I got this recipe in a travellers' restaurant in India. Pahar Ganj is an area in Delhi that has lots of cheap hotels and restaurants and it's very handy for the train station. The collection of streets and alleyways also forms one huge bazaar so you can buy almost anything you need for travelling. It makes a good stop off point and I usually go there straight from the airport, hit the train station as soon as it opens to buy tickets then hang around the bazaar area until my train leaves, picking up vital supplies for the trip while I'm waiting. That sounds like a rapid series of events but in India such sequences usually take at least a couple of days to unfold so there's always plenty of time to explore the various restaurants in the area.
Most of the restaurants are high on ambience but low on quality of food. Many places have open fronts and it's great to sit and watch the comings and goings on the street (click here for a picture of some comings and goings). There are also a lot of roof top restaurants where you can catch the sun and watch squirrels and parakeets, or look down into the narrow lanes below. Generally the menus are much the same - baked beans and toast, banana pancakes and stuff like that; none of it cooked very well - but a few places do stand above the rest. One of them is a rooftop restaurant on Main Bazaar road, above Sam's cafe. The menu has most of the usual stuff - Indian Chinese, Indian Itailan, Indian Israeli, etc. but the quality is rather good. The second year after discovering this restaurant, Sveta and I went there just after arriving in India. I had just booked a train ticket to North Bengal to do a spot of trekking and Sveta had an air ticket to Chennai. We decided to have lunch before doing a bit of shopping.
The rooftop restaurant had a chalkboard with the day's specials - carrot and rosemary soup and avocado and yak cheese salad were there and that's what I had. Now, if I thought most people could get yak cheese on a regular basis, I would post that recipe as the salad was delicious; however, the carrot soup was also pretty good, and since the vegetable is fairly easy to get a hold of across a large area of the globe, that's the recipe we're going with. It was a good meal. I like to chose the day's special if there is one on offer. It's usually fresh and well prepared. It's usually available, too. In my experience, that's not something that can be said for a great many of the offerings on Indian menus.
I returned from North Bengal two weeks later and stopped off again in Pahar Ganj before heading for Chennai to join Sveta. I decided to go to the same restaurant and check out the day's special. The soup of the day was carrot and rosemary. By popular demand, perhaps?
Ingredients
About 350g carrots
3 cloves of garlic
A half teaspoon of dried rosemary
1 or 2 vegetable stock cubes (or equivalent)
Olive oil
Salt
150g single cream
About 1.5 litres of water
Put the water in a pan and set to boil. Peel and finely grate the carrots. Peel and finely chop the garlic. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and fry the garlic for a minute or so until it just begins to turn golden. Add the rosemary and stir then quickly add the grated carrot. Stir for a couple of minutes until the carrot has softened.
Add the contents of the frying pan to the soup pan along with the stock. Bring to the boil and then reduce to a gentle simmer for five minutes. Salt to taste and turn off the heat. Stir in the cream and the soup is ready to serve.
