Cream of Peanut Soup

Ingredients:

Cream of Peanut Soup (Thanks Kings Arms Tavern of Williamsburg Virginia for many a happy culinary moment in my youth!)

Ok so this sounds a little odd. It is not. It is tasty!

You will need;

an onion
couple ribs of celery
1/4 cup butter
3 Tbsp flour
2 quarts chicken stock
2 cups smooooth peanut butter (or not, like I did, it just adds a step)
1 3/4 cup of light cream (or heavy whipping cream if you hate your arteries.)
1/4 cup of so of chopped peanuts (not salted)

Get the raw ingrediants all in one place

Step 1:

Chop up the celery.

Step 2:

Chop up the onion.

Step 3:

Chuck the butter in a pretty big soup pot - it's going to get 2 qts of chicken broth added in a few minutes.

Saute up the onions and celery together till they are nice and soft. Not brown, just soft so keep it to 6 or 7 on the electric range and use more time rather than more heat.

Step 4:

Chop up the peanuts while sauteing.

Step 5:

This is what two cups of peanut butter looks like. I used the organic, feel good, hippy type though the recipe calls for smoooooth. We shall see the correction for this discrepancy in a minute.

Step 6:

OK, vegies are lookin' good:

Step 7:

Where's the flour? Ahh there it is, in the biggest flour container in the WORLD:

Step 8:

Add the 3 Tbsp of flour and cook for a minute or so:

Step 9:

Dump in super hippidippy, grain fed, farm raised, cute chicken juice and bring JUST to a boil. When the bubbles start, stop the cooking.

Step 10:

Now I use my expensive sieve. You could go with a strainer if you don't have one but the soup will be a tad less creamy. Pour in the whole bubbly chicken juice and veggie mass.

Step 11:

Squash out all the juice into another bowl.

Step 12:

Pour the sieved out soup stuff back into your pot and add the cream:

Step 13:

Add the peanut butter:

Here's where smooth is better than chunky - if you go with fresh ground peanut butter you'll have to squash it out spoonfull by spoonfull until it's not chunky anymore. As the soup heats, the peanut butter will disipate and thicken the stock. In my case I had to go back and sieve it out again to get the right consistancy (see next step).

Now on LOW heat bring that mess up to just under a boil. Don't boil it.

Step 14:

Beacuse soup was too chuncky I had to sieve the peanut butter / stalk / cream mixture again. Use smooth peanut butter and you won't have to do this step, the creamy kind will fully dissipate in the previous step.

Step 15:

Here is chunky mess that was left in the sieve:

Put the sieved soup back on the stove to warm up again once you sieved to your liking.

Step 16:

The end result. Pour yourself a bowl and garnish with the peanuts you choped up - just a few for crunchy cruchy goodness. This soup can be served hot or cold - it's a TAD less heavy when hot. When it's chilled it's almost a desert soup. This isn't a whole meal all by itself though - more of a small bowl served before a heavy meal like meat.

The end result is VERY tasty and is not like eating peanut butter at all. It's heavy and definitly peanut based, but surprisingly tasty.

One thing to resist, for authenticity sake is spices. While Williamsburg would have had spices to work with, they wouldn't have had anything like the variety that we have now. If you add hot pepper you will find yourself in Thai cooking land. Not authentic but tasty none the less. If you add salt and pepper, you lose some of the interesting tastes that just cooking with vegies and peanuts gets you.

All in all a FINE recipe, pretty cheap and pretty fast, that I would suggest as a contribution to, say, a thanksgiving meal that you're invited too. Nobody else will bring it and everyone will be surprised by that taste!

If I'd been on Hells' Kitchen, I would have served this as my initial dish to impress chef Gordon Ramsay.