Cream of Peanut Soup

Submitted by ChlamydiaJones Uploaded by Schpyder

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!

Ingredients

Get you some of this;

• 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 like I do - hate YOUR arteries, not mine, mine I friggin love!)
• 1/4 cup of so of chopped peanuts (not salted)

Method

• Get the raw ingrediants all in one place

• Get the baby something to play with so she'll chill during the process

• Unleash the dogs of CHOP!

• 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.

• I used time management techniques to figure out that I could chop up the peanuts while sauteing - I should be a consultant!

• When baby gets bored of the Moon Creature, give her milk - this is the perfect antidote to angry baby!

• 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.

• OK, vegies are lookin' good

• Where's the flour? Ahh there it is, in the biggest flour container in the WORLD - sorry Ingamonkey, you can't have it.

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

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

• Now I use my expensive rear end 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 dead chicken juice and veggie mass.

• Squash out all the juice into another bowl.

• Pour the sieved out soup stuff back into your cooking device and add the cream and peanut butter.

• Now on LOW heat bring that mess up to just under a boil. Please don't boil it. Just please don't.

• Here's where smooth is better than chunky - if you go with fresh ground peanut butter you'l 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.

• Nasty mess left in the sieve damnit - but it came out with a little persuasion.

• 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 peanusts 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 satan.