When we talk about "comfort food", soup and a sandwich would certainly seem to fill the bill.  But when we talk about "new adventures in comfort food", we have to dig a bit deeper into our culinary bag of tricks.  Fortunately for us, that's something we love to do.  Take our recent lunch special: tarragon chicken salad sandwich with sweet potato and star anise soup.

Chicken salad is a delicatessen staple all over this great land of ours.  To give it a slightly more exotic flair, we add tarragon to it, then serve it with tomatoes and lettuce, and the optional touch of red onions and a jalapeno pepper on the side, just for that extra kick.  But in this ensemble, it's the soup that plays the starring role.

We love sweet potatoes, which make a wonderfully creamy and sweet (duh!) soup...but the idea of using star anise as a flavor counterpoint came from the cookbook, "Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia", by Jeffrey Alford and his wife, Naomi Duquid.  The couple spent months traveling down the Mekong River, collecting cooking ideas and recipes from villages along the way.

For this soup, which we adapted from the intrepid authors who combine their love of food with an interest in anthropology (makes sense to us), we start by cooking star anise with our sweet potatoes -- then we add cream and puree the mixture. We end up soup whose creamy sweetness is balanced by the licorice notes of the star anise.  But we don't stop there.  We add a generous dollop of a ginger-infused creme fraiche before serving.  Our creme fraiche is created by letting buttermilk sit over night to essentially become a clotted cream.  We then grate fresh ginger into it.  When added to the soup, it introduces a sourness that accents the sweetness of the sweet potato, while the star anise and ginger add some delightful complexity to the flavor.

You have to admit...this sure beats opening a can of chicken noodle soup, doesn't it?

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 8:52:10 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)    Comments [0]