Bringing out the flavor: roasted vegetable soups

As the weather is cooling down - and it IS cooler this year than it was last year (so much for global warming!), my mind turns to dishes with deeper, richer flavors. At the same time, many of the items that are an essential part of my summer kitchen are gone. I looked in vain this weekend for a leaf of pesto, and it was no easy task to get some thyme. (Nevia bailed me out). As the list of available ingredients shrinks, the task of a cook is to be somewhat creative, and think of new ways to work with what is , essentially, a limited color palette of flavors.

That's a"BLOCK THAT METAPHOR" if there ever were one, isn't it? Sorry. It's Monday, I'm sort of exhausted, and I'm just doing the best I can to set this one up.

OK, so let me get to the food. In cold weather, I cook a lot of soups. Some are improvised and take minutes. Others take a bit longer. This one is somewhere in between, and it really serves as a model for a whole variety of soups you can make.

My friend Chuck made me a soup of roasted root vegetables a couple of years ago that I still remember. There must have been about six different veggies in that wonderful puree. And I was thinking about that as I made this soup, which appeared in Gourmet magazine.

Fennel, as faithful readers will know, is one of my favorite things in the world. When we were kids, and Nana was making thanksgiving dinner, my favorite part was at the end, when she would pull out slices of fennel, with olive oil and salt, and we'd just crunch away. I later found out that this was (and may still be), a traditional part of southern Italian festival eating. I think they call it pizzimonio or something like that, and occasionally you'll have it offered to you in a really
traditional, southern Italian restaurant . These days, I use it in salad, I make it in a dish with cheese and butter (and I wrote about that one), and now, in this delicious soup.

When you roast vegetables, in fact when you roast anything, you are essentially making caramel. All that browning you see on a piece of a roast, or a vegetable, etc, is the natural sugars in the product, reacting as you heat them, to the point where they carmelize. So when you roast vegetables, they are going to taste sweeter. You need to keep this in mind when y ou're adjusting your seasonings for the end product.

OK, here we go. You need a large onion, peeled and quartered. You also need 3-4 cloves of garlic, a pound of carrots (that's usually one large bunch), and either one very large fennel bulb, all the fronds removed, or two smaller ones, treated the same way.

Cut the carrots into large chunks, say three or four per carrot, and then slice the fennel bulbs lengthwise, about a quarter to a third of an inch thick. Take all of those vegetables, and toss them in a bowl with five tablespoons of olive oil, and a scant tablespoon of salt. Get your hands in there and work the oil all over everything. Then dump it all out on a baking sheet, and put it in an oven that's been preheated to 450 - 475 if you feel comfortable going that high. Make sure everything is spread out on the pan so that everything gets good contact with the baking sheet.

You're going to roast these vegetables for a half hour. Every ten minutes or so, I suggest going in and stirring them, and perhaps flipping the fennel so that the top becomes the bottom, (NOW NOW, BOYS), and everything gets sort of soft.

You'll have some pieces that are fairly charred, some that aren't charred at all, and of course, some in between. Now, what the recipe TELLS you to do is to puree half the vegetables with chicken stock, and half of them with water, then to combine them and adjust the seasonings with salt and fennel seed.

If you're a vegetarian, don't use the chicken stock. What you should then do is kick up the seasonings, perhaps with some additional olive oil, or some crispy vegetables or something like that. OR - as I did this weekend - make a pesto. I dressed up each bowl of the soup with a big spoon of the sage pesto I talked about a few entries ago.

You can eat this soup cold. If you do, the taste of the fennel will be very pronounced. That's fine with me, but if it's not to your liking, then you'll either want to heat it, or perhaps modify the flavor by blending in a cup or so of milk or buttermilk, or even a good quality yogurt.

This is the kind of recipe that, of course, admits to many variations. If you're eating seasonally, you're going to be eating a LOT of root vegetables in the near future. My own vegetable crisper is crammed with turnips, because I used the greens for another purpose this weekend, and I'm thinking of what might go with turnips in a soup. I'm leaning toward chestnuts. If anyone has any ideas, bring em on, but keep in mind that the turnips are going to be at the center of this. I'll let you know how it turns out.