On Soup

...in which our narrator has nothing to write about bikes or metal.

Buy the following at your farmer's market one Tuesday afternoon:

a two-pound beef roast
a bunch of turnips (save the greens for later)
a few little redskin potatoes
several sweet potatoes
4 Anaheim peppers, neither mild nor hot
2 sweet onions, medium-large

Roughly chop the veggies to about the same size. Throw everything in the slow cooker on high, along with:

a bay leaf
a cup or two of frozen homemade beef/chicken bone stock

- Go have a life for 4ish hours, until everything is cooked pretty well to death. Allow to cool.
- Transfer everything but the beef into a big mixing bowl.
- Mash/blend/stir until it seems like a good texture. (Bonus points if you have an immersion blender. I just have a hand mixer and a big wooden fork, but I brandish them with fervor.)
- Add kosher salt and enough freshly-ground black pepper to kill a small elephant. (Wintertime sickness=cold, slow, heavy; pepper=hot, light, airy.)
- Chop the roast against the grain so it crumbles into little slivers. Stir into the soupy stuff.
- Refrigerate/eat on for 2 days, then freeze in quart-size bags until the really busy part of the semester comes 'round.

The peppers add background spiciness. Other than that it's earthy and hearty. This is a great way to use up turnips and sweet potatoes. I don't especially enjoy turnips when they're in chunks, but presented this way they're just pleasantly earthy. Maybe some barley would be good. Barley is good with pretty much everything.