Carrot Soup with Ginger and Lemon delivers a year-round impact with a light summer taste by using winter
root vegetables.
“We’re vegetarian at home and I think most vegetarian soups are too bland, but this one is not. It has
ginger, cayenne, lemon zest and lemon juice, so it has that sparkly kick to it,” said Amy Fry. “It has
taste impact. It’s great for a light vegetarian meal when you have a lot of carrots.”
She believes it’s a good summer soup, because it’s light, but heavy on taste.
Fry has been regularly making it for more than 15 years.
“I don’t know why I started making carrot soup,” she said, laughing. “Probably, I had bought a bag of
carrots to make tuna noodle casserole and then I had all these carrots and I thought, ‘what do I do with
these?’ and then I found the recipe for carrot soup.”
Fry has been a librarian at Bowling Green State University for 16 years.
She had just taken a class on uses for the Internet, because it was still a fairly new tool at the time.
That was just before she moved to Bowling Green and was still working in Minnesota at Gustavus Adolphus
College. She describes it as “a small, lovely college,” but with cold weather.
That original recipe was found on the Epicurious website.
“I found a recipe and I didn’t quite follow it and I’ve not quite followed it the same way ever since,”
Fry said.
At her house she plants wildflowers for the butterflies.
“I love Bowling Green. I love trees and I’m now a master gardener. I’m more a steward of the land than a
vegetable farmer.”
She gets the Riehm Farm Community Supported Agriculture shares.
“We got the fall winter extension, which means we’ve been getting a lot of root vegetables. Which means
we’ve been getting these huge bags of carrots and just about the only way to use a huge bag of carrots
is to make carrot soup. At least it’s the only way I can think of,” Fry said. “We have things from our
farm share that we don’t know what they are.”
A variation with the soup is to use chicken broth, which she also likes. Fry cooks it vegetarian style
because her boyfriend is a vegetarian.
She also thinks it’s essential to use fresh ginger in the soup.
“I don’t shred. You just chop and boil. It doesn’t have to be chopped small,” Fry said of both the ginger
and carrots. “You really have to make sure to bring the carrots to a full boil.”
Another variation is using heirloom carrots. The dark colored carrots are not as sweet, with an “earthier
taste.”
She also uses immersion blending, which was not in the original recipe.
“Wow! This is so much easier,” Fry said of her the discovery of the tool and technique.
She said that the blending did change the character of the soup, but warned that it’s easy to make the
soup too smooth with the immersion blender. The soup’s best, she said, if some small carrot chunks are
left.
The recipe pairs well with take-and-bake bread from Kroger, a salad and fancy butter, Fry said.
“I’ve fed this soup to just about anybody I’ve ever known. Everybody gets the carrot soup,” Fry said.