(relaxing country music) - There are days when there is nothing more comforting than a warm bowl of soup.

Today, we're making a creamy wild rice soup that is hearty and delicious, served with a side toasted garlic bread, you are going to love it.

So, grab a cup of coffee, and pull up a chair, and let's make some soup.

(upbeat country music) (warm country music) So, to get our rice started, we need one cup of wild rice, (rice swishing) and you need to put your rice in a tall sauce pan.

This is an actual rice cooker, but you don't need an actual rice cooker, you can do it in a tall-sided sauce pan.

And to our rice then, all we need to do is cover it with some water, a couple inches maybe.

(water splashing) I usually use one cup of rice to two cups of water, so, it keeps my ratios going.

Now all I'm gonna do is get this going.

We want to bring it to a boil, and then, once it comes to a boil, we're just gonna give it a little stir.

(spatula pattering) Put the lids on.

(lid clinking) (lid clinking) And just turn down the heat enough so that you have a simmer and it's going to do its thing for the next 40 to 50 minutes.

Did you know that wild rice really isn't a rice at all?

It is actually the seed of an aquatic grass that grows naturally in lakes, ponds, rivers.

It has a delicious, nutty flavor and a chewy texture.

And as you can see here, it's just long, thin grains that are black and dark brown.

It is delicious and used a lot in soups or stews.

It's sometimes combined with white or brown rice.

And it is delicious as a side dish, as well as in the soup that we're gonna be making today.

(upbeat country music) For our soup today, we need chopped celery, we need chopped carrots, and some chopped onion.

So, we need a relatively small dice, not anything too tiny, (knife clacking) but let's just get that going.

(bowl clinking) And just a little tip, if you are dicing up carrots, is try to get a flat edge.

So, you know, this is a half of a carrot right now, but if you had a whole carrot like this, I would recommend at least going down the middle as best you can, and then you'll have a flat surface to work from so you're not trying to maneuver your knife around a round carrot and risk cutting yourself.

But, again, small dice.

So I'm just gonna take this in half again.

And another half here.

I once watched a video where they were showing you how to make perfect little cubes.

I'm like, "Oh, my gosh."

Even for me, that was a little bit over the top.

But we're just dicing it up, getting it ready for our soup.

(knife clacking) The French term for this combination of veggies that we're using today for our soup is mirepoix, and that is a mix of carrots, and celery, and onion.

And, in many countries, they have their own term for mirepoix, including Italy, where their mixture is onion, carrots, and celery, but they also include garlic and some parsley, maybe some panchetta.

Spain has their combination, called a sofrito, and it has onion, garlic, tomato, and peppers.

But there's also a Cajun version which has onion, celery, and green pepper.

So, they've all got classic ratios, two parts onion maybe to one part celery, or one part carrot.

For me, and the soup, I will tell you that I'm putting in a little bit more carrot than I am the others just because that's to my taste.

But certainly use the combination that best suits whatever it is you're making.

(warm country music) (warm country music continues) We need to cut up one whole onion for our soup.

But did you ever wonder why your eyes tear up when you cut onions?

Well, onions store sulfur compounds, and when you cut the onion, the cells break open, and then there's this enzymatic reaction that causes a gas.

The gas floats up to your eyes, and your eyes tear up to flush out the gas.

Some things that might help would be to chill the onion before cutting it up, and use a very sharp knife, plus, cut the root, which has the highest concentration of the sulfur compound.

Or, which is the thing that I like to do, is wear goggles.

And, honestly, for me, that's the only thing that works.

So let's start cutting this baby up.

(bowl rattling) (knife clacking gently) See?

No tears.

So, our rice has been cooking for about 40 minutes now.

I'm just going to lift the lid and check and see where we're at.

I've got double lids on my rice cooker here.

All right.

Ooh, look at that.

I think we are totally ready.

If you can see, the rice kernels themselves have opened up, and they are now expanded and all nice and fluffy, which is just what we want.

So, let's turn our burner off, and we are going to set this aside until we're ready to use it.

