Eating Soup

2009-07-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, so these next 3 recipes are not one pot meals. But they're still delicious.

Lemon Herb Pasta with Beets, Broccoli and Peas

This is a meal that I made from vegetables that came from our CSA this week. The sauce may taste a little tart on it's own, but the combination of the sweet beets and peas as well as the sort of middle of the ground pasta round out the flavour quite nicely.

For the sauce
1 cup of white wine
1/4 cup of water
1 lemon
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 a lemons worth of zest
3 tbsp of olive oil
1 tablespoon basil parsley verdurette
4 oz. butter
Fresh basil & dill chopped - whatever I could harvest from our plants.
salt & pepper to taste (quite a bit of pepper)

I put the wine on the stove with a bit of the water and heated it up. Squeezed the lemon juice in with the olive oil and added the zest, with a bit of salt and mixed it in a bowl with the minced garlic. Then I added it to the wine, with some of the butter and the verdurette. I kept it going on the stove for around 1/2 an hour to 45 minutes, adding and tweaking the flavours (sorry if you are trying to recreate this - I wasn't very scientific).

For the vegetables:
1 Beet, sliced into thin quarters.
3/4 cup fresh peas
2 small heads of broccoli, pulled apart to make bite sized florets.

I put the beets in the steamer basket first, because they needed the most time. Then I added the broccoli and peas.

I tossed them all together with fusilli pasta I cooked while making the sauce, then we ate it. Then I packed the leftovers for my lunch today and it was even better. I'm still thinking about it.

Sweet Pea Spread

More deliciousness from our CSA.

1 cup fresh sweet peas
1/4 cup chopped mint
1 lemon - juice of and zest of
2 tbsps ground walnuts (or almonds)
1/4 cup of grated parmesan (optional - one could add more nuts or maybe try substituting with nutritional yeast)
1 tbsp olive oil
kosher/sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Combine the ingredients in a bowl and either process in a food processor or leave as is. Use for spreads on toast, crackers or just guiltily eat it by the spoonful when you come home one night after drinking wine with Laila.

Ad Lib Peanut Sauce

Made very quickly with ingredients on hand, basically because I was missing the tofu satay I used to get at Zenyai in Santa Barbara. Of course all of the amounts are to taste but here's a rough guide:

2 tbsp peanut butter
1 lime
2 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tbsp garlic powder (we ran out of fresh!)
pinch ginger powder
pinch of white pepper
1 tsp chili-garlic paste.

Combine and eat with sliced cucumbers nacho style. I could also envision actually spreading it on cucumber slices and serving as hors d'oeuvres.

Quick Soba Noodle Soup

2009-04-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

This is a very easy, very fast soup. You can make it and eat it in less than 15 minutes. It is good as one course of a multi-course meal, or as a light meal. Experiment with the spices and which vegetables you use. Pretty much any fresh or frozen vegetables will be good in this soup (cabbage, zucchini, bok choy, greens of any kind, broccoli, thinly sliced carrots, green beans). The mix I list below is just what I happened to have handy. It takes so little time to cook this soup that you should probably get all your ingredients together ahead of time.

8 frozen soup stock cubes
4 cups water
1/3 cup or less soy sauce
1 & 1/2 teaspoons granulated garlic
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
several drops sesame oil

Add broth ingredients to a pot and bring to a boil.

2 bunches (175 grams) soba noodles

Once the broth is boiling, add the noodles. Cook almost until done (maybe 2 to 3 minutes). Then turn off the heat and add the following.

1 cup frozen corn
3/4 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen lima beans
2 tender stalks of celery, including the leaves, sliced diagonally
2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

Let the vegetables warm up, then serve and eat.

If you'd rather use fresh ginger and garlic, add half of each to the pot at the beginning, and add the rest at the end with the vegetables.

Vegetable Curry

2009-04-03T07:17:00.000-07:00

A very easy curry, despite the number of ingredients. Experiment with the spice amounts to get the flavour that you want.

