Livre d'Or

It's easy soup. It goes like this: Chop and fry an onion with 3 or 4 cloves and some garlic. Peel, wash and chop as many carrots as you can be bothered with. A potato and a single parsnip are optional extras; both thicken the soup slightly and the parsnip adds to the flavour. Fry the vegetables with the onions for a while. Then fill up the pan with stock (the Osem pareve chicken soup works very well, but otherwise vegetable stock is fine). Bring to the boil, add salt, cover and simmer until the vegetables are soft.

If you are clumsy and nervous like me, allow the soup to cool, or if you are dextrous like ploni_bat_ploni skip this step. Blend the soup with any kind of powered blades. If you have no access to a blender or similar, cook the soup until everything falls apart and then mash it with a fork or something; it will be slightly lumpier and somewhat harder work, but it will still be fine.

Continue cooking the blended soup for a while on the lowest heat possible. Overnight is fine, which is why I made it for shabbat. Less than several hours will probably be ok but the flavour ends up slightly blander. When you are about to eat it, add the juice of a whole, large orange. If you're feeling ambitious, add the zest as well. Don't on any account serve it to hatam_soferet; she has an irrational prejudice against orange coloured foods.

If you need to thin it out having stored it, you can add milk. It will curdle a bit, because that's what happens when you mix milk with orange juice. I don't think it matters, but if you or your guests are horribly squeamish about curdled milk, you can add water instead. For fancy effect you can put a swirl of cream into the bowl and not bother to mix it completely. But that probably wouldn't appeal to you with your views on cream.