And one little hint is you can make this wild rice two to three days ahead of time, and then you're one step closer to your creamy wild rice.

(warm country music continues) (pot lid clanking) (spatula pattering) So, sometimes, (gentle country music) when you're using fresh herbs, you don't want to go through all the hassle of getting each little leaf off of the stem.

Let me show you a nice way that you can still get the flavor of your fresh herb into whatever you're making soups, stews, but not go through the hassle of getting every little leaf off.

And it really only works for those herbs that have a nice little woody stem to them.

So, like this is our thyme.

Here's a rosemary, it would make a nice herb to do this.

But we are going to just tie it up, versus working on getting every single little leaf off of the stem.

And all I have here is a piece of kitchen twine that we're just going to tie it up, and wrap the string around so we get it good and tight, and just give it another little knot.

So then, when your soup, or stew, or whatever it is you're making is finished, you just grab the string, pull it out, and voila, you have all the flavor of your herb, but none of the woody stems.

To get our soup started we need one stick of butter.

Into the pot.

And we're gonna get that melty.

(butter sizzling) And, to that, we are adding a combination of onions, chopped celery, (bowl clinking softly) (butter sizzling) and chopped carrots.

So I'm just gonna stir that around a little bit.

I'm trying not to touch the pot because it's hot.

And we're just gonna let that cook down, and get those carrots, and celery, and onions nice and soft.

It'll take about 10 minutes or so.

And when that is ready, we'll add some more ingredients.

So, our onions are getting nice and translucent, our carrots and celery are softening up.

And now I'm going to add three cloves of garlic that I've chopped up, and just stir that around.

I'm gonna let it do its thing until I can really smell the garlic.

(butter sizzling) (warm country music continues) Mm, which I can.

(spatula tapping softly) To that, I'm adding 1/4th of a cup of all-purpose flour, that will help to thicken the soup up.

But the thing with adding flour is we want to cook the flour taste out of the soup.

So I'm just gonna keep stirring that, I don't want the flour to brown, I just want it to thicken up that butter and the vegetable juices so that we have a nice, thick soup.

And you know what?

If flour isn't your thing, you don't have to add it.

It's just then your soup is going to be a little less thick, which is still delicious and yummy.

(butter sizzling) (warm country music continues) (butter sizzling) Okay, I think now we're ready.

Our flour has been nicely incorporated, and is cooked out in terms of the taste itself.

And to that we are adding two ounces of yummy drinking sherry.

(mixture sizzling) Do you hear that sizzle?

So, that is exactly what we wanna hear, and we're gonna cook that sherry and veggies just for a minute or so.

And what will be left is that wonderful kind of smoky sherry flavor, but not the alcohol.

So, to our lovely little vegetable mix, with sherry, we are adding a quart of chicken stock.

And yes, of course, if you have homemade chicken stock, by all means, use homemade.

But I don't, and this is tasty, so I'm just adding it in as is.

And give it a stir.

(warm country music continues) Next up, we have some fresh thyme that I have tied just into a little bundle.

So give that a little stir, get that thyme up under that delicious chicken stock.

(spatula thudding gently) And to that now we're adding our cooked rice.

And actually we started with one cup of uncooked rice, this is about now three to four cups.

So, in it goes.

That's good.

Give it a stir.

So we're gonna add just a little bit of fresh ground pepper (pepper grinding) and a little bit of salt.

This is one thing I love about cooking versus baking, you don't have to be quite as exact, which is fun.

So, we're gonna let this simmer for about five minutes (lid clinking) with the lid on.

All right, let's see what our soup is doing.

All right.

Ooh, we're looking good.

This has just been simmering away for about five minutes or so.

Don't forget to fish out your thyme bundle.

And see, some of our thyme leaves have gotten off the stems, but an easy way to keep those stems from being in our soup.

And now, to our soup, we are going to put in the full can, or 12 ounces, of evaporated milk.

I learned something interesting about evaporated milk, that it is actually whole milk, but with 60% of the water removed.

