Welcome Wednesday + Sweet Potato Soup (recipe)

 

We want to welcome our new readers from the Welcome Wednesday blog hop (hosted by Take It From Me)! For those of you that don't know us, we're the Glasers! We hope you enjoy our journey through pregnancy while living in a foreign country. You can read a bit more about that journey in yesterday's post. We're so excited to have you here and we hope you come back soon!!!

Now, on to the fun stuff. Remember the root canal I had? Well, I had everything filled up yesterday. Wait, not everything. Just two of three broken teeth. I found out that I will need three more appointments to fix everything up because my dentist vastly underestimated how much work would be needed for my mouth. Thanks Dr. Dentist. I looooooove missing work because you want to kill my mouth.

Whenever I have dental work done, my mouth is usually sore afterwards and I have a few go-to food staples:
Latkes (potato pancakes)
Yogurt
Ramen Noodle Soup
Sweet Potato Soup
Mashed potatoes
Grilled cheese


Have you noticed a pattern? I really like starches and this pregnancy is not helping that addiction. I don't have any secret recipes for the mashed potatoes or latkes - they usually come from a box. I get tired after the dentist and I usually don't like to cook when I'm feeling tired and numbed up. Disastrous things happen when I'm tired and I start to cook. I do have a not-so-secret recipe for sweet potato soup and I'm excited to share it with you.

When I was a kid and I had dental work done, my mom used to make me tomato soup with grilled cheese strips. As I got older, I started having trouble digesting tomatoes but I really liked the aspect of eating grilled cheese. Then I moved to Israel. The cheese is different. The bread is different. Everything is different. My aunt taught me an awesome alternative to tomato soup (which isn't really common here). She gave me a recipe for sweet potato soup and I started eating it with my Israeli grilled cheese sandwiches. It's super easy to make and requires very very little work:

Sweet Potato Soup
Ingredients

3 carrots - peeled and cubed
3 sweet potatoes - peeled and cubed 
2 large white potatoes (any kind) - peeled and cubed
1 onion (any kind) - rough chopped
1 can pumpkin puree
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp. cinnamon
1 tbsp. salt
1 tsp. nutmeg


Prepared
So far, so good, right? Take a large pot, fill it with 8-10 cups of water - I like more water, it creates a thinner soup - add your carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and onion to the pot. Let the mixture boil until everything is a bit mushy (sometimes this takes a half hour, other times it's an hour. You WANT the mixture to be mushy!

When your mixture is mushy, take it off the burner and take a handheld blender (or a stand alone blender) - start pureeing the soup mixture. If you've taken the mixture out of the pot, put it back it when everything is smooth. At this point, turn your burner back on and add in your pumpkin puree, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg to the mixture. Stir everything together for about five minutes, then eat it!

See? Simple! Just a warning: this soup is VERY filling because of the starches. Start off with a small cup. In the Middle East, we like foods that can simmer in our bellies for long periods of time... this soup does it for me! At the very end, your soup should look like this:

Picture Courtesy of Taste of Home Recipes

I usually eat this soup with a few croutons or a good grilled cheese sandwich (we don't have American cheese like Kraft so we make due with other cheeses). I also like it with a bagel... but it's great on its own.

As they say in Israel: Betayavon (Bon Appetite!)