1/3 Cabbage, one-inch squares
1 small stalk of celery, finely chopped
2 carrots, sliced diagonally
1 to 2 tablespoons peanut oil

2 small onions, diced
large handful of green beans
2 potatoes, cut into parallelepipeds

2 cups water
1 can coconut milk

5 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon fennel seed
salt, to taste

Put the cabbage, celery, carrots and peanut oil in the pot on high heat, stirring occasionally. This will start to smell like chow mein. Add the onions. Once the onions are translucent, add the green beans and potatoes. Add the water (you may have to adjust the amount). Simmer until the potatoes are done. While this is happening, grind the spices and mix them together. Add the coconut milk and ground spices. Simmer briefly, serve and eat.

Chick Peas & Spinach II

2009-03-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm home alone for the next week. So, here's dinner for the next two days. It's simple and fairly quick. A fine soup with a simple flavour. It's good on the first day, served hot and fresh. It'll be just as good on the second day, but the texture will be different---the spinach will have wilted completely and a lot of rice starch will have dissolved into the broth.

- 1/3 cup brown rice
- 2 tablespoons butter

Heat a pot and melt the butter. Toast the rice in the pot.

- 2 ice cubes of homemade stock (salt-less)
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, diced

When the rice is toasted, add the stock cubes, stir to cool the rice, then add the onion and garlic.

- 1 potato, cubed
- 2 tablespoons olive oil

When the onion is translucent, add the potato and oil to the pan. Cook for a few minutes.

- 4 cups water
- 6 ice cubes homemade stock (salt-less)
- 2 cups or 1 can (15.5 oz) cooked chickpeas
- salt to taste (1 1/2 teaspoons)
- ground black pepper to taste (1 - 2 tsp)

Simmer gently until the rice is tender.

- 1 cup cream or milk
- 1/2 bunch of spinach

Add cream to soup. Once hot, add spinach. Serve when the spinach has wilted.

Broccoli Gorgonzola Soup

2009-02-17T19:10:00.000-08:00

We had the Waitrose version of this soup while staying with at my aunt's house in the south of England this last winter. The Waitrose version had a surprisingly short list of ingredients - we are usually not the types to eat "pre-made" meals, what with all their nitrites and ridiculous ingredients lists. Anyway, inspired, we decided to make our own.

1 onion, chopped
3 heads of broccoli, floretted.
1 block (about 6 0z) of Gorgonzola (or Stilton or Bleu etc), crumbled
3 cloves garlic, minced
salt, pepper, olive oil to taste
olive oil
4 cups of water/stock - I used my homemade stock

Heat olive oil in a pot on low heat. Add onions. Once they have softened, add broccoli and garlic. Cook for about a minute. Add the water/stock and bring to a boil. Leave to simmer until broccoli is cooked. Remove from heat and add Gorgonzola, stir until it is fully melted/incorporated. Blend in batches. Once all of it is smooth, return the soup to pot and reheat.

SERVE AND EAT. (You can sprinkle a little extra Gorgonzola on the top if you wish and serve with nice, fresh, crusty bread)

Yam Soup

2009-02-17T19:09:00.000-08:00

2 yams
3 cloves garlic
pepper to taste
soy sauce to taste
1/2 to 1 cup soy milk as needed
salt to taste
curry powder to taste
juice from half a lemon
1 small onion

First I baked the yams in the oven until they were nice and soft. While this was happening, I tossed some tempeh in a pan with garlic, pepper and soy sauce. I originally did this with Quorn, but I'm not the biggest fan of Quorn, with it's long ingredients list. It does add some protein and texture when needed and is better than some other, similar products, but I'm more comfortable with using tempeh as it is less processed.

When the yams were ready, I took them out, peeled them (Jeeves had a lovely breakfast the next day of cooked yam peelings and his usual kibble) and put them in a bowl with half a cup of soy milk and mixed it into a slurry. Use more soy milk if necessary.

