Caribbean Vegetable Soup Recipe

Oh. My. Gosh.
Everyone loved this. I'm not even kidding. I'm having a hard time keeping my freezer-full-of-soups anywhere near capacity. My husband, especially, just finds himself wanting to eat it by the pound.

This would be me. I always wear my butterfly apron =)

Recipe:


2 tablespoons butter
1 chopped onion - to preference
1 crushed garlic clove
2 sliced carrots
1 1/2 quarts vegetable stock
2 bay leaves (see? Always with the bay leaves)
2 sprigs of fresh thyme (almost always goes with the bay leaves..)

This is usually what my counter looks like. It's my only one, and it's limited, but it works

1 minced celery stalk
1 1/4 cups peeled and cubed white yams (po-ta-toes!)
2 green bananas, peeled and cut into 4 chunks
2 tablespoons red lentils
1 chayote, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons of optional macaroni (go whole wheat with it!)
salt and fresh black pepper
chopped scallions, to garnish

1: Melt the butter or margarine. Add the onion, garlic and carrots to fry for a few minutes. Stir occasionally until they begin to soften. Add the stock, bay leaves and thyme and let it boil.
2: Add everything else. Season it as you see fit and let it simmer for 25 minutes, or until things are at the cooked consistency you like. Serve with the garnish.

You could do that. Or you could lead my relatively hectic lifestyle and have no idea where to find chayote -- unless it's at a stupid Whole Foods store; they're stupid 'cause I don't feel like driving for 25 minutes to get to it.
Instead, you could call a fellow food science major and ask them what the heck chayote is. She, we'll call Magz the Scientist, will do what we do best: Google it. Upon doing this, we discover it's a gourd similar to other light-flavored gourds. Can't find one? It's somewhere between a cucumber squash (or something close to it; I keep wanting to say spaghetti squash but it's a lie) and, oh, honeydew melon. Sure. So we went with that.

I've mentioned the 8-people-feeding-frenzy we have weekly. It really is a bit insane. I cook. I yell at people who get in my kitchen. The longer the night goes on, the more I have to yell. The smell of nearly-done food seems to make them respond like shark do to bloody waters; eventually, every single one of them will just continually walk in circles through my kitchen, into the hall and back again.



This soup satiated the men-sharks.

These are man sharks. Don't be fooled by their present lack of movement; they eventually become troubled when hungered.
See the redheaded one? He's going to be the first to fall victim to his own stomach. I had to watch him carefully, to be sure I could complete my meal.

Thanks to Magz the Scientist, I ended up doing just what it says. Except I tripled everything. And I couldn't find green bananas, so instead I used plantains. Red lentils? What about a can of red kidney beans instead? Whole can. Why not? Chayote turned into 2 zucchini squashes and a whole honeydew melon. 2 carrots turned into half a bag of baby carrots I'd found on sale. 3 celery stalks, 4 red potatoes and a stray sweet potato later, and what was an attempt to fix a missing ingredient turned into Frankenstein-Caribbean Vegetable soup.

Frankenstein Soup

Contrast is off, but I wanted everyone to see how chunky it was =)

I also added some Caribbean spices I found at Bi-Lo some time back. Everything was put into chunks. I didn't garnish. You don't garnish DND nerds -- there's no point. It went over EXTREMELY well, and I must say it was probably the biggest hit of the semester. Is it anything like the original recipe? I'm disappointed in myself for straying, and it probably isn't like the original, but no one cares.

This is my best shot of it. The colors and everything are right; it was hard not just to eat it right then, too.