Carrot Soup

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? It gets better. It's all vegetarian and this soup has no flavor help from any additional stocks, not even vegetable stock. It's just carrots and water and a few helpful additions. I told you it was exciting...and it is!! This soup is awesome.

I looked into my vegetable drawer to find a lot of bags of carrots. I'm not even sure where they all came from. I just had a drawerful of carrots so I said to myself, "yo, that's a lot of carrots." So I decided to do something about it. And this was it.

All-Vegetarian Carrot Soup

Ingredients
6-7 large carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch diagonal rounds
1 mm slice of ginger (You can use more if you like the stuff)
5-6 shallots, diced (if not, you can use half a small onion)
1/8 (up to 1/4) tsp cinnamon, depending on taste. I like it almost at 1/4.
1 tbs brown sugar *I amended the amount of sugar*
1 bay leaf
3 cups water
3 tbs bread crumbs
2 tbs butter
1/8 cup of heavy cream

Melt the butter in a soup pot. In the melted butter, saute the shallots and the slice of ginger. Saute the shallots and ginger until the shallots are soft and slightly brown. Add the carrots and saute on medium high for about 5 minutes. Add the brown sugar and saute until the sugar starts to caramelize. When the sugar starts to caramelize (be careful not to let it burn), add the water to the pot scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen and dissolve any bits that are stuck. Add the bay leaf and the bread crumbs to the soup. Let the soup simmer for 45 minutes. When the carrots are soft, remove the ginger slice and bay leaf from the soup and puree the soup until smooth. Return the pureed soup to the pot and bring back up to a simmer. Stir in the cream and check the seasoning. Salt and pepper to taste.

Great with crackers. If you have those little goldfish crackers that'd be cute.