I love soups!!! In the Czech cuisine, soup belongs to every meal. And of course, growing up in Bohemia makes me appreciate soups very much. Czech soups are mostly watery made from chicken or beef stock – with meat and fresh vegetables. Good stock usually needs a few hours cooking time to get its strong flavour. Therefore, during the week, I often make creamy soup for dinner because it is so quick and easy to make and usually it boils down to only a few ingredients which I already have at home such as carrots, frozen green peas or broccoli, canned beans, colliflower or pumpkin – depending on the season.

A great advantage of soup is that I can heat it it up the next day again. So, coming home from work knowing that cooking means to ‘only turn on the heat’ is truly fantastic and relaxing! This week, I had some carrots and some juice from prunes so I simply tried to combine these two… and yes, it worked out!

250 Gr   Carrots – peeled, cut into pieces
250 ml   Prune juice
750 ml   Stock – vegetable or chicken stock
1-2          Garlic cloves – peeled and crushed 
1 small  Onion – peeled, cut into pieces
180 ml   Cream (optional) 
                Thyme – fresh spring and extra leaves
                Salt & Pepper – freshly grounded

Put the stock together with the carrots, garlic and onion into a sauce pan and bring to boil. Boil for about 10 minutes or until the carrots are soft. Then add the prune juice and one thyme spring and let simmer for another 2-3 minutes. Set aside, take out the thyme spring and puree with a hand mixer until the soup becomes smooth.

If you want to make sure, the soup gets truly fine and free from any lumps, you may take the time to drift the soup through a fine sieve with a spatula. If you have cream at home or if you prefer to have a stronger creamy taste, just add the cream into the sieved through soup and stir to combine. Top with freshly grounded salt and pepper and serve with fresh or roasted bread.

Before serving you may mix up the soup once more to give it an extra beat. A foamy presentation is always a highlight!

And, of course, warm soup will always make you feel at home and even if you may have only some salad or cold bites afterwards, soup will always kick in and give you loads of energy.

10 May This entry was published on May 10, 2014 at 8:17 pm. It’s filed under Recipe and tagged carrot prune thyme. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.