Roasted Sunchoke and Garlic Soup with Spanish Chorizo

Ok, so this is really more like a stew but who's really keeping track. Which is actually pretty incredible, considering that I started with basically no recipe laid out, just some great winter-y vegetables I wanted to roast and then puree. My first foray into making soups with my food processor... and what I'd been dying to do all last winter as I was coaxing my former food processor to work and manually mashing vegetables when it inevitably didn't. But I digress.

On a whim (which is what 85% of my food shopping is) I picked up some lovely plump sunchokes, otherwise known as Jerusalem artichokes, which when roasted give off this earthy, almost smokey flavor and taste amazing, think roasted potatoes with more depth. Lightly tossed in some olive oil and a few cloves of garlic, a sprinkling of salt and pepper then roasting away. Pureed with a touch of cream and a ton of low sodium chicken stock, threw it all in a giant pot where I had just sauteed up some Spanish chorizo, threw in a healthy splash of bourbon and finally added in the pre-cooked black eyed peas. Let it simmer for a few and voila... soup. Well, hearty soup. Like a stew, but not quite.

I do this a lot, where I just throw things that I think will work into a pot, or a pan, or a food processor. Sometimes, like the above recipe, it works. But most times it's just meh... edible, moderately tasty, but definitely not blog worthy. I have a girlfriend who is always incredulous about how rarely I use a recipe, or measure things out (we're strictly talking cooking here, not baking by any means) so I just want to come clean and say that by no means do I make blog-worthy meals every night. But if I can get 1 in 4 to be pretty darn good, well then I consider that a success. In fact, just the other night I made an arroz con pollo with brown rice and chicken legs. I thought I could do it, in fact I could just throw it together. 3 hours later I'm starving and finally give up. And while the chicken was delicious, the rice was still crunchy. Still. You'd think, with this dish being in the regular rotation of my Chilean Grandmother's meal (granted not with brown rice of course) that I'd have it down. It'd be in my bones, in my blood. But alas, no. Only practice will get me there.

Roasted Sunchoke and Garlic Soup with Spanish Chorizo
1 lb. sunchokes- scrubbed clean but not peeled
4-5 medium sized unpeeled garlic cloves
1 Tbl. olive oil
7 cups low sodium chicken stock- or veggie
2-3 precooked chorizo links- quartered into small pieces
1/4-1/3 c. cream
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 Tbl. bourbon
1 can pre-cooked black eyed peas (or white beans, hominy, etc)
1 tsp. salt plus more to taste
Pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 375. Toss sunchokes and garlic with olive oil and 1 tsp of salt and place on a baking sheet. Roast for 10 minutes and remove the garlic. Roast for another 5-10 minutes until a knife can be inserted easily into the thickest part of the sunchoke. Remove and let cool. Peel the shell from the garlic.

2. While these are roasting in a large soup pot brown the chorizo. Once browned, remove and drain on a paper towel.

3. Once cooled, cut sunchoke into smaller pieces and place in a food processor with the garlic. Add the cream and a little of the chicken stock to get it nice and smooth. Pour out into the soup pot. Add the rest of the stock and let reduce a little.

4. Add in the black eyed peas, oregano, then the chorizo. Pour in the bourbon and stir to combine. Let simmer for 30 minutes-1 hour. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve with cornbread.

One last thing to leave you with. For any vegetarians out there, New Years Resolutioners, people watching their weight, etc... this is actually pretty good for you. No butter, very little oil and you can easily leave out the cream, especially if you can get a nice puree on the vegetables. You could even add more veggies: parsnips, turnips, carrots, potatoes, etc, or greens like kale, collards, spinach. And the sunchokes are so subtly smokey and full of flavor that you can easily leave out the chorizo.