Ginger miso carrot soup

Don't you sometimes wish you could touch up your life a little?

Add some color here, soften some sharp edges there?

Some weeks are a little duller than others. On those days a little contrast wouldn't hurt. Other times stuff just gets on your nerves. How about erasing it with one quick swipe?

Come on, you know it would be cool if you could sometimes  photoshop your day a little.

Keep the basics but tweak them a bit. If energy was low and stress levels high, you would just move a cursor up or down a line until you reached the percentage that suited you best.

  

I wouldn't mind cropping some aspects of my life these days, parts involving desks, meeting rooms, coffee machines, badges and monitors, but unfortunately you need more than a mouse or a touch pad to do that in the real world.

Truth is, I am not big on photo editing either. I get by with the really basic stuff and my limited knowledge  is just enough to try to slightly improve my amateur photography skills. Sometimes the light is so superb that I don't even need to turn to photo editing, but today I had a good recipe for you and a bunch of terrible pictures, the kind you take in a dark kitchen in a rush, with family members hungrily and impatiently waiting around a dinner table. So I decided I could distract you and tell you about the deliciousness of this soup anyway.

  

  

I was smitten with this soup the minute I laid eyes on it. It seemed like the perfect way to a) use up all those carrots I had in the fridge and b) devise another way of getting my kids to eat cooked carrots. They are slightly miso-soup-obsessed so I thought if I just called it miso soup and told them the color came from the miso paste, they would eat it. Guess what? It  worked perfectly and my daughter's jaw dropped when I told her right after she literally finished licking out her bowl that she had eaten carrot soup. That doesn't mean you don't taste the carrots, because they shine through, but every spoonful is accompanied by the tingling flavor of ginger on your tongue, the smoky nutty taste of sesame oil and the umami from the miso paste. It is Japan in a spoonful.

Ingredients

about 2 pounds carrots,  sliced thinly
about 4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed (or to taste)

1 onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp finely grated /chopped ginger (or to taste)

4 cups vegetable stock
1/4 cup miso paste (the recipe suggests white miso paste, but I only had dark paste so I started with less and added it little by little)

olive oil

toasted sesame oil
2 sliced scallions for garnish (I unfortunately didn't have any)

Cover the bottom of a saucepan with olive oil, heat it and add in the carrots, onion and garlic. Sauté for a while, then add the stock and grated ginger. Simmer covered until carrots are tender, about half an hour.

Blend soup and then mix together the miso paste with a ladel of hot soup . When it has dissolved pour it back into the pot. Taste and add more if you like. Season if needed and then serve in individual bowls, drizzled with the sesame oil and garnished with scallions.

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