A friend invited me over on Sunday for a potluck with a twist. Instead of bringing a completed dish to share, 5 people cooked 4 kinds of soup in 1 kitchen with the deliberate purpose of having leftovers to take to work for lunch. We prepped a week’s worth of clean eating and made it a party.
Of my friend’s many, many desirable attributes, the one that inspires the most envy in me is her Vitamix. It’s a blender with blades that move so fast the friction of the food particles generates enough heat to boil the contents! Knowing stove space would be at a premium, I thought it would be brilliant to use it to make a cream-style vegetable soup.
At first, I considered a proven crowd-pleaser like Butternut Squash Soup, but then I realized this was the perfect opportunity to try something more exotic. If it was fantastic, then I’d get credit for introducing the group to something new and wonderful. If I hated it, I could simply pawn it off on someone else. Surely one of the five would take the leftovers rather than face meal prep all over again! I finally settled on an Roasted Beet and Apple Soup that sounded weird, yet potentially wow. Then I remembered the objective was excess, so I ended up making both.
Five people cooking in a four-butt kitchen resulted in some creative choreography, but everything turned out divine. The soups were not all done at the same time, so we turned a simple supper into a four-course meal. We ate, laughed, and did a week’s worth of dishes while the soups cooled enough to package into single-serving containers. The afternoon was an unqualified success. The only downside has been some lustful late-night shopping for Vitamix blenders….
Vegetable Challenge 