Soup’s on.

Red and I both love soup. I’ve eaten minestrone for more days in a row than I can count, and I have fond (pre-vegan) memories of my friend Jess’ grilled-cheese-and-tomato-soup lunches. When I’m hungry and tired, Amy’s canned soups hit the spot without feeling or tasting like canned soup. When I lived alone (rather, with my sister, but she rarely ate anything I made), I underestimated the quantity of Veganomicon’s Tomato-Rice Soup with Roasted Garlic and Navy Beans and ended up eating it twice a day for a week or more. It was delicious, but I was definitely tomato-ed out afterwards. It’s nice to make soup for two, is what I’m saying.

Red is a great person to make soup with. Last winter, he found a crock-pot recipe for spicy black bean soup. It was easy and good, but a little too spicy even for him. There was that one time he forgot to add the broth to the minestrone, but we’ll let that be. This weekend, with fall clearly upon us, he agreed that we should indulge in some seriously heavy soup action.

First order of business: 30-Minute Vegan’s African Sweet Potato Soup. I was a little nervous of a soup that involved peanut butter, but the cookbook hadn’t steered us wrong yet, and it was only a quarter-cup, so what the hell. Peanut butter in soup? Be my guest. I souped while Red studied (or maybe he was reading There I Fixed It), and the result was a silky, tangy-sweet creation that was half hearty vegetable soup, half creamy peanut-ginger bisque. It sounds weird on paper, I know, but it was delicious. And all the credit goes to my immersion blender.

Not where you thought I was going with that, huh? But, all exaggeration aside, the immersion blender is a miracle of engineering. Gone are the days of ladling hot soup into a blender and praying the lid doesn’t explode off in a steaming volcano of fail. Instead of puréeing and scraping the peanut butter-spice-lime juice mixture out of a blender—our blender weighs about 90 pounds, did I mention that?—all I had to do was dump everything into a mixing bowl and go to town with the immersion blender. It does a number on hummus, too. Then, it helped me purée half the sweet potato soup to get that creamy consistency without the blender-pitcher-spatula drama. It is a handy little gadget and I love it. Thanks to my dad-in-law for listening when he asked what I wanted for Christmas.

Moral of the story: African Sweet Potato Soup is definitely a keeper. And so is my stick blender (’scuse me, fancypants, immersion blender). More soup goodness to come later this week!

Sweet potato photo ripped from Wikipedia.