Several major projects just wrapped up for me and I am finally feeling like I can come up for air a little bit. Last weekend we spent a day buying a new car.  Why does that always take an entire day to accomplish?  It’s bright orange.  Because it’s fun.  And we got a manual transmission, which is super hard to find.  The really nice guy at the car dealership was pretty dumbfounded when I told him that I could drive a stick.  :)  I am voting that we name her Clementine.

This is not my actual car, but mine’s just like this.

Yesterday we raked a bunch of leaves (many of them were orange) and made a trip to our favorite games store.  I have mentioned this before, but I love board games.  We have good friends that we play with very often and we have a gaming “rule” that we always choose the same color for our piece. Mostly it’s for our own sanity, you have to be able to remember who it is that you are ganging up on (green) or who always wins (red).  I am always orange or yellow, depending on what the game has.  We got a copy  of the new Firefly board game.  (Because we are big geeks, I know.)  It has BOTH orange and yellow pieces.  We are totally going to be messed up.

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We played a game last night and it is pretty fun and especially so if you are a fan of the show.  The rules have a little ambiguity unfortunately, so we will be having some house rules discussion before we play again.

It was a cold and windy night, so we decided to make soup for dinner.  I saw a tweet from someone about making roasted carrot soup and one of my favorite lunch places makes a curried carrot soup that is amazing.  So we made roasted curry carrot soup.  So yummy (and very orange).

Curried Carrot Soup

2 lbs of carrots

3 small onions

3 inch piece of fresh ginger

3 endives

4 cloves of garlic

1/3 c cider vinegar

1/3 c olive oil

1 tbsp curry powder

1/2 tsp sea salt

vegetable broth

1/3 c heavy cream

Chop all of the vegetables into large chunks.  Put them in a large baking dish.  Combine olive oil, vinegar, curry powder and salt and pour it over the veggies.  Stir to coat them.  Roast at 450 for about 1/2 hour.  Transfer all of the contents of the baking dish to a large soup pot.  Add vegetable broth until the veggies are just covered and simmer for about 1/2 hour, until the carrots are very soft.  Puree. (we use an immersion blender).  You can add a little extra broth depending on how thick you like your soup and then finish by stirring in the heavy cream.

I know the endive is kind of a goofy ingredient.  We started with another recipe to get the proportions of everything and it called for endive.  They had them at the grocery store, so we got them.  I think you could add celery or leeks or leave them out completely and all would work.

Super simple, nicely sweet/spicy.  I am sure you could also add coconut milk instead of cream and it would be equally tasty.  We had it with bread and sharp cheddar cheese.