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Monday, 18 May 2009

Crécy Soup for a cooler day.





One of our favourite soups is Crécy 

It's an interesting soup.  When I serve it, many people don't know what vegetable it is.  It has a delicate flavour, not 'carroty' at all.  It pays to make a lot because people often come back for seconds.  Sometimes we've had it for tea with grated cheese melted on top.  When I was on the farm and we had a huge vegetable garden, I grew so many carrots we didn't eat them all, and some grew to be huge, strong monsters over the winter.  In they went, into the crécy, and the flavour was just as mild, sweet and hard to pin down as always.  Once, one carrot fed all five of us!

Below is how the soup recipe appears in my book.  I'll record it here because it's one of our family's favourites.  So it's here for posterity then.

Crécy
Grate about 1/2 kg (1 lb) of carrots and two large potatoes into a pan with some melted butter.  Add a couple of chopped onions and let the mixture sweat for a few minutes until the vegetables have started to 'melt'.
Then add a litre of good chicken stock, salt and freshly ground white pepper and allow to simmer slowly for about an hour.  Then pass it through a mouli or whip in an electric blender.

Serve with freshly chopped parsley or chervil.
You can also add a nice big knob of butter just before serving and swirl it around.
We especially like it with a sprinkling of freshly-popped pumpkin kernels on top and some grated sharp (tasty) cheddar cheese.

10 comments:

  1. I'm going to try that. I could do a big batch in the pressure cooker and freeze some!

    Sounds like a great way to get one of your five-a-day!

    I bet it would taste good with some wilted baby spinach in it, too!

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  2. Right, I'll give that a try then! I love recipes with resonance.

    We can't grow carrots here, the clay ground turns them into miniature mutants. Still, I'd rather have a garden to suit roses than carrots! (and I don't want to know if you can grow both;) )

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  3. The soup sounds great. Adding cheese or pumpkin kernels on top sounds excellent.

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  4. Jay - wilted spinach - yum, I'm eating NZ silverbeat these days with some melted cream cheese tossed through - it seems to take away the tinny coating you get on your teeth.

    EB, ok, I won't tell you if we can grow both ;o)

    Lakeviewer - the cheese makes it into a mini-meal, and of course it's fab with fresh home-made wholemeal bread. Which reminds me, I must make some today. (I 'cheat' and use a bread-maker these days.)

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  5. Anonymous19.5.09

    Thanks for visiting. That soup sounds delicious - I just saved the recipe to try. I posted once on butternut squash soup, also a delicious vegetable soup.

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  6. Sounds delicious - I make similar with some lentils and parsnips added.

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  7. Hello there - came to you from Dumdad and I've got to say that recipe does sound nice. It's a lot of grating though - do you think I could slice the veg with my blitzer instead?

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  8. That looks really lovely. I made a big batch of butternut squash soup today that looks rather like yours. Same ingredients too if you subsitute the squash for the carrots. Sighhhh no knob of butter though!

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  9. That sounds very tasty. I love a good soup.

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  10. Le Laquet and French Fancy! Welcome to TLVD! - lentil and parsnips - that would make it nice and substantial.

    French Fancy - I usually just chop roughly and then buzz it with my 'blitzer'.

    Debby - Pumpkin soup is fab - but this is ..er...juicier and sweeter, somehow.

    It's yum Juliet.

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