Potage of the week: céleri rave and carrot with topinambour, ginger, and almond butter

On a gray, cold, and rainy January day, this is a good soup for giving the house an aroma soft yet stimulating. We started out to do a lentil soup with céleri rave, carrots, and potatoes, which is a good standby that will nourish and warm you right up, but when Juliette saw the creamy broth with the white and orange bits floating around, she said, “Let’s try something different. Keep it simple. Leave out the lintels and potatoes and just make a soup of this. Really focus on these two main ingredients and what goes into the broth.”

So this is the potage of the week. Saute a chopped onion just until the pieces begin to soften. Add to this: diced céleri rave, diced carrots, marinated raisins, and topinambour chopped into tiny bits, with miso, curcumin, almond milk, and a spoonful of almond butter.

Two hours later.

The soup had a particular flavor, one that we could not match. A sweet-sour taste, somewhat like but not. Celery, yes. But if you were blindfolded and asked to ID the flavor, you might not come up with celery. It was the sauce that got our attention. What if we mushed the soup into a volute? That would be the thing. And add some shortgrain Italian rice.