Creamy Wild Rice Soup – Recipe Test Drive

With Christmas comes cookbooks, at least in our family. My brother gave me one that I’d never heard of: Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways To Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking by Heidi Swanson. He assured me it was not about cooking for ghosts or demons, so I cracked it open the other day.

In honor of National Soup Month, I decided to give the recipe for Creamy Wild Rice Soup a try. This is not your typical wild rice soup: Cream of mushroom soup is not an ingredient, nor are chicken, carrots or celery. What made this recipe jump out at me was the coconut milk, the red curry paste and the sweet potato croutons.

First off, this was a pretty easy recipe to make and to follow. It’s a hearty soup too, one that I think is enough to make a good dinner combined with a salad. Needless to say, Keith insisted we serve some sausage on the side, because the stigma of a vegetarian meal lacking in protein is far too ingrained in his paradigm.

We were absolutely thrilled with the taste and I’m glad we didn’t change a thing (it’s tough for us to actually follow a recipe verbatim in this house). The squeeze of lime at the end added just the right amount of tang to the sweet coconut milk broth, and the crunch of the sweet potato croutons added just the right texture. I can honestly say I wouldn’t alter this recipe at all (Did you hear that, Heidi? That’s a huge compliment, because I alter EVERYTHING!).

A few tips as you make this recipe:

• Do not let your four-year-old distract you — you really do need to simmer for 40 minutes with the pot COVERED. That’s all I’m saying about this point.
• It’s really hard to brown the sweet potato croutons without them starting to turn black. I’d use a medium heat, as opposed to the med-high suggested, next time. The charred sweet potato was the least delightful flavor we encountered in this soup.
• You can add the full amount of red curry paste. We went a little light on it because we didn’t want it to be too spicy for the four-year-old, but it wasn’t spicy at all.

I loved this soup with a salad, but I am at a bit of a loss as to what else I’d serve it with. Focaccia is the wrong ethnicity, as is cornbread. The sausage with it also didn’t really compliment it, but at least it filled my husband up.

Creamy Wild Rice Soup comes highly recommended by this reviewer, and I hope you’ll all chime in with suggestions for side dishes.

By the way, Heidi Swanson has a delicious blog, 101 Cookbooks, with even more of her recipes. I am salivating at all of the other amazing soups over there:….

Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Jan 24, 2009 @ 15:04 EST5EDT