Beet that!

This year, we will be joining our very good friends for Thanksgiving dinner. It is going to be pot luck, and I am bringing soup.

On the one hand, this gets me out of cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, thereby freeing up the turkey feast for Christmas day. On the other hand, I have to make soup.

I love soup.

I’m good at soup.

We eat a lot of soup.

But the show-off in me has emerged from latency and has taken over my brain. So I’m thinking, what soup is fantastic to look at and splendid to eat?

Vichyssoise.

That potato-and-leek soup named after the kings of France, creamed and served cold. It is a good soup, easy, elegant, and delicious. But it’s predictable. How can I up the ante?

My mom makes hers not with potato but with yuca, a Latin American root vegetable that has a better flavor and less mealy texture than potatoes, and so this afternoon, I made some chicken stock, thawed the bag of frozen yuca that I happened to have in my freezer, called my mom, and then sliced the cold slimy roots into 1/4 inch rounds and put them into the broth to boil.

So far so good.

Hmmmmmmmm, I said to myself.

Then I dug a beet out of the vegetable bin, peeled it, diced it, and plunked it in.

Tomorrow I shall slice the leeks and saute them in a little butter until they are mushy, then process the while thing in batches in the food processor, then run it through the fine mesh sieve. I’ll run out to the grocery store at some point and pick up some heavy cream.

It occurs to me that it’s going to look exactly like Pepto Bismol.