To start off the New Year right, I bought a copy of the Flat Belly Diet! Cookbook. Before you judge/laugh, 1) It’s a diet cookbook with a cupcake on the cover! and 2) I’m not really on the diet (so I can’t speak for its efficacy), but I always need some fresh “healthy eating” recipes around. So during the ridiculously cold snap we had, I decided to make the vegetarian Curried Apple & Pear soup from my new cookbook. This was a little outside my tastebuds’ normal comfort zone spice-wise, but I ended up enjoying it a lot!

Curried Apple & Pear Soup

Due to copyright issues I don’t think I can actually reproduce the recipe here, but I’ll give a walkthrough and maybe you can find something similar via your favorite search engine.

I started with the typical soup starter, a mirepoix. The veggies were sauteed in a little olive oil, after which my spices–cumin, curry powder, and salt–were added and heated just for a few seconds until fragrant. A skinned and roughly chopped apple and pear were then introduced and coated with the spiced veggies. Vegetable stock and water topped off the fruits to allow them to simmer until soft. I removed my soup from the heat, put it into the blender in batches (lots of hot soup+blender=unhappy cook) and pulsed it smooth. I’m currently shopping around for a nice immersion blender because it would be much handier for soups than my blender. My lovely sweet/savory bowl of soup was topped with a dollop of rich Greek yogurt, which took the edge off the heat from the curry perfectly. This soup was super smooth and just what I needed for a cold evening!