At this point, I'm sure a lot of people would have shoved it through a siv, but I feel like that sort of thing is a little wasteful, both time wise and resources wise. I might do it if we had dinner guests over (and maybe save the leftover stuff for stock or as the base for another soup?).

I tossed chopped onions and sliced garlic into a sauce pan with some olive oil. I stirred it around a bit so as to get the scrummy browning bits of the bottom of the pan and did this until the onion was translucent. At this point, I added the yam slurry, the coconut milk, ground black pepper, salt and curry powder (about 2 teaspoons). I also added the Quorn (making sure to spatulate the frying pan so as to get the garlic and olive oil into the pot as well) and some frozen peas.

I squeezed half a lemon in, to balance out the sweetness of the coconut milk and yams and a little more salt, to taste.

Potato-Fennel Soup

2009-02-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

This potato-fennel soup recipe straight from the New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (strangely not available on the Moosewood Restaurant website) coincidentally given to us by Ryan's aunt Marcia for Christmas. We didn't know we were moving to Ithaca then. Here is what we made, it's different from the book mainly because we didn't have the right amounts of anything. But that's one of the best things about the Moosewood Cookbook - that sort of stuff does not matter.

some oil/butter
2 cups thinly sliced onions
some salt
3 strangely shaped, quite large potatoes
1/2 a fennel bulb, minced (in retrospect, we wished we had used the whole bulb)
toasted caraway seeds
4 cups of water
white pepper

Add oil to soup pot, then onions and a little salt. Cook over a low heat, so they are soft and brown. Add potatoes, some salt, fennel, caraway. Sautee for a few minutes and then add
water.

Bring to a boil and then simmer until potatoes are soft. Blend resulting soup so it is nice and creamy (that wasn't in the recipe book). Serve with minced fennel feathers on top (that was).

Chick Peas and Spinach Soup

2009-02-17T19:04:00.001-08:00

30 ml/2 tbsp olive oil
4 garlic cloves
1 onion
7 oz. spinach
12 oz potatoes
15 oz. can chick peas
10 ml/2 tsp ground cumin
10ml/2tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp cornstarch
3 tbsp tahini
5 cups vegetable stock (We used Better Than Bouillion)
cayenne pepper to taste
salt & fresh ground pepper to taste

Chopping the onions and garlic. Add to a pot with olive oil (honestly, is there any better smell than onions, garlic and olive oil cooking?). Get them nicely browned - the onions should be translucent on medium heat. Next, add the cumin and coriander.

After this, add the 5 cups of stock and the potatoes and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Following this, add the chick peas.

While that cooks, mix the tahini, salt, pepper, cayenne and cornstarch. When the chick peas and potatoes are tender, add this mixture plus the spinach.

Once the spinach is cooked, it should be ready to serve (and eat).

Potato Leek Soup

2009-02-17T19:03:00.001-08:00

1 onion

2 russet potatoes

3 red potatoes

2 carrots

4 or 5 leeks

3 tomatoes

4 cloves garlic

Thyme, basil, salt and pepper

2 quarts vegetable stock

1 can coconut milk

olive oil

-Chop half of the onion, both russet potatoes, two leeks, two tomatoes, one carrot and add to pot of vegetable stock. Add 3 cloves of crushed garlic. Boil until everything is cooked. Add thyme, basil, salt and pepper to taste.

-While those vegetables are boiling, chop up the remainder of vegetables and reserve. Put the chopped red potatoes and carrot in a separate pot and boil.

-Take cooked vegetables and stock and blend until smooth and delicious. Return to pot and stir in coconut milk. Leave on low heat to keep warm.

-Heat olive oil with 1 crushed/chopped garlic clove. Add reserved onion, leek, cooked red potatoes and carrot. Add salt and sautee until colors are nice and vibrant. Add to soup along with (uncooked) chopped tomato.

Enjoy!

We Make Soup

2009-02-17T18:59:00.001-08:00

A lot of soup. We often love our soups and decided that it would be a good idea to document them.