Creamy Roasted Garlic Soup - from "The Harry Caray's Restaurant Cookbook" (2003)

RECIPE

6 bulbs garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Spanish onion, chopped
1/3 cup Marsala wine
4 cups homemade chicken stock or equivalent amount canned low-sodium chicken broth
1 large russet potato, peeled and diced
1 cup heavy whipping cream
salt
black pepper
1/4 cup chopped chives

Preheat the oven to 400F.  

Remove the top quarter inch of each garlic bulb. Place the bulbs in a baking dish and drizzle with the olive oil. Bake for 1 hour or until the garlic is soft. Remove the garlic bulbs from the oven and allow them to cool. Squeeze the garlic out of the bulbs and reserve the olive oil from the baking dish.

Heat the reserved oil in a large stockpot and sauté the onion until clear. Add the Marsala wine and reduce by one-third, then add the chicken stock and bring the mixture to a boil.  

Add the potato and roasted garlic and reduce the heat to a simmer for approximately 1/2 hour or until the potato is soft.

Purée the soup in a blender or food processor and return the soup to the pot. Add the cream 1/4 cup at a time, stirring slowly. Season with the salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until the soup thickens. Garnish the soup with the chives.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Well, the unthinkable happened and the Chicago Cubs won the World Series earlier this month.

I have a couple of Cubs cookbooks, but I also have The Harry Caray's Restaurant Cookbook by Jane and Michael Stern. The Sterns have been food and travel writers for decades and this volume was part of a series of regional cookbooks that they published back in the 00s.

The Cubs' victory gave me a reason to finally crack this one open. Harry's has a bunch of restaurants spread out all over Chicagoland and this cookbook presents about 150 recipes for seemingly everything on the menu. It's a pretty decent cookbook. I'm actually curious to check out the other volumes in this series.

Let's get to this month's soup selection. There's a strong Italian flavour to this cookbook, keeping with the theme of the restaurants. The soup recipes include minestrone, tuscan bean and sausage, potato and pancetta, tomato and basil and a few others. The creamy garlic soup jumped out and I gave it a try.

This recipe is very simple (something I seem to say every month haha). You basically make a cream of potato soup and add the roasted garlic bulbs. It takes no time at all, and your home will be filled with fantastic aromas.

The result is a fragrant, mellow soup that goes down easy. Quoting from the cookbook: "When roasted, even ferocious garlic develops a pussycat personality," and I couldn't put it any better.