The New Year is upon us, and for me it’s going to be the year of soup. Every week, or as near as I can manage, I’ll be making soup, and sharing it with friends.

The same time I decided to soup my way throughout the year my gal informed me that she wanted to see less of both us. Like ninety percent of the population, we each need to lose fifteen (or in my case a bit more) pounds, and the start of the new year is the start of a new resolve.

That’s going to be a challenge, but I’m I’m up for it. We believe in exercise along with calorie and carb counting, so, I’ll do my best to provide some nutritional information. By the way, although I grew up with the Department of Agriculture’s big red book of nutritional information, these days I like http://nutritiondata.self.com for help deconstructing dishes.

So on to today’s soup, which is a Roasted Root Vegetable soup made by emptying out the vegetable drawer in our fridge (the modern root cellar) to use up everything that we were going to cut out, or at least cut down on for the next few months. Sweet potato, white potato, parsnip, and carrot tossed with some olive oil, salt, rosemary and thyme and roasted until they got some color.

click on image for slide show

Yield: 6 8oz servings 250 calories each, 30 grams of carbohydrate (approximate)

• Sweet potato 11 oz
• Potato 8 1/2. oz
• Parsnip 6 oz
• Carrot 8 oz
• Onion 11.5 oz
• Celery 3 pieces 6 3/4 oz
• Garlic 3 cloves
• Chicken Stock, 1 qt.
• Water to adjust texture (1 pint)
• Salt to taste
• Thyme, Rosemary

I started by chopping everything to half inch sized pieces, or a bit smaller except for about a cup of parsnip strips I made with a peeler. Fried crispy in a little olive oil, and it makes a garnish that finishes the soup nicely.

The cut up root vegetables went onto a flat pan, got sprayed with olive oil, sprinkled with kosher salt, thyme and rosemary, and popped into a 425 degree over for 25 minutes.

While the root vegetables were roasting, I chopped up the onion, celery and pepper and sauted the first two up. Roasted peppers sounded like a good idea, so I added the peppers to the oven. As soon as the onions started to get some color I tossed the lot into a quart of chicken stock and left it to simmer.

After 25 minutes, the vegetables were done, but didn’t have the browning I wanted for flavor, so I gave them 4 minutes on broil, which did the trick. I held back a fullish cup of root vegetables to add in at the end for interest, and added the remainder to the broth and sauteed vegetables. I added a pint of water to bring up the level right, then simmered it all for half an hour.

I used some of that time to crisp the parsnip strips I’d made with my peeler in a few tablespoons of olive oil, and with a pinch or two of salt on them. The result was very tasty, in fact it got me to thinking that parsnip chips would be pretty good.

Turning down the heat, I used my handy propeller blender to smooth out the soup, then threw in pinches of salt until it was about right.

Finally, I added the reserved root vegetables and left the whole thing to sit.

Half an hour or so later, we brought two bowls up to temp in the microwave, added the garnish strips, ground some black pepper over it all and dug in.