.

The latest soup at Dirt Candy is Fennel and Sunflower Seed Soup with Pickled Mustard Seeds, Mustard Green Pesto, and Fennel Pretzels. A lot of people don’t like fennel, but come on. Give it a chance!

.

.

Because this started out as a sausage.

.

.

For some reason this dish took forever to get right. It all began with my desire to make fennel sausages. I wanted that fennel-sausagey taste in a soup but it took me a while to realize that what I really wanted was fennel soup. Now that I had my head on straight, I needed to figure out how to do this. The first step was the soup itself. I wanted to make a creamy but light soup, but I didn’t want to do a heavy nut milk. So I wound up soaking sunflower seeds and pureeing them which gave me a really light, fresh, creamy soup that balanced the fennel taste really nicely. And the strong taste of fennel needs balancing – a little of it can go a long way.

.

.

This is a vegan soup, despite the fact that it’s ultra-creamy. The cool thing about it is that after blending the soup it comes out a pinky-brown color and then it gets darker while it’s heating. But, suddenly, just as it’s about to boil it turns bright white, which is how we know it’s done.

.

After getting the soup together, the dish all fell into place. It needed sweetness, so we caramelized fennel and rolled it into tiny balls.

.

.

Then, because it was a fennel taste that, in my mind, was associate with sausage, I wanted mustard and pretzels. I pickled mustard seeds to get an acidic crunch:

.

.

And made fennel pretzels because there should be more pretzels in the world.

.

.

I made a pesto from the mustard greens to give it a bright green finish.

.

.

And there you have it. One of the less complicated dishes I’ve ever made. It started as a sausage, ended up as a soup.

.