Purple Soup!

We've been enjoying some delicious soups this fall.  Homemade chicken and turkey soup, potato soup, beef stew.  All so tasty!  But they're a little unusual looking...

Potato Soup

Horrid photo, with the flash, but the creamy soup looks a little strange, do you think?

Chicken Soup

 Another bizarre broth...

Turkey Soup?

What in the world could be making all our soups purple?!?  The kids love it, they taste great, and in fact there isn't any wild ingredient, like beet root powder or anything.  Can you see, in the above photos, where the purple is coming from?

I'll give you a hint:

We grew it in our garden.  We harvested a huge tupperware bowl full of them after frost.  We're about through that bowl (better plant lots more next year!)

Any ideas??

Ok; here you go:

Poker chips?

Yes, our favorite Purple Haze carrots!  We grew them in half of our deep square foot garden.  They tasted much better than the orange ones that filled the other half, though both were tasty.  The kids will certainly be disappointed (me too, to say the truth) to go back to those boring old "orange" grocery store carrots.  The first year I planted them, I remember cooking them and I thought the purple cooked out like purple beans do.  Apparently, the purple leaves the carrot, but stays in the soup.  Put enough in, and you have a decidedly purple soup!  Broth, chicken, even the rice [or whatever] takes on the hue!  Lovely!

*sigh*  I do wonder how I survived the first 25 or so years of life before I ever even knew there were carrots other than orange.  My children truly live a different life than I did!