Yam and Black Bean Soup with Orange and Cilantro

I was looking for a different sort of black bean soup, so I settled on Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Yam and Black Bean Soup with Orange and Cilantro from Appetite for Reduction.  I’ve had this book since it came out, though haven’t cooked much from it (yet).

I cut the recipe in half, but otherwise followed it at written. This is definitely more of a yam soup than it is a bean soup. It is okay, but not great. Granted, I don’t tend to like orange or citrus savory dishes in general, so perhaps I should have know that I wouldn’t love this one. A few notes in case I want to make this again:

1.     Chop the onion, rather than slice it. I don’t like onion strings hanging off my spoon!

2.     The serrano could be increased to make the soup more interesting.

3.     The recipe calls for partially mashing the yam base with a potato masher before adding the beans. I did this, but wonder if I would have preferred a smoother puree, rather than the chunky mixture that I had (?).

4.     The orange flavor wasn’t bad… it just wasn’t good (to my taste). It became somewhat more subtle over the few days that I ate this soup.

5.     I mostly served this soup over a corn fritter dish from Cooking Light. I think that the sweetness of the corn was a nice pairing for the yam (which should be sweet… but really was more acidic because of the orange juice).

Overall, this was good, but not great. I’m realizing so far through this blog that I’m a fairly picky soup critic. A soup has to be really fantastic for me to love it (that sounds like such a ‘duh’ statement…but worth noting).

We are in in the midst of a decent winter storm… here’s hoping that we have tomorrow off from work! If so, I’ll be sure to spend some time perusing new  soup recipes.

Also, I am now one moth in o my year of serving soup and I’m ahead of pace with my challenge to have cooked 50 veg*n soups by the end of the year!