Senegalese Peanut Soup: Lessons about Peanuts

I have to admit that before making this, I didn't exactly know where Senegal was. Senegal is apparently a hot place.

I got this recipe from my trusty copy of the Daily Soup Cookbook, from which I've made a fair number of super tasty soups. I love soup. I eat hot soup in the dead of the Arizona summer and I never break a sweat.

Some things I learned while making this soup:

• Chopping peanuts with a knife and cutting board is a bad idea (hellllo, flying peanuts of doom! Thank god I wear glasses, because a peanut almost took my right eye out). Use a food processor.
• You can apparently make peanut butter in your food processor. This is cool and not hard.
  
• There's apparently a difference between roasted peanuts and dry-roasted peanuts, that being regular roasted peanuts are roasted with oil, and dry-roasted peanuts are not.
• Taking unsalted peanuts and putting salt on them is not like just buying salted peanuts. Z says the peanuts absorb the salt into them while they roast. Sigh.
  

The recipe called for salted dry-roasted peanuts and I managed to buy unsalted (woops, memory lapse) roasted (no idea they were different) peanuts. When you have a pound of fucking peanuts in your soup, you need to buy the right kind of peanuts, which can be done by reading the recipe and remembering it properly when you go to the store, but uh... yeah. I'm not always good at following directions. I ended up with some pretty bland soup. I need a do-over for this one.

Anyway, look out for the leftovers report over the next few days. I'm going to try to figure out how to doctor it to taste better after it sits for a bit.

P.S. Upon reading the recipe again, I realized I also put in double the amount of heavy cream called for. Dear Donger, learn2read! Fixing this will be fun. Yipes.