely. Finally, chop pumpkin into large pieces and halve the paprika.
Chopping the vegetables into pieces of different sizes ensures simultaneous cooking, so you don’t need to boil each of the veggies separately.
Boil the vegetables in an amount of water just enough to cover them, seasoning with salt to your taste. Make sure you remove skin from the paprika as soon as the pepper becomes soft. Just take out the paprika, peel the skin and continue boiling it together with the other vegetables.
When the vegetables have cooked tender (the main indicator of readiness is the potatoes of course), separate vegetables from the liquid they’ve been boiling in, and blend them into a smooth, creamy paste. Stir the butter into the paste. Add the remaining liquid, making the soup as thick as you like.
Serve with warm croutons, fresh thyme and slices of chili pepper. Alternatively, use your fantasy our our suggestions above!
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Oooh that soup looks delicious and perfect for fall!
This looks so good, love root vegetables especially in the winter time. I also love the garnishes you added, yummy chillie:)
[...] for most of my foods is based on wanting to eat it, though!) Tonight I might try making the root vegetable cream soup (sprinkled with some cheese on [...]
This soup sounds and looks great. Thanks for posting the recipe
That looks amazing. I just went out and got all the ingredients to make this tonight! I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for posting this.
Thank you so much for all comments!! ^_^
Great post and great site! My great-grandparents on both sides are from Russia, but I know very little about the culture, so this will be an insightful read for me!
What a great recipe! I love your site, I followed you from the foodieblogroll and I’d love to guide our readers to your site if you won’t mind.Just add your choice of foodista widget to this post and it’s all set, Thanks!
Jada, really? How interesting! Thank you for your comment, I hope we’ll stay in touch and share our favourite recipes!
Alisa, thank you! I really like Foodista, just didn’t have enough time to explore all of the possibilities yet. I’ve just added a “Baking” widget to the right sidebar!
[...] pleasantly salty and buttery Cheese&Rosemary Halfmoons are perfect to serve with root vegetable soup. They are made with a semi-soft to firm sort of cheese with a mild flavour – something like [...]
Hi there! Love the blog, and can hardly wait to explore it more. I am so happy to see others enjoying Slavic food. I am of Slovak decent living in the US, and just started a blog on translating my grandmother’s Slovak recipes from an 80 year old handwritten cookbook into English, along with telling some family stories.
Tonya
Tonya, your project is incredible! I’m subscribing :) Really, it’s unique and it was a great idea to post all those old photographs! Thank you for stopping by and letting us know about your blog!
what does 500 g pumpkin mean? (in recipe)