Soup as a Party Food!

We had a party at our house last night. The “main course”? Soup, of course! We had about 25 friends over for beer, appetizers, and 2 soups that I cooked in advance and then kept warm in crock pots. I knew that I’d want something tried and true for this party. After all, a part is no time to test something new.. .and have it come out no good. I also knew that I wanted relatively “normal” and mild soups. By “normal” what do I mean? Well, with nothing too too strange in it. In my mind, that ruled out the following ingredients (which otherwise can be found in many of my favorite soups!): nutritional yeast, miso, faux meat of any sort (sorry Gardein, seitan, Quorn and the like…), and/or any other odd ball item. I also knew that I didn’t want anything too spicy, or with too strong of a bite of a flavor that’s not  widely liked (i.e. cilantro). So that takes care of normal and mild. I also ruled out anything with beets (the idea of kids running around the house with bowls of beet soup made both Mike and I nervous… the potential for spillage on the light carpet downstairs was just too great…).

So, with those parameters in mind, I chose 2 soups that were different enough to please different pallets:

·      Wild Rice and Vegetable Soup (compliments of VegWeb.com)

·      Apple Rutabaga Soup (thanks, Aunt Kay for bringing my attention to this recipe from the Inn at Little Washington!)

Both were a hit- and I’m glad that I picked different types of soups. Let’s start with the Wild Rice & Vegetable Soup. First, my modifications:

1.     I used 2 cans of Muir Glenn Fire Roasted diced tomatoes (with no added salt) in lieu of ‘regular’ canned tomatoes. I find these particular tomatoes to add a richer tomato flavor and when used as a base ingredient, as was the case here, they really enhance the overall flavor of the dish.

2.     I added a handful (probably about a cup) of good sweet corn at the end.

3.     My wild rice was about ¾ cup of a wild rice blend, with ¼ cup of true black wild rice mixed in (there was some wild rice in the blend itself, but I wanted a higher ratio of actual wild rice in my soup).

4.     I used my standby Better-Than-Bullion as the broth (organic vegetable flavor), and just added it to taste (I think that I used less than the called for amount).

This soup is hearty, flavorful, and was even popular with the kids at the party. It is fairly thick (especially since I made it the day before and the rice then absorbed more broth and plumped up overnight; I added more water when I reheated it to serve). I really like the addition of corn too.

The Apple Rutabaga Soup could actually be called Butternut Squash/Carrot/Yam/Apple/Rutabaga/Maple soup! It looks (and tastes) much like a traditional butternut bisque, but has a more complex flavor, which makes sense, considering the veggies in the pot! My main modification was to use evaporated fat free milk and light coconut milk as the creamy addition, rather than heavy cream. My Aunt Kay made this soup for Thanksgiving a number of years ago, and she gave me the recipe afterwards. She had made the change to evaporated ff milk then, and passed it along to me. I didn’t actually realize that it even called for heavy cream until finding the original recipe to link to here. I also used less maple syrup (I had good sweet carrot, so I correctly predicted that I might not need as much added sweetness). Of course, I used veggie broth vs. chicken. Lastly, I usually make this as a fairly spicy soup. However, given the kids who I thought would be there, I eased up on the cayenne, and instead set out a bottle of Siracha for people to swirl in as they wanted (which I did, yum!).

I made the recipe 50% greater for the Rutabaga soup, so had more of that than the Wild Rice. I ended up with about 3 cups of leftover Wild Rice Soup (which Mike and I enjoyed this afternoon), and probably about 4 cups of leftover Rutabaga soup. One of our friends was raving about that soup, and when she stuck around after people had mostly left the party, I offered to send it home with her and she kindly obliged. Not bad portion predictions for a party with 25+ people in attendance!