Monday, September 9, 2013

Roasted Cauliflower, Garlic and Bush Dust Soup

Eek, I can't quite believe that it's been over a year since I posted here.... Hmm, I have been eating soup though of course, just not blogging about it. Naturally I've been making my Hall of Fame recipes, they're never far from my mind, or my lips, and I have tried quite a few new soups, not all of them noteworthy, and I don't see all that much point to blogging soups that I wouldn't remake myself.

I'm pretty proud of this soup though as it's an original creation. And it's super easy, and delicious! I started off intending to use this recipe for Creamy Cauliflower and Roasted Onion Soup from a lovely new Australian blog Lushloves, but I do love fiddling with soup recipes, and tonight I fiddled enough to create a new soup.

I've been eating well this year, losing weight, and estimate that I've now eaten my body weight in cauliflower- and I'm still not tired of it! I've been roasting quite a lot of cauliflower too so it made sense to roast it here.

I forgot to photograph the soup
but I'm sure you can visualize whizzed up cauliflower

Roasted Cauliflower, Garlic and Bush Dust Soup

1 cauliflower
2 brown onions, chopped in segments
Olive oil
1 head garlic, unpeeled, wrapped in foil
5 cups vegetable stock
1/2 cup skim milk powder
2 tsp Tasmanian Bush Dust/or other spice blend that you like

Chop cauliflower and onions, put into two roasting pans, drizzle with olive oil.

Roast cauliflower, onions and garlic in a medium oven until done (I always lose track of time while doing this, but it's quite a forgiving process).

Squeeze garlic cloves from the head of garlic. Make a paste from the skim milk powder and some of the vegetable stock. Place all cooked vegetables into blender, add stock, milk paste and spice. Blitz until smooth.

Heat soup, and enjoy with some tasty toasted rye bread and butter.

Notes
I used Tasmanian Bush Dust as the seasoning tonight because I found an unopened jaw lurking in the pantry. I don't remember buying it but suspect that I bought it on a trip to Tasmania last year. Bush Dust is a delicious mix of macadamia nuts, Tasmanian native pepper, bush tomatoes, herbs and spices. You could substitute many other spices or spice blends that you have on hand. Cumin. Ras al hanout. Garam masala. A curry blend. They would all work really well.


The 5 cups of stock wasn't quite enough, my soup is really too thick (can that actually happen? I never really thought so until now), but I've been diluting it somewhat to eat it.