Experimental Cooking - Roasted Parsnip and Parmesean Soup

As many of you know, Sean and I love to cook. We each have our specialties - Sean prefers pastas and BBQing, while I enjoy Asian recipes, party foods, and soups. Baking is my weakness, but I'm working on it! As for who's the better chef...well I guess that's up for debate depending on who you talk to. Sean thinks he's better than me, but I beg to differ. Overall, we tend to get pretty good reviews.

Personally, I like to use cooking as a way to de-stress and detach from work related things. I usually dedicate one day on the weekend to 'experimental cooking', by which I try new recipes and cooking styles. My inspiration comes from allrecipes.com (which has pretty much every recipe you could ever want..it is awesome!) and a UK magazine called Delicious. For those in Ireland, you can find this in any shop. For those in the US, you can check out the recipes on www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk.

From a recent cooking experiment, I decided to make a Roasted Parsnip and Parmesean Soup. Its somewhat labour intensive, but turned out to be delicious! I topped it with green onions, croutons (the caesar salad type) and some toasted almonds (which was Sean's addition). We decided the almonds were nice, but masked the flavour of the parsnips, so better to go without.



Here's the recipe if anyone wants to try it:

Ingredients:
2 large parsnips
50g Parmesean cheese, grated
1 potato
50g butter
200g shallots / green onions
2 tbsp plain flour
1.5 litres hot chicken stock (or veggie stock for vegetarians)
4 tbsp cream
1 tbsp green onions
Croutons

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Cut parsnips into chunks and boil in salted water for 3 min. Drain and place on baking sheet.

2. Toss parsnips with olive oil and sprinkle with a small amount of parmesean cheese. Roast for 30min until golden brown.

3. Peel and cube the pototo. Boil potatoes in salted water and boil for at least 10min until soft.

4. Melt butter in saucepan and saute the shallots for about 10 min until soft. Stir in flour, then stock, and finally the parsnips and potatoes. Bring to boil and simmer for at least 10 min.

5. Using a hand held blender or food processor to blend the soup until smooth.

6. Shortly before serving, return blended soup back to the stove and gently simmer for 5 min. Stir in cream, parmesean cheese, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

7. Top with fresh green onions and croutons to serve.