Homemade Friday: Carrot Stew*

Well, not really Carrot Stew.  More like ‘Let me find whatever leftover vegetables are laying around, heavy on the broccoli and cauliflower, cook them in a pot of water then use an immersion blender to make it soupy’ stew.  Or soup, I guess.

But in our house we refer to it as Carrot Stew because of Tawny Scrawny Lion.  If you don’t know the story, Tawny Scrawny chases lots and lots of animals and even though he catches everything he goes after he’s still too skinny and is always hungry.  One day a bunch of animals send a rabbit to ‘talk things over’ with the lion.  Rabbit invites lion over for dinner, and when lion learns that the rabbit has nine brothers and sisters at home he decides that instead of eating the one rabbit, he would hold out until he gets to all the other rabbits.  But by then he’s too tired to chase the bouncing rabbits and just eats the delicious carrot stew and becomes ‘Fat as butter, sleek as satin, and jolly as all get out.’  A reformed serial murderer, if you will.  Except of course for all the fish that are put into the stew, but no matter.  I don’t think fish count as real animals in this story.

So Sebastian has been asking for Carrot Stew for awhile now, and has been asking me to read this book quite a bit lately.  So I made this soup.  It’s not very orange, but Sebastian helped me with the ingredients so he knows there are carrots in there.  He even cut up the celery and the two leftover mushrooms I had laying around. 

Other ingredients were one package of frozen broccoli, one package of frozen cauliflower, about a half of a cup of spinach I had in the freezer, about 4-5 carrots, an onion, roughly chopped, a bunch of water to cover the veggies, maybe a little garlic, if you like, and as much chicken bouillon as you think you’ll need.  I think I used 8 cups of water and about 6 teaspoons of bouillon, maybe more.  Just taste it and if it isn’t salty or flavorful enough, add more.  Or you could be fancy and use chicken stock, but whatever.  (I’m lazy and bouillon is easy.)

Sebastian isn’t very consistent on whether he thinks this soup is worthy of his discerning palate.  (You know, the one that only likes peanut butter sandwiches and apples).  One day Chris got him to eat a whole bowl while I was at the gym, and another day he had one bite and wouldn’t eat any more.  He seemed more excited about helping make it than he actually was eating it, but that’s okay.  I love the soup.  Adele, of course, isn’t fond of it at all. 

On word of caution, though.  This makes a TON of soup.  I’ve got two gallon bags full of it in the freezer. 

*At least this isn’t more knitting, right?