What do you think of when you see purple carrots?  Perhaps the possibility of roasted vegetables, or maybe the notion of purple carrots is new to you.  I however, immediately thought of soup.  “Let’s make some awesome, bright purple soup!  Who wouldn’t want to eat bright purple soup?”.  I was aware that most people probably wouldn’t want to but this fact was easily dismissed by my own eagerness.

I actually put some thought into this meal too, which once again supports my belief that the less you try and plan a meal, the better.  These were the flavours that I decided upon:

• purple carrots
• leftover baked lamb
• parsnips
• onion
• chicken stock
• moroccan inspired spices: ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, paprika and tumeric*
• lemon: juice and preserved
• greek yoghurt

As you can see, it all started out well.

It all went downhill, quickly.

I had forgotten the valuable lessons learned in early childhood about colour combination.  Red and yellow = orange, yellow and blue = green and so forth.  Remember though when you would then add a wrong colour and suddenly you had brown.  You would keep adding colours and then it would just become a worse shade of brown.  I managed to reproduce this phenomenon as an adult.  Enter, tumeric*.  The tumeric that is not only known for flavour but as a spice which adds a vibrant yellow colour to dishes.  Think back now, what does purple and yellow equal?  Oh that’s right, brown!  A big pot of brown lumpy soup.  Delicious.

All hope was not lost.  “Let’s add some milk”, I thought.  We then had a greyish, purple brown pot of gurgling soup.  Gurgling and bubbling soup.  It resembled what you would imagine the cauldron of a witch in a fairytale would have bubbling away in the darkness of her kitchen.  At this moment, I pissed myself laughing.  I don’t know how else to describe it but by using that rather crude terminology.  It was the worst thing I had probably ever cooked.  Every time I looked at it, I cracked up laughing some more.  I entered a fit of a laughter that lasted a good few minutes and resulted in tears rolling down my face and my stomach aching.  I should make dodgy food more often!

Yet I still did not lose hope, as looks aside it actually tasted rather nice.  A bit of a blitz to release some of the fabulous purple colour still hiding in the carrots.  I also next unintentionally rediscovered another science lesson that had been covered at some point in high school.  What an awesome surprise it was when upon adding the lemon juice, a vibrant red was exposed wherever the juice fell.  What was the cause of this you may be thinking?  Anthocyanin.  Anthocyanin are pigments found in many predominantly red/purple fruits and vegetables such as raspberries and red cabbage.  When an acidic solution such as lemon juice is added, it turns a pink/red.  My soup was a pH indicator.

Things were indeed picking up.  I added some yoghurt, preserved lemon and herbs for contrast.  I also couldn’t resist putting some retro red dots to the top of my soup by adding a little bit more lemon juice prior to serving.

It turned out to be quite the little science experiment!  All of which was eaten.