Curried peanut butter buttermilk soup

 

Sadly, it is definitely still soup weather here. We woke up to snow (again!?) with a forecast of more possible tonight and 20 degrees windchill. By mid-afternoon the second snowy wind arrived. This after it got up to 88 degrees on Wednesday. Another case of weather whiplash, only partially treatable by soup.

Curried peanut soup
Adapted from "Mollie Katzen’s Recipes:Soups,” that cute little ring-bound flippy book that has its own built-in easel to stand up on the counter. I was intrigued by this recipe that could be said to riff on peanut butter banana sandwiches.

Ingredients
1 cup plain peanut butter (I took plain to mean creamy rather than chunky style)
2 tablespoons honey
4 cups boiling water, divided
2 teaspoons peanut oil
2 cups minced onion
10 large garlic cloves, minced (no really, you can’t even detect it when it’s done)
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon dry mustard
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground cayenne (or less, depending on your heat preference)
2 cups buttermilk, room temperature

Method
Combine peanut butter, honey and 2 cups boiling water in a large bowl. Whisk until smooth. Whisk in remaining boiling water and set aside.

Heat 2 teaspoons peanut oil in a large saucepan. Add onions, garlic, ginger and salt and cook 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring often. Add cumin, turmeric, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, mustard, cloves and cayenne and cook another 5 minutes. Stir in peanut butter mixture. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for 20 minutes. Stir in buttermilk and serve with banana topping if desired.

For the optional banana topping
This called for three bananas. I just tried it with one, and I think three would be overkill in any case.
1 banana, sliced ¼-inch thick on the diagonal
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon peanut oil
Cinnamon, salt

Place banana in a shallow dish. Drizzle with lemon juice and let stand for 10 minutes. Heat 1 teaspoon peanut oil in a small skillet. Cook bananas with the lemon juice for a minute over medium heat until it just picks up a bit of color. Flip over and cook the other side. (The recipe said not to worry if they lost their shape since they would mainly disappear into the soup anyway, which was my first clue that this wasn’t really garnish material.) Dust with cinnamon and a tiny pinch of salt. 

Rating: As Dave points out, peanuts are really legumes, so it's not that odd to make them into a soup, but it's still horizon-expanding about what can be called a soup. The spice combo gives it really nice flavor; I could see poaching that for other applications. The texture was just ever so slightly grainy, perhaps because I used fresh peanut butter. It's fairly pantry friendly, providing yours is stocked with that many spices.

Now about that garnish: Don't bother. The bananas instantly sink to the bottom of the bowl so it's not so much a garnish as a vanish, and I don't really think they brought anything to the party.