Flying by Seat of Pants Recipes: Carrot Brie Soup

For those of you who enjoyed my hapless attempt to recreate citrus almonds, here's another one.

 1) go to Allium in Ottawa with three friends (great restaurant, stupid name -- whose chef was actually trained by my husband's cousin's French-chef husband -- true story -- well obviously, why on earth would I make something like that up? I met him at my brother-in-law's wedding. Where there was a vegetarian buffet. He was fairly gracious in the absence of foie gras). Fail to order the Carrot and Brie soup on the grounds that you have never really loved carrot soup, which usually tastes like watery cooked carrots, while I prefer them raw. Taste the Carrot and Brie Soup of a friend and then wait for her to go to the washroom so you can eat most of it and refill her bowl with wine and hope she won't notice.

 2) go home and mount a pitched battle with said friend to see who can re-create the recipe best. Swear at her when her first attempt is much better than yours, which prompted your mother-in-law to counsel dumping most of a litre of cream into the pot, which actually does improve it immeasurably.

 3) make a second attempt which goes much better. 

 4) make a pot for book club which garners rave reviews and may even edge out my almost-famous near-sublime butternut squash soup. 

 5) go to Zarah's and decide to make a pot for lunch with good friend and his wife who I am meeting for the first time. 

 6) dispatch Zarah to the market for ingredients, including carrots and brie. Admire big beautiful local award-winning carrots with which she returns, and look somewhat suspicious at the cheese, which has a thin layer of ash running through it, but succumb to Zarah's blithe assurances that it will work fine (and it does taste really good).

 7) roast the carrots lovingly on a cookie sheet, drizzled with olive oil at 400 degrees until soft

 8) sauté sliced onions and one or two sliced potatoes slowly in butter and olive oil over medium-low heat until soft.

 9) place carrots, onions and potatoes in soup pot. Season with sea salt, pepper, lemon thyme, oregano, whatever. 

 10) add homemade chicken stock just to cover (I over chicken-stocked and under-potatoed the first time).

 11) simmer for a while. 

 12) add wine. simmer for another while. 

 13) add cheese. Stir. Observe cheese melting nicely. Observe strange substance that resembles blobs of gray chewed gum floating around. 

 14) Freak out and deride Zarah's ridiculous yuppie ash-bedecked cheese. 

 15) Calm down and scoop out blobs with a slotted spoon. Empty out soup into bowl and scrape remainder of blobby gray crap off of bottom of pan (or make Zarah do it. She switched the cheese, after all).

 16) Return soup to pot and simmer. Add cream. Consider contacting the Evanturel people to advise adding a big red warning DO NOT USE IN SOUP label so no one else has to endure a similarly harrowing experience. 

 17) Serve soup to appreciative guests and swear each other to secrecy. Until you're in dire need of a blog post.