Three days to make a carrot soup may sound like a big commitment, but the tasty results and hours of contemplation about the nature of human existence are worth it. If time (which we are learning is a construct) is limited, prep can be shortened to under an hour, but it loses a lot of the ennui that really makes this recipe stand out. If possible, take your “time.”
Day One
Chop about 6-10 carrots, place in casserole dish with half a cup of one of the five olive oils you panic bought in an anxiety black-out and salt.
Roast carrots in 375-degree oven for however long carrots take to roast during Pandemic Standard Time.
Remove and let cool.
Day Two
Wake up, make coffee, and stare at the casserole dish of roasted carrots sitting on the stove. Consider transferring them to a dish and refrigerating until you have the energy to complete the next step.
Realize you can skip dirtying another dish if you just put the carrots in the blender. Place blender full of roasted carrots on the counter along with chicken broth, an onion, cumin, and coriander, and a lemon.
Take a picture and consider posting to your Instagram story with the quip, “I figured if I just put all the ingredients next to each other, it would somehow make itself.” Workshop the quip until you eventually talk yourself out of posting it. Dig through your freezer for a frozen burrito. Heat it up and eat while watching YouTube videos of late night TV hosts in their houses talk about how hard it is not having a live audience. It’s finally dark out, so it must be bedtime. Thank God.
Day Three
Wake up, make coffee, and think about what a strange and sad time we’re living in and how the pandemic is so abstract and massive, making it so hard to know where to direct your thoughts on any given day so you question every act and wonder if it could be your last.
Place some butter and olive oil from one of the other five olive oils in a frying pan.
Chop up the onion and place in pan, simmer with the cumin and coriander. Notice you’re running out of both. Go to your laptop to add coriander to your Amazon cart. Stare at the screen and try to figure out how even coriander is out of stock.
Add the boxed chicken broth you bought ahead of the massive snowstorm that paralyzed Seattle last year because it’s about to expire. Realize you should probably check the expiration date on everything else in the cupboard you pulled it from. Notice the giant package of Red Vines you bought because they’d be a “nice treat” during a crisis have expired. Contemplate how it is that even Red Vines have an expiration date. Think that surely you could still eat them but what if you get sick from Red Vines what a dumb way to die during a pandemic. Throw out the Red Vines.
Let the onions and broth cool while you read the news and roller coaster through rage, tears, and grief.
Add onions and broth to blender with carrots and blend.
Squeeze in the lemon.
Taste to see if it needs anything else. It doesn’t.
Breathe a sigh of relief that you can breathe a sigh of relief and still taste things.
Bon appétit!
