Apple Parsnip Soup

The apples clutch their purses a little tighter when walking
through parsnip-town. Racist apples. 

If the rain, wind, and gloom outside for the past couple days are any indication, it might not be summer any more. Then again, I live in Chicago, so this is about the third time that I've thought that since August. But this time is different. This time there's also "pumpkin spiced" garbage all throughout every store, and the spiderwebs that I carelessly walk into outside are starting to feel store-bought. So I'm fairly certain that Winter is coming to kill us all, but first we get to ease into it by always being slightly too hot or too cold, and being forced to clean up after dying trees. So it's time to grab all of the root vegetables we can, make some delicious soup, and start waiting for May.

Ingredients:

6 Parsnips
4 Granny Smith Apples
2 Onions
5 Cups Vegetable Stock
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
1/2 tsp Coriander
Salt
Oil

So there are a lot of different kinds of apples out there, and they all have misleading names. Red delicious apples, for instance, while very red on the outside, are actually garbage on the inside. Granny Smith apples are kind of weird and tart. I didn't know the Smith matriarch myself, but if I had to guess I'd say she probably was super sweet and straight laced, in the sort of apologetically racist way that movies depict protagonists in the 40s and 50s. But I digress. The first thing you're gonna need to do is chop up your onions and sauté them in some oil (In a pot of some kind, for preference) with a standard-issue-human's pinch of salt. Let them cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally as an excuse to go smell delicious cooking onions. Then add in your parsnips, which you've prudently taken this time to peel and chop. Once you realize you forgot to do this and you haphazardly do it as fast as possible, add in another pinch of salt and let that whole mess cook down for another 5 minutes.

Apple slices added in futile attempt to distract from the
beige-ness of delicious soup.

Now it's time to peel your apples. Why not earlier? Because apples hate the air, and while I'm not usually one to kowtow to whining vegetation, hate-filled apples turn brown and gross. And sure, you could just squeeze lemon juice in their whiny faces and they'd get over it, but then this soup would taste like lemons which wasn't the idea. So we coddle the apples until the last moment, when we strike. Kind of like an evil witch. Once your apples have seen your true nature we don't have a lot of time, so quickly chop the flesh off their cores, and then toss them in the pot along with the rest of your ingredients. Bring that sucker to a boil and then simmer it for 45 minutes. Blend it until it's smooth, and enjoy. It tastes savory, peppery, mildly sweet, and a little tart, which is perfect for pretending the world isn't dying outside. Some of you may be thinking about the colors of parsnips and peeled apples and wondering "is this another aggressively beige soup that you're making?" And to them I say: see you next week!