Good Soup to Start the Week

When it's Sunday and cold, I'm probably making soup or chili. Today I made a tasty, healthy soup to start the week on a good note. It's Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Soup. I worked from a recipe at Peas & Crayons, click here to see it. I used two sweet potatoes and about 3/4 of a head of cauliflower. I chopped up the potatoes and cauliflower, sliced half an onion, and put them in the oven at 400 degrees for approximately 20 minutes. All you need for that is olive oil and spices. I had cauliflower and onions on one pan and sweet potatoes on another. The cauliflower and onions cooked faster, so I put them in the crockpot with 32 ounces of chicken broth and added the sweet potatoes a few minutes later. The recipe calls for vegetable broth, but I like chicken broth better. I used to always buy low sodium chicken broth but found myself adding a ton of salt for flavor. Now I just buy regular chicken broth and barely need to add salt. I added diced scallions to the mix, a few splashes of hot sauce, and that was pretty much game on. After only an hour of the crockpot being on high, I was surprised at how much flavor I already achieved. I thought of stopping right there because the potatoes and cauliflower were softened and I liked the taste of the broth. The recipe calls for then using an immersion blender but I don't roll with an immersion blender. Plus, I wanted to preserve the nice chucks of sweet potatoes and pieces of cauliflower. So I skipped the blender part. The recipe calls for adding cream cheese and milk but I used some half and half instead. I didn't measure it, just added enough to cream it up. I let it cook for another thirty minutes or so. It obviously sweetened the soup up, perhaps too much. I think I liked it better before I added the half and half. Don't get me wrong, the soup was good, very good, but I lost some of the wonderful salty chicken broth taste. I added a little more hot sauce. The recipe says to cook the soup for 4-5 hours, but I was all done in a total of two hours, including the 20 minutes of vegetables roasting in the oven. I put out oyster crackers and shredded cheddar cheese for add ins. This soup went over well in the Schoepflin household. Everyone but my 6-year-old liked it. Fine, little man, sit over there with your soupless lunch eating chicken nuggets, do what you have to do. Lol. My bottom line is this is a delicious soup -- you've caught my drift by now that half and half or other milky-creamy substances are optional. I think I might try this recipe sometime with curry powder. My life is an adventure and my memoir will have a lot to say about soup, so there you have it. One last thing: there is enough leftover soup for another meal. A lovely, nutritious, inexpensive soup, enough for two meals. Loving life, I am.