Lumahai's Carrot-Green Soup with a secret ingredient **

My six year old thought we should reserve all the carrot tops from the bunches we bought today and create a soup out of it. I suggested that pureed soup, thick and creamy, might work. He recommended we start with an onion. I suggested the leafy bits of celery hearts we have would add a nice dimension to the soup, and added that I thought perhaps some of our green cabbage, white sweet potatoes, and split indian yellow peas would give us the body and creaminess we wanted, while giving us enough sweetness to offset the bitterness of the carrot greens in a pleasing way.

This is what we came up with, together. I adore cooking with my son. I adore cooking. This was grand. I love his recipe ideas!!

I taught him the correct way to hold and use a gigantic chef's knife shortly after he turned six and I figured his hands were both big and strong enough to start handling this instrument under supervision. (I've also taught him out to cut bread with a bread knife.)

Today, he did most of the chopping of and adding of the ingredients to the pot.

Anyway, I think this soup is delicious, and I love the flavour. Cumin and carrot greens -- who knew??

ingredients:

2 tbsp coconut oil
1 large cooking onion, diced (yellow kind)

2 cups chopped green cabbage

1 1/2 cups chopped celery
1 cup split yellow indian peas, very well rinsed
2 cups diced sweet potato

3 tsp sea salt
2 tsp cumin

10 cups boiling water

black pepper


3 cups carrot-greens, washed and chopped (mostly the frondly bits, removing the toughest parts of the stems)

2 tbsp marjoram


directions:

1. saute/sweat/cook down the cabbage and the onion with some of the sea salt -- we let ours get a tiny bit brown, to be honest -- 5 or 10 minutes, not long
2. layer in the celery, split peas, sweet potato
3. sprinkle on the salt and cumin
4. pour on the water
5. cover and let simmer for 40 minutes
6. add the carrot greens
7. simmer for 5 minutes
8. take off the heat
9. puree with a hand blender, and add salt and pepper to taste

** we found a wild carrot in our garden, and added the carrot, sans greens, whole to the pot to simmer for the  cooking time, and then removed before pureeing