Rutabaga & Carrot Soup

What to do with a rutabaga?  The brief description to the Williams-Sonoma Soup of the Day recipe for Rutabaga & Carrot Soup mentions that these otherwise known "yellow turnips" often get ignored because people just don't know what to

do with them.  Yet they are sweet and very flavorful when roasted.  "Paired with carrots and allspice, they simmer into a delicious soup."  Rutabagas have that sort of taste that might remind you not just of your grandmother's kitchen, but your great grandmother's kitchen, and in that right it's one of those throwback foods that remind you of old time kitchen gardens, pickling, root cellars or a summer breeze flying through a screened-in front porch.  I'd go a step further and say that anytime roasted vegetables are called for in a recipe – roasting chicken and vegetables is a fairly common recipe – one cut-up rutabaga might turn a standard vegetable dish into something much more surprising and authentic.  This recipe calls for two rutabagas and four carrots chopped and roasted on a sheet until tender.  When done, they get dumped into a prepared soup base of a sautéed yellow onion, garlic and, importantly, a

good 1/2 tsp. of allspice. Add at least five cups of vegetable broth, a chopped up tomato and let it simmer for 25 minutes.  At this point this soup is brothy at the top and chunky at the bottom so I

assume that if a cook wanted to leave it like this it could be fine.  But the recipe calls to puree the soup in batches in a blender, then pour this back into the warm pot to adjust its brothiness if chosen.  I blended the soup not quite to a full puree, leaving some noticeable chunks of carrots and rutabagas, then added some water to loosen a bit more.  This is ultimate comfort food. A pinch of pepper over the top or maybe even a squeeze of honey...the rutabagas add a very robust but not bitter or too bold taste to the more neutral flavor of the carrots.