>>So let's get started with this carrot soup.

It's wonderful with a Viognier, it's also spectacular with a Petit Manseng or a Roussanne and even a Chardonnay, but today with the Viognier.

So I'm going to put a little bit of oil in my pan and get that nice and hot.

The ingredients in the soup are pretty simple.

We're going to use some carrots, some sliced leeks, and then a little bit of ginger root.

So let's just grate a little bit of ginger root, and if you don't have a ginger grater, that's fine.

Just chop it up nice and finely.

Now I have about a teaspoon of ginger root here and that's all I want for this particular wine.

And that's what's in the recipe, a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half.

If you're using a Petit Manseng, it's awesome to have about two teaspoons of the ginger root because the Petit Manseng really absorbs that great flavor.

Now let's add our carrots and our leeks, and we'll pop in our ginger root.

So the idea here is to get a little bit of oil on all of those ingredients, a little bit stirred through in the leeks, the carrots and the ginger root.

You don't have to saute until they're completely cooked, because we're going to add liquid to the pan.

That's where the soup comes in.

Now I want to add a little bit of liquid and some seasoning.

So the first thing, a little bit of chicken stock.

Three cups, to be exact.

I love fruit in this, so I'm going to add about three quarters of a cup of applesauce, unsweetened.

Now you can use an apple if you'd like.

I also love this soup with pear.

It's delicious.

It doesn't have to be sauce.

It can be whole fruit, because it's going to cook down.

And the last liquid we need is one 14-ounce can of coconut milk.

Now I like to use full fat, but you can also use a light coconut milk.

It works just fine.

And then we need a flavor component.

This is cardamom, and I love cardamom in my soup.

When I'm making a butternut squash or a carrot soup, cardamom really is a highlight flavor for me.

So about three quarters of a teaspoon, sometimes half.

Again, it's just to your taste.

My recipe calls for a half, but sometimes I like to put in just a speck more.

Now, I want this to simmer for about 40 minutes or until those carrots and leeks are extremely soft, and then I can put it through my blender.

So my soup is all cooked down.

The carrots are nice and soft.

Those leeks have started to kind of disintegrate into the liquid, and now I want to just cool that soup for a while and then take it to the blender to just blend it in small batches.

So let's blend this beautiful concoction.

And all I want to do is take about half into my blender first, and then the other half we'll do in a second batch.

Now, make sure your soup is not too terribly hot because when it's hot and it goes in the blender, the steam will create an explosion and you don't want that to happen.

So I always have a towel with me and I just kind of lay my towel over the top of the blender, but I release the top so that way, if you get a lot of heat popping up, it goes into the towel, it doesn't go all over your body.

(blender whirring) There we go.

This looks so gorgeous.

I just love this soup.

Now let's do the rest.

You don't want to scoop out the soup yet because what happens is you have all of those solids in your first batch, and then you have a lot of the liquid left for the second batch, so make sure you blend them together.

All right, again, let's take off that little top just in case.

(blender whirring) And you can see how much more liquid there is in this batch.

(blender whirring) And the heat did pop up.

It's a little bit warm right there.

Now let's pour in the rest and we'll stir through.

Be sure you really scrape it down.

You don't wanna miss any of that soup.

Okay, now we've got our soup ready.

Let's just put some in our bowl.

And then we want to garnish, and I love to garnish this soup with a little sour cream or creme fraiche and a bit of freshly minced chives.

Now you can snip these chives right in, but if they're at all moist from your garden, they will just stay together in a clump, and mine just came out of my garden, so I want to make sure I chop them with a knife and that way I can kind of spread them apart a little bit.

There we go.

I like to use a nice little piping bag for this.

If you don't have one, use a Ziploc bag if you wanna make it pretty and just snip off the corner, pipe right into your bowl.

Or you can just use a dollop of sour cream.

There we go.

And a little sprinkle of that chive.

I love fresh chives on my soup, in my potatoes.

Awesome.

All right, now let's taste it with this amazing wine.

This is a Viognier, and Viognier is light, it's refreshing.

It has a lot of apricot, nectarine, honeysuckle.

It's fantastic.

Mm, so good.

And with this soup, let's give it a try.

(light music) Mmm, that's so good, and the pairing is just perfect.

(light music)