For a cold winter day, sometimes all you want is a soup that warms you, radiating heat from the your middle to all your fingers and toes that are a bit stiff and chilled from the blustery winds of late or being a little soaked from the rain or snow.

Even better is if that soup is low carb, healthy. Something like this Roasted Cauliflower and Leek Soup Recipe.

The roasted cauliflower in the Roasted Cauliflower and Leek Soup Recipe is pretty classic. All the pieces of this recipe are delicious, so putting it together only increases that right?

Especially this roasted cauliflower, which you have the option to season how you’d like- with garlic, in my case with dill, or whatever are your favorite herbs. Then roast!

In fact, you might be tempted, after pulling it out of the oven and quality tasting a floret or three florets, to just start eating then and just have a meal of roasted cauliflower.

There’s something very low key about just putting something in the oven and letting it be while you attend to other matters, like laundry. Especially in the winter, roasting becomes one of my go-to ways to make a meal.

Temptation also appears with portion of the recipe with the sauteed leeks in butter- you may be tempted to rather than waiting another 40 minutes for flavors to combine in a soup, to just pour the leeks in pasta with a sprinkle of cheese and call it good. Especially right now at the Farmers Market, I can never resist grabbing a few leeks.

Patience and perseverance here will pay off though-  this Roasted Cauliflower and Leek Soup Recipe makes 6 servings. However, that didn’t stop F from, after I had one bowl and left for some errands, eating the rest of the pot of soup before dinner.

I guess it must be a testament to how good this soup is.  It is full of flavor, but light and not creamy (unless you switch out the skim milk for cream, or add potatoes instead of flour to thicken it a bit). If you are gluten free you can ignore the flour, and if you want this vegan, switch out the skim milk for soymilk or a bit of evaporated milk, and the butter for olive oil.

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves of minced garlic (optional) and/or any herb you want to flavor the oil with for roasting- I picked a teasp0on of dill and left out the garlic since I needed to be around people later
• 2 tablespoons olive oil or vegetable oil
• 1 head cauliflower broken into florets – this was 1 1/2 pounds of florets for me
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 2 leeks, white part only, chopped
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 quart stock – I used vegetarian stock
• 1/3 cup skim milk
• 1 teaspoon parsley and 1 teaspoon of chives (or green herb of your choice)
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 tablespoon cracked black pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Stir garlic and olive or vegetable oil together in a small bowl. Alternately, you can choose to flavor your oil with herbs instead of garlic (I picked dill). Arrange cauliflower florets on a baking sheet; pour oil mixture over cauliflower. Toss to coat, and then distribute to the cauliflower is laying flat all across the baking sheet so it will brown better. Roast the cauliflower in the oven until tender and lightly browned, about 30-40 minutes or so- just look for the color to be right. Halfway through, use a spatula to turn over the cauliflower so it browns on the other side.
   
2. Melt butter in a 4-quart stockpot over medium heat. When the butter is melted, stir leeks and flour in the melted butter until cook until well blended, 5 to 10 minutes. Instead of flour, another option might be to use potato to help thicken- or just ignore it all together.
   
3. Add cauliflower, stock, and skim milk to the stockpot with the leeks. Simmer all together until flavors have combined, about 20 to 25 minutes. Stir in the parsley and chives (or green herbs of your choice), salt, and pepper into the soup; simmer until desired thickness, 10 to 15 more minutes.
   

If you want the soup to be smoother, use an immersion blender, but I liked that it was a bit chunky! It makes your mouth work a little longer with it, feeling the textures in your soup, so you can savor it a little bit longer. I also think it makes you feel more full. I love soups that have texture.

Serve with some bread! To keep it healthy I served it with one slice of Dave’s Bread- Blues Bread specifically, essentially a wheat bread with seeds like sunflower, flax, unhulled sesame and black sesame seeds, rolled oats, and blue cornmeal, and a little molasses for sweetness. But you can make a simple sandwich, or maybe a toasted piece of bread- maybe even garlic bread. Or a salad.

For a little bit of richness, you may want to just sprinkle just a pinch of cheddar- that’ a very small luxury you can add. I think cheese can’t hurt that much!

How do you like to pair soup with a meal? Would you go with just bread, upgrade to a sandwich, go full healthy with a salad, or indulge with sprinkle of cheese?