Carrot Corriander Soup

This one's a classic adapted from the Juice for Life (now called Fresh) restaurant cookbook...

Ingredients:
3 tbsp ground corriander
2 large onions chopped
3 large carrots, diced
3 celery stalks, de-stringed and diced
2 tbsp dried marjoram
6 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp tomato paste (optional if you are worried about acidity)
1/2 teaspoon of umeboshi paste (optional if you can't find any but this is not only consider one of those alkalinizing "superfoods" (people down umeboshi tea as a hangover cure!) but also imparts the much-vaunted "umami" taste... this is invaluable for vegans as unami is usually achieved most easily with animal products like anchovy)
sufficient water to cover vegetables plus perhaps 1 inch above the surface of the vegetables

1 medium sweet potato, diced

1/2 cup fresh cilantro

In a dry heavy pot, toast the ground corriander for 1-2 minutes to release its fragrance, empty into a small bowl and set aside.

In the same pot, saute onions until translucent in olive oil. Add carrots and celery and around 1/2 tsp of salt. Keep stirring, and sauteing so that the water in the vegetables evaporates. Depending on your patience, you *may* wish to keep going to do the "pocket full of evil" aka pincage concoction I mention in an earlier post. Umami bomb! Highly effective but does take patience. Anyway, even if you just saute until things are looking soft and sticky, this will do.

Add dried marjoram, plus a bit more oil, stir, release fragrance. Add the garlic, stir, brown.
Add the tomato paste and/or umeboshi paste if your using them here plus a little water to make the paste more liquidy.... once it's at a state where all the vegetables are evenly coated by the tomato paste/umeboshi paste liquid, then stir in enough water to cover the vegetables plus 1 inch above the surface of the veggies. Add the sweet potato and then allow all of this to reach a boil, turn down to simmer and cook until sweet potato is done (around 20 minutes).

When everything is done, take off the heat, add fresh cilantro and puree the soup. I use an immersion blender and puree it right in the pot but if you are using a blender, you should let things cool before putting it in the blender. Depending on how smooth you want the soup, you can go to town with the pureeing or, leave a few veggies intact so you have something to chew on.

You're all done!

Feel free to garnish with things like:
fresh cilantro, tofutti soy cream cheese/sour cream.... but really, this soup is quite lovely on its own and also very nice if you serve some cooked udon noodles with it.