It adds that creaminess without, you know, being so heavy as if we were going to do just cream, all cream, in our soup.

But we need to add a little bit of extra creaminess, richness, and so I'm adding a half a cup of half-and-half to the mix.

In it goes.

Give that a stir.

The half-and-half will really add just enough of that creamy texture that makes it something super special.

So now that our half-and-half and our evaporated milk are in, you just wanna make sure that you heat that all through and it is ready to serve.

Now, if you wanted to, you could let this cool off, stick it in the fridge, and then just heat it up tomorrow, and that would give all of your flavors just a day to kind of come together, and it will be even more yummy then.

(warm country music continues) (music fades gently) (upbeat country music) Our creamy wild rice soup is delicious by itself, but, I tell you what, this garlic bread just sends it even over the top more.

So what we're going to do is I'm gonna show you how to make a garlic bread spread, basically, that you can put on any bread that you like.

But the first thing we need to do is just chop up some parsley.

And this is just some fresh flat-leaf parsley.

You can use curly, if that's what you have.

But we need about a tablespoon of it.

(knife clacking) It really smells so fresh and so nice.

I want it relatively fine (knife clacking) so no one's biting into some big chunk of parsley in their garlic bread.

(knife clacking) (knife clacking) Okay, that looks good.

So, what we're going to do is, to one stick of softened butter, (bowl clinking) we're gonna add our chopped parsley.

And to that, I've got one tablespoon of powdered garlic.

And last, but not least, we are adding two tablespoons of olive oil.

You need to just get that all mish-moshed up here and incorporated.

(mixture swishing) That's looking good.

Now, for our bread, I just got this from the store, this is a sourdough loaf, but choose whatever you guys like.

You could maybe put this on a French baguette, which is one of those long skinny ones that, you know, could make individual slices.

Or you could do French bread loaf, you could do an Italian bread loaf, whatever your heart desires.

But what we're going to need to do is slice that in half.

So, on my cutting board, I am just carefully, with a serrated knife, just gonna cut it in half.

(knife swishing) There we go.

(knife clacking) And slather our, mm, you can smell the garlic, our yummy, buttery garlic spread over the top.

We're gonna use all of it to get it all nice, and buttery, and yummy.

(upbeat country music continues) (bowl clacking) The olive oil in the mix just makes the spread so easy to spread against your bread.

And then, once you've got it all over the bread, we are just going to place it here on a aluminum foil-lined tray.

So, just in case, when your garlic bread's in the oven, any of that lovely, buttery goodness starts to go over the bread, you've got your aluminum foil to help you clean up.

Okay into a 375-degree preheated oven for 20 minutes or so until the top gets nice and golden brown and everything is all melty and delicious.

(upbeat country music continues) (upbeat country music continues) (relaxing country music) Oh, my gosh, here it is.

Ooh!

Yummy.

Look at that.

Oh, my gosh, I wish you guys could smell all of this between the garlic bread and the soup, but let me plate some up here.

(bowl clanking) So I have to tell you that the first time I ever was introduced to this creamy wild rice soup, I took a cooking class at a local cooking store, and they made this in a pressure cooker, because they were trying to sell pressure cookers.

Well, of course, the soup was so yummy I bought the pressure cooker, and for the first few times I made it, hey, I was golden.

But, you know, I had read all of the horror stories from some of those old pressure cookers, and how, you know, they explode in your kitchen and cause great harm and damage, so the last time I made the soup in the pressure cooker, it started sputtering on me, it started making all sorts of weird noises, I think the seal maybe around the lid had warped or had gotten old.

Well, anyway, that was the last time I ever did that, and I left the soup alone because it was like, "Oh, my gosh, I really don't know how to make it if I don't make it in the pressure cooker."

Well, here we have it, now we made it on top of the stove, and I can tell you it will be every bit as delicious.

And we have this wonderful garlic bread to go along with it.

I can't wait to tuck in.

(relaxing country music continues) (relaxing country music continues)