Apple & Celeriac Soup

This is a good soup for this time of year. It's best if you can use a blender, but a stick (immersion) blender could work too, although it might take a little time to get the soup to a smooth consistency. If you use tart apples, and you find the soup to be too sour, just add a little honey or sugar, but I doubt it will be a problem.  

Ingredients:

4 to 5 green onions, with some green, chopped
2 apples, cored, peeled or unpeeled, chopped (I leave the peel on)
2 1/2 cups celeriac, peeled and chopped
2 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
2 cups apple cider (or apple juice)
5 to 6 sage leaves chopped
1 teaspoon dried thyme
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter + 1 1/2 tablespoons oil
1 cup milk (I prefer canned milk in cooking, but it's certainly not mandatory)
plain yogurt or low fat sour cream for garnish

In a heavy bottomed pan, heat the oil and melt the butter over medium low heat. Cook the onion, apple, celeriac and ginger until the celeriac, especially, is just softening (this will take a little time). Stir it occasionally to prevent any major browning of the ingredients. Then add the apple cider/juice. Let the cider come to a gentle simmer. Cook for about 15 to 20 minutes until everything is tender.  Pour the mixture into the blender and blend until smooth. Pour the blended mixture back into the pan. Add chopped sage, thyme, salt. Bring the soup to a bare simmer. Gradually stir in the milk until it is all mixed in. When the soup has returned to a bare simmer, that's it. Serve with a dollop of plain yogurt or low fat sour cream on top of each serving. 

WORD HISTORY:
Slit/Slice-These closely related words go back to Indo European "skel," which meant, "to cut, to cut off," which then produced "skleid," which meant, "to tear off, to tear apart, to cut off, to split apart;" and thus also, "to use up" (likely from the notion of "cutting or breaking off parts until used up"). This gave Old Germanic "slitan(an)," meaning, "to tear off, to tear apart, to split," as well as the figurative "use up" meaning. This gave Old English "slitan," with the same main meanings, but also, "to cut into pieces." This then became "sliten," which kept many of the same meanings, but also, "to wear out or wear down," which likely had been retained in some areas of England as a meaning for the original English form "slitan." This then became "slit." The noun was derived from the verb in the 1200s, with the meaning, "a generally long cut or tear in clothing, which is purely an opening and doesn't detach any part from the main object," but also then, "a long cut in general." The Old Germanic form also gave Frankish, a Germanic dialect, akin to English, "slitan," which also meant, "to split, to split into pieces." This was absorbed into Old French as "esclicier," meaning initially, "to split," and the more figurative "to break or smash into pieces." French also had the noun "escliz/esclis," meaning, "a fragment, a splinter, a piece." English borrowed the noun as "slice" in the early 1400s, and it borrowed the verb, also as "slice," in the second half of the 1400s. The noun and the verb are both examples of Germanic based words being borrowed into Latin-based French, and then borrowed by English, itself a Germanic language. English had its own form in what is modern "slit" (above), but German had "slizan," in Old High German, which then became the more modern (but now not in every day use) "schleissen," pronounced kind of like "shlice-n," and properly spelled "schleißen" and meaning "to split, to wear down, to wear off, to peel off." It is spelled with the double "s" in the Swiss and Liechtenstein spelling systems, but with the "ß" in German spelling elsewhere. Dutch has "slijten," meaning, "to use up, to wear down or away," Icelandic has the noun "slita" (a tear), Danish "slide" (work very hard; that is, wear down or wear out with work), Swedish "slita" (wear out, wear out with hard work).