Ayr and I both made soups today at HSQ. If you stopped by at breakfast you may have seen us dicing and caramelizing. Now the soups are ready for you to come taste.

Ayr made African Peanut soup. This is a soup he discovered a couple years ago in Providence. The peanuts act as a legume in the soup, so it’s pretty filling. There are sweet potatoes too, and carrots, and the soup gets blended at the end. That garnish is fried sweet potato.

I made up a Wild Rice soup. I learned a few things about wild rice. One, it’s not really rice. It’s a grass that grows in the waters of Minnesota. Two, it’s traditionally harvested by canoe. And three, most people hate it because their only experience of it is in boxed rice mixes, where it’s mixed with actual rice, and ends up being undercooked.

I learned you need to cook the wild rice for a long time until it splits. When it does, it kind of looks like a shrimp. When your wild rice looks like a tiny shrimp, you know you’re done.