Carrot Soup

I feel like I'm in another country. I left Seattle and a career as a cook that was stagnating. I am now an intern for no pay with only room and board on two small farms in the San Juan Islands. One, Quail Croft Farm, is a goat dairy and cheese making operation, Heritage Farm is across the road and operates a CSA (community supported agriculture), a raw cow milk dairy with pastured meat and fresh eggs. This is all organic of course. And its about food; wholesomeness, taste, anti-oil, food security and community.

I am here to have an experience, learn some new skills and see what being a grower looks like. I want to cook. I am here as a farm intern and will be very busy herding goats and helping garden, but I'm here to to cook locally and seasonally. Just like in "Julie and Julia" I want to cook a recipe a week. Except, I want to come up with something original and something from this exact place and about these people. Don't get me wrong I am no localvore (I will be drinking coffee everyday), but I don't want to cook "Mediterranean Cusine". I don't want to use olive oil. I want to use what is available here and make it work. I have farm butter and chicken fat and lard all from grass fed animals and if I believe Michael Pollan that fat will be just as healthy as the olive oil.

These farmers are food motivated (as my dog trainer puts it), they want to be around good food, so they are happy to have me here cooking. I'll be preparing weekly meals, food for special events and parties, writing recipes for the CSA members and hopefully we will be putting on farm dinners.

We did our first weekly dinner and I came up with my first recipe. Let me say, before coming out I had this grand fantasy of having all these great farm ingredients to work with but it's not quite like that. And, at first, I was disappointed. But, this is reality. It's cold here. Winter is barely over and nothing is coming out of the ground. And, also, our society is dependent on grocery store food. I don't have prosciutto's and tons of cheeses to work with. It is farms like Heritage and Quail Croft that are trying to create this slow food, but without the support of the community it will go nowhere. And for the moment, there is no smoke house around the corner to provide me with beautiful bacon or ham. But, this is what eating seasonal is all about. When the peas do, finally, come and there are tons of tomatoes I am going to be stoked. Anyways, For my first meal I braised a beef heart with pinto beans (recipe needs some work), had a cauliflower and celeriac casserole, fresh bread, wheat bran cakes (the bran is a byproduct of grinding the wheat for the fresh bread so I came up with a recipe to use it up, kind of like polenta cakes, not too bad. But, I had one winner
Soup of Carrot Jus with Leeks and Winter Greens

It's a pretty simple soup but a bit different from the standard carrot and ginger puree. Here I use juice of carrots (jus is the french way of saying juice or sauce made from the juice of something). And everything came from the farm except the salt and pepper.

6 cups of carrot juice (approximately 3 large bunches of carrots)
2 TBS. Lard
2 Tbs Butter
1/8 cup flour
6 Small Leeks cleaned and sliced into half moons (white and little bit of green only)
A big bunch of any kind of braising green you like (I used Swiss chard and flowering kale)
pinch of chili flakes

1) Melt fat
2) Slowly saute leeks until tender then add chili flakes
3) Add flour to pan to make a roux (just like sausage gravy) I really want just enough to give the soup a little body and help the carrot juice from separating. Cook until fat and flour combine
4) Add carrot juice and bring to a simmer to slightly thicken. Cook until it tastes good and not like raw carrot juice. At this point you can hold the soup until ready to serve. When ready reheat and season with salt then add greens and wilt and then serve.

This soup is kind of sweet and would benefit from some acid. If I had a little sauerkraut I might have used a bit when I was cooking the leeks, also I think it would have been good with beef tongue cured like corned beef. Anyways, it's pretty good the way it is. Also, I am not real sure how accurate this recipe is, if you follow the general technique you should do fine. I'll try to be more accurate in the future.