Vegetarian table: Broth, no bones about it
Food trends seem to come at the speed of light nowadays. You hear somebody mention the words “bone broth,” and you think, “Isn't that just stock?” The next day you hear it mentioned about a dozen times on Twitter, and you read a piece emphasizing that it's so much more than just stock, and the day after that you hear a story about it on the radio explaining that it has to include vinegar, and you spot it on a restaurant menu and see it in little aseptic packages in the supermarket.
A little part of you continues to think, “Isn't it just stock?” and wishes everybody would just shut up about it, already. And the whole thing reminds you of why you don't listen to commercial music radio anymore: Some perfectly catchy tune is reduced to the most annoying earworm ever just because some DJ has no imagination.
Anyway, I don't think that's going to happen with another broth I discovered recently. I was flipping through “Soul Food Love,” Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams' new cookbook, looking for ideas, and I saw the most beautiful soup, made of sweet potatoes, kale and black-eyed peas. But the sweet potatoes weren't in big chunks, like the carrots. They had been pureed with a lot of water, making a beautiful orange backdrop for the chunky soup.
The three words I read next made me gasp out loud: sweet potato broth. The story is that Alice needed a vegetarian substitute for her classic soup, and she and her daughter, Caroline, came up with the sweet potato idea. It's simple enough: You simmer a cutup sweet potato with aromatic vegetables and water (and some cloves) until it's tender, and you fish out those cloves and purée the rest.
When you use it to make the soup (and sub collards or mustard greens for the kale, if you like), you realize the true brilliance: The broth is thin enough to let the other ingredients take center stage but thick enough to provide just the right amount of body. The recipe makes more than twice as much broth as you need for the soup, but consider it a bonus, because there are lots of other ways I can imagine using the broth. One night, I'll make a vegetarian riff on tortilla soup, with black beans and tomatoes.
Sweet potato broth deserves to be trendy, but it probably never will be. And that's fine with me, because I don't ever want to get sick of it.