A week or two ago, I tried this awesome recipe for sweet potato soup from Melissa Joulwan.

I tried it because it has bacon in it.  Bacon!!  We love the bacon.  I love bacon so much that I never order it at a restaurant.  Know why?  Because they never give you enough!  I can never have enough bacon.  My eldest feels the same.  We love the bacony goodness of bacon.

I was a bit intimidated by the recipe, mainly because I didn’t have quite everything I needed and I was in my pajamas and did not feel like getting dressed and going to the store (I told you I was lazy).  I didn’t have chives but I had some scallions for the garnish.  Good enough for me!  I thought I didn’t have chicken broth but I dug around in my fridge and found some broth I made just a couple days prior in my crock pot.  That was some hard core broth.

And Oooh! the whole recipe starts with frying up some bacon!

Mmm…yummy.  I had to stop myself from eating it.  After I cooked the bacon, I removed it from the pan to use as a garnish.  Which is something I appreciate because I have found that bacon loses it’s UMPH when it gets left into most dishes to simmer and bake.

When I saw I needed to finely slice the sweet potatoes, I panicked.  But only for a moment because I remembered that we have a handy dandy food processor.  I always forget about that thing and to tell the truth, it scares me a bit.  My parents had a food processor they never used because my mom said “It made too much of a mess”.  But then again, mom’s always been a bit of a food Luddite.  She won’t even use her dishwasher because “It just doesn’t get the dishes clean enough!”

My husband says I need to forget my childhood if I am going to be happy.

So I pulled out the food processor and found the right blade. And got to chopping.  It was so easy!  And look at those gorgeous taters!

Melissa’s recipe calls for Ras el Hanout which I had never heard of before but apparently is a melange of spices including cinnamon, alspice and other yumminess.  Lucky for me, I had already made a batch when I cooked a ground lamb dish.  I saved the blend in an airtight container and stored it in my fridge.  Why in my fridge?  I don’t know, it just seemed like a good idea.

 

I sauteed the other veg and spice and added all of my stuff and simmered.  It looked like this:

And then it was time to puree.  I was so excited.  I got to pull out our brand new big gun blender.  My husband is a Christmas baby and I was planning on giving him the new blender for his birthday…and then our old blender died in November so his birthday came a little early.  Anyway, I had not used it before.  He insisted on giving me a lesson.  There seem to be a few steps.  You flick this switch and then turn this dial SLOWLY and then the magic happens!

Once I was done pureeing, I poured it into cute bowls and garnished with BACON!! and chopped scallions.

And it was awesome!

I have to say that fancy pants blender really pureed the heck out of that soup.  Not a lump in sight and it was smooth and creamy.  Almost like you would imagine hot ice cream to be.

Everyone loved it. Everyone raved!  My boys asked for seconds.  The dog tried to eat some.

It was glorious.

I couldn’t have done it without the gadgets.  They truly make life easier.  And as far as the clean up, The Husband handled that.

I was in soup savasana.