Roasted Carrot Soup with Curry and Coconut Milk

Recipe inspiration...I didn't plate mine with the coconut milk swirl and cilantro

On Friday I decided to make some soup from the Yum & Yummer cookbook.  It was pretty simple really - roast your veggies in the oven for about 45 minutes, then toss them in a pot with some spices and broth, then puree the soup either by blender or immersion blender (I don't have an immersion blender so I did it the more difficult way but it was SUPER smooth). I would say you can do this start to finish in about an hour.

Chopped veggies ready for the oven

I peeled and chopped up my carrots and sweet potato, and onion - I didn't have a clove of garlic as I don't use them - I buy the pre minced stuff in the jars, so I just skipped the garlic so it wouldn't end up being super garlicky (since a roasted clove tastes much weaker than diced up garlic).

I had to use a giant cookie sheet as it wouldn't fit on a standard one (according to the video I may have chopped my veggies a bit smaller than necessary).

the ingredients I used minus the veggies shown previously

Once the veggies were roasted, I tossed them into a big soup pot - and added the broth (I underestimated how much vegetable broth I needed and only bought one vegetable broth)...so I added two cups of beef broth which I don't think made much difference other than to a vegetarian...

Waiting for the broth to boil

I added all of the spices and brought to a boil...then took it off the heat and added the coconut milk. I had to whisk the coconut milk as it was pretty chunky...so just beware if you don't use coconut milk very often - I think if I had warmed it up a touch it would have been easier to mix back together, but whatever - it ended up just fine.

Blending about 1/3 of the soup at a time in the blender

Then came the tricky part...moving boiling hot soup into the blender.  My blender has a soup function so I just used that, but I assume any blender would work - just beware that it needs to vent while blending as its very hot...so don't put too much in the blender at once and be careful while blending to ensure it doesn't result in the lid popping off from the pressure of the steam.  

Soup transferred into a casserole dish

I moved the blended portions into a casserole dish until the last bit of chunky mixture went into the blender and I could mix it altogether again in the pot.

mmmm...fresh buns

I had made fresh buns to eat with it, which was nice, but I would have liked more texture and variety to the soup, as it is quite thick and I like to add crackers or eat a grilled cheese sandwich or something with this type of soup, but maybe a more refined person could add some croutons for some crunch or even some nice tandoori marinaded chicken would have been good to add just before serving.

Finished soup, super smooth and thick and creamy

It said it made about 8 cups...but I would say it made double that...so maybe I had way more vegetables than I should have, but based on the recipe, I used 2 lbs of carrots and a medium sweet potato and small/medium onion as the recipe called for...sooooo I'm not sure.

Link to the video for reference