Roast Potato and Onion Soup

Cold, grey, dreary English days call for a hearty winter soup to take the chill out of the bones. SheWhoMustBeFed had been out doing errands and came home looking all blue and frigid around the edges, so I made this soup to thaw her out. The roasted vegetables add depth of flavour and texture. This recipe will feed two very hungry people, and it takes about half an hour from clicking on the oven to sitting down to eat.

Ingredients

• 4 medium spuds - a type that roasts up nicely
• a few cloves of garlic
• 1 medium onion
• fresh bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, parsley, dill
• black peppercorns (to taste: I would add about 3/4 teaspoon)
  
• white miso
  
• olive oil

What to do (important to do in this order if you do need to make this in less than 31 minutes)

• crank up the oven (to whatever tempurature suits your oven for roasting vegetables)
  
• top and tail the onion, remove the outer flaky skin. Place in a small roasting dish with olive oil and place in the hottest part of the oven
  
• reserve one and half potatoes
• do not peel the remaining potatoes. Dig out any nasty bits. Cube. Place in a roasting dish with olive oil and place in the hottest part of the oven
• de-skin the garlic, place in a small covered baking container with olive oil and get that in the oven too.
  
• Dry roast the peppercorns
  
• ** Note: I leave it to you to remove the onion, garlic and spuds from the oven at the right time. In my oven, the onion would take the longest, followed by the spuds. The garlic would be ready in about 15-20 minutes while the peppercorns would be (dry) roasted in 5 or 6 minutes.
• Meanwhile....peel the reserved spuds. Cut in to smallish pieces and boil together with the bay leaf and the miso paste. Once the spuds are soft, gently mash them. This forms the basis of the "soup"
• Once the peppercorns are roasted; crush them in a mortar and pestle
  
• Once the garlic is roasted, puree it together with some of the soup and add to saucepan. At this time also add the chopped rosemary and thyme, and fish out the bay leaves.
• Once the spuds and onion are roasted... the outer skin of the rost onion will be chewy and needs to be removed. Stand the onion on one end and slice in half with a very sharp knife (a blunt knife will make a right mess of this as the onion should be very soft). Lay down the halves on their cut side. Using whatever implement is to hand, "pinch" off the outer layer and discard. Cut the roast onion into largish pieces.
• Add roast potato, onion, pepper, chopped dill and parsley to the soup.
• Stir
• Eat - note that the longer you delay the eating now the less the roast spuds will have a nice crispiness to them
  

Nice with chunky bread...