Winter has finally arrived in Chicago, after a relatively mild fall.  I hate most things about winter (the snow, the wetness, the cold, shoveling out my car, late night freezing walks with the dogs who inevitably decide to do some extra exploring on the coldest of nights, the dogs nearly dragging me to my death down icy stairs…I could go on and on) but I do love winter food (and winter clothes, but that’s another entry).  I especially love soups, stews and chilis.  Last night I made a fantastic carrot chile and cilantro soup I found on allrecipes.com.  I had really low hopes for this recipe because, come one, how great can carrot soup be?  But it looked relatively  healthy and I’m always looking for ways to fool myself into eating vegetables.  I made the recipe as is except I used extra cilantro.  As an experiment, in one bowl I splashed in some half and half to make a cream soup and I tried another one plain.  Both were really, really good!  Seriously, this is going in my favorite recipe rotation.  My only caveat would be that I didn’t find this particularly filling, so you’re probably going to want to serve this with some bread or as a first course.  One more caveat, for whatever reason mine didn’t look as appetizingly orange as the one in the picture – it was decidedly much more brown.