Grill veggies for added depth of flavor for soups, salads
For some reason, grilling makes everything taste better. Even soup. Yep, even soup.
There's something about grilling the veggies that add an incredible depth to the taste of any soup. The heat of the grill chars the vegetables, adding texture as well as caramelizing them, which makes them sweeter and much more flavorful.
Besides, it's an easy summer add-on to any meal you are already cooking outside. Just pile a few more veggies on the grill and you're set for dinner tonight and soup tomorrow.
I recently took a cooking class at Happy Eats Healthy (happyeatshealthy.com) in Chicago, taught by Monique Costello, healthy cook extraordinaire, which focused on grilled soups and salads. She whipped up an amazing Avocado Poblano Cream Sauce that she served over grilled romaine lettuce. With a few additions, she turned the sauce into a dressing for a corn salad and then whipped it up in the blender where it became a really delicious (and healthy) Avocado Corn Chowder.
It's sort of a cook once, eat twice way of doing things.
She started out by grilling the poblano peppers for the sauce, but also grilled the romaine, corn on the cob and the red onion for the salad and soup. In each case, she lightly applied olive oil to the veggies and grilled on high until they were crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside.
If you've never grilled romaine lettuce before, you are in for a real treat. Just cut the lettuce head in half lengthwise, brush the surface with olive oil and grill for about four to five minutes total. This is tasty all by itself, but when you drizzle the Avocado Poblano Cream Sauce over, it takes the dish to a whole new dimension.
For the soup, she added the sauce to a blender, along with corn, garlic, onion, jalapeño, olive oil and lime juice, as well as a cup each of vegetable brother and coconut milk. Top with some of the remaining corn salad and the result is creamy, crunchy, spicy and refreshing.
Now, that's a summer soup.
• M. Eileen Brown is the Daily Herald's director of strategic marketing and innovation and an incurable soup-a-holic. She specializes in vegetarian soups and blogs at soupalooza.com.