Beetroot Soup with Coconut Milk

         

     

         Last year after vocation spent in Moscow I eventually brought my blender here, to India. Immediately I developed a mania to blend all possible and impossible things and, as you may guess, creamed soups were often on a menu in our house. It was then that I remembered about a beetroot soup I’d once tried to make a year before during the Lent (I got the recipe from a website featuring vegan food). I was impressed by the flavors and an interesting, really unusual combination of beets and coconut milk but chunky vegetables in the stew made it more like “I’ll probably (rather than certainly) make it again” type of a dish. But since I had eventually got that necessary piece of equipment in my Kolkata kitchen, I decided to give the soup another try and to blend it! And oh….that was a vivid (bright-pinkish) example of how a texture can change the whole dish!

So, go ahead – indulge! Even if the whole place will look like a Barbie house (with funny pink slashes on the tables/stove/sink/wall) you won’t regret it – the soup is really worth it!

Ingredients:

1 big beetroot, roasted in the oven and peeled

1 medium potato, peeled and cut into 2 cm cubes

1 small onion, chopped

1 glove of garlic, chopped

5 cm piece of celery, chopped

5 cm piece of leek, chopped

5 cm piece of carrot, chopped

2 cm piece of ginger, grated

2 medium tomatoes, skinless and seedless, chopped

1 cup of coconut milk

2 tbsp sweet corn kernels

salt and pepper to taste

a few coriander springs

Method:

1.      Bring 1 cup of water to boil and cook potato till almost done (this will take around 10 minutes).

2.      Heat some vegetable oil in a pan and briefly sauté ginger and garlic, add onion, celery, carrot and leek and continue to stir-fry for a few minutes. Add some salt at this point (to draw the moisture out of the vegetables and help them cook in their own juices). Stir in tomatoes and season with black pepper. 

3.      Add potatoes with the cooking liquid to the pan, put a lid on and simmer over a low heat for 7-10 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Remove from heat and let it cool.

4.      Blend the pieces of beetroot together with the vegetable mixture until smooth. Return to the pan and add coconut milk, stirring continuously over a low heat. Adjust the seasoning and heat to the desired temperature.

5.      Cook some sweet corn kernels (if they are fresh) or defrost the frozen one. Ladle the soup among the plates and put the corn in the center. Garnish with coriander leaves.

Notes:

1.            To peel tomatoes, cut a shallow X on the bottoms, put them into boiling water for 30 sec, then chunk into a bowl of iced water – it will loosen the skin and make it very easy to remove the skin.

2.            The original recipe called for 2/1 ratio of water in coconut milk in the soup, but since my husband doesn’t like his soups to be too thin (and I’m not an advocate of diluting great flavors, either) I always make it 1/1. Even if I find the final result to be a bit thick, I add more coconut milk to the dish.

3.            If you don’t have time to roast your beetroot, grate it finely and stew it with the vegetables.