Bonus Blog: The Purple Reign

I am not sure what is going on with my crystallized intelligence at age 56, but lately I have been coming up with some truly righteous soup ideas. I might actually be peaking. This week my brain locked onto one mission and one mission only: figuring out how to properly use purple sweet potatoes in a soup.

Purple sweet potatoes are the new kale. Every health podcast I listen to keeps raving about them like they are the second coming of chia seeds. You hear words like rich in anthocyanins, high in beta carotene, low glycemic index, resistant starch, and loaded with vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. If you have no idea what any of that actually means, you can look it up or just trust me (UWGB Heath & Wellness) that it is all good stuff. And at $4.50/lb, it better be!

So naturally, the only logical move is to turn these purple gems into a full-blown purple soup. Prince, or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, would absolutely eat this. It looks like a bowl of Purple Rain with extra chucky antioxidants floating around.

Like all of my soups, this one is packed with healthy ingredients, but the lead players are the purple sweet potatoes and the beets. Yes, beets are called red beets, but let us be honest, they are purple. Between the two of them, this soup could probably lower your blood pressure, clean out your gut, and make your Apple Fitness App smile!

The fun part is that you can make this soup your own because there are a ton of purple veggies out there. Purple kale, purple carrots, purple cauliflower, purple potatoes, even purple bell peppers if you get lucky. Basically, if it is purple, toss it in. It feels like a royal order straight from Soup Club headquarters.

Now for the origin story. Surgeon Jenn and I created the first batch of this madness on the west coast. This was a full-on culinary experiment. We were entering new territory here, the first purple soup known to mankind. The first version used three beets and the color was insane, somewhere between magenta and cosmic violet. The flavor, though, was very beet forward. We liked it, but I knew I needed to dial it back for the official version or Kevin wouldn’t touch it!

The updated recipe uses one beet. You still get that incredible color, but the taste is far more balanced. Sweet, earthy, savory, warm, and not dominated by beet. It is everything you want from a purple soup and nothing you do not.

This soup is also ridiculously fun to make. Watching the pot go from normal human colors to a cauldron of glowing purple is deeply satisfying. It feels like Willy Wonka decided to try clean eating for a weekend.

Jenn and I made a whole adventure out of gathering ingredients. We went to four different grocery stores hunting for anything purple. It turned into a full-blown antioxidant scavenger hunt. Picture two adults in the produce section seriously debating whether something is purple enough to qualify. At one point an employee asked if they could help. We told them we were making purple soup and needed purple vegetables. The look on their face was priceless, a mix of confusion and amazement, as if they were thinking, “why didn’t I think of that.”

In the end, the soup was delicious, souper healthy, vibrant, and an absolute blast to make (“absolute blast” making soup? Yep, this is what old people do for fun). This is not a Soup Club meeting soup, so the recipe is on the Partner’s Page. I’ll be bringing in a sample for work people Monday and will report back. I’m thinking it’s not going to pull in the 8.8 score from the last one, but I’ll be adding years to everyone’s lives!