Soup Therapy

While spending the holidays with family in Ottawa, I made a huge pot of nice soup. It wasn't really anything fancy but for a group of people who would only need a phone to order takeout in place of a kitchen, homemade soup is something of a treat. Plus I was getting sick of eating shitty food.

As one would expect, I started by caramelizing some onions after which I deglazed the pan with about half a glass of merlot. To this I added carrots, celery, garlic, a red pepper, a de-seeded jalapeno pepper, a can of organic chick peas, two boxes of organic chicken stock, a big can of tomato juice, cayenne pepper, celery seeds, bay leaves, salt and black pepper. Surprisingly the soup was really good. Maybe I was just hungry for good food though.

When we got back home, I replicated the recipe with the addition of salmon, halibut and mackeral. I also changed some of the ingredients such as vegetable stock in place of chicken stock and white wine instead of merlot. The results were different but both were pretty good.

Zucchini and Goat Cream Cheese Soup

I got the general outlay of this very simple recipe from Laura Calder's French Food at Home on Food TV here in Canada. She used French "vache qui rit" cheese which is a sort of cream cheese whose name means "the cow who laughs". I didn't want to make a special trip to the supermarket for this cheese (I'm a farmer's market convert) so I bought some goat cream cheese from my local goat cheese purveyors.

Though I used the best products, all organic and/or local, zucchini tends to be bland. And Campbell's organic chicken stock doesn't have much body either. So I guess you can say that it's subtlety was what I should have appreciated. But I like my food to whack me around a bit. None of this soffisticated pallet crap.

Oh and if you do want to try this soup out, it couldn't be easier. Onions, zucchini, chicken stock, goat cheese, salt and pepper. That's it. Purée and top with some paprika. Nothing complicated but nothing really special either.

Stilton Borscht

Similar to my experience with coq au vin, making borscht was a matter of knowing what could be done with two large, excessively fresh and earthy beets. Plus both results are purple. But that's just a cool coincidence.

Though there are probably thousands of recipes for this traditional Eastern European dish, I adapted mine from one of my soup & stews cookbooks. Here then is my version of borscht. Note that most of the ingredients were just things I threw in because I had them on hand. Sort of like cleaning out the fridge sort of thing. This recipe is definitely not set in stone. Whatever tickles your own fancy.

Stilton Borscht

1 large onion, chopped
1 large garlic clove
2 medium to large beets, peeled and chopped small (about 2 cups)
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 cup or so of chopped daikon radish (I just had some of this on hand)
500ml box of organic vegetable stock (the stuff I buy is very rich...almost a soup in itself)
1 medium onion, peeled and left whole
2 bay leaves
2 tsp. sweet paprika
spicy chili flakes or powder of choice to taste
1 tbsp. tomato paste or 1 small can of tomato sauce
2 tbsp. dijon mustard
3/4 bottle of amber to dark beer (I used a Scotch beer)
a little less than 1/4 cup's worth of stilton or other blue cheese (goat's cheese would also be lovely and obviously milder)
generous handful of asian greens (I substituted these for cabbage...they look like lettuce but apparently they are related to cabbage)
salt and pepper

sour cream, for serving

1. In a medium pot, cook onions in hot oil till they start to brown. Add all other vegetables and sweat covered, stirring occasionally till vegetables are softened.
2. Add all other ingredients and cook till flavours have developed and all vegetables are soft.
3. Puree the soup with a hand blender (or you can do it the hard way with a regular blender).
4. Adjust seasoning and serve with a very generous dollop of cold sour cream.

This soup can be eaten hot or cold and as with any soup or stew, it only get's better with time. You can even freeze or can this stuff. Plus it looks really cool. I'm sure kid's would have a blast with this...especially seeing as the very healthy veggies are disguised as a Barney coloured puree.

Stilton and Lentil Soup with Goat Meat Pastilla

I had broth left over from a chicken we'd cooked the other day. When combined with a cold day, this broth becomes an inviting opportunity to make a delicious warming soup. So I cooked up an onion and some bacon strips. Added a mased garlic clove. Poured in the gelatinised chicken broth with it's beautiful little layer of fat (both marks of a good leftover broth). Spooned in two tablespoons of pesto. Dropped in two cups of cauliflower chunks, a large lump of stilton cheese, a quarter cup of red lentils and let the whole thing simmer away till the lentils were cooked and the soup looked delicious. I love adding a strong cheese such as stilton or blue in a soup because it's flavour gives the whole thing a bit of umph. It doesn't scream out at you but you know that its there. Season and enjoy.

Another treat for that night's supper was pastilla, a small prepared dish we bought at the farmer's market from the Belgian cheese lady and her son who have their kiosk by the French meat man's kiosk. This pastilla, she informed us, was of North African origine and made with goat meat which is slowly cooked overnight. She wanted to expose people to the potential deliciousness of goat meat (she makes the best fresh goat's cheese). And oh was it ever delicious! In true North African style, the dish was both sweet and savoury without seeming overly bizarre. The whole was wrapped in phyllo dough, cooked for 15 minutes at 400 degrees, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. Simply delicious.

Vichyssoise

When it comes to making soups, there can be nothing simpler than Vichyssoise which could also be called a Leek and Potato Soup. It's traditional French fair, smooth and a delight to eat. The use of leeks is also nice because they're just like a milder onion. All the deliciousness but none of the strong smelly taste.

What's also nice about puréed soups is that it really doesn't take any fancy cutting or special presentation. Just simmer, stick the hand blender in there, serve and enjoy. If you don't have a hand blender you should really invest in one. The alternative is transferring everything back and forth between the pot and the blender. And plus you get to buy kitchen toys. Fun times!

Leek and Potato Soup
from "A little taste of France", Murdoch Books

50g butter
1 onion, finely chopped
3 leeks, white part only, sliced
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
200g potatoes, chopped
3 cups chicken stock
3/4 cup cream (10% is not too heavy and not too light)
2 tbsp chopped chives, optional

1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and add the onion, leeks, celery and garlic. Cover the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are softened but not browned. Add the potatoes and stock and bring to the boil.

2. Reduce the heat and leave to simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Allow to cool a little before puréeing with a hand blender or in a blender or food processor. (You could also go super old school and push the soup through a fine sieve with the back of a wooden spoon.) Return to the clean saucepan.

3. Bring the soup gently back to the boil and stir in the cream. Season with salt and white pepper and reheat without boiling. Serve hot or well chilled, garnished with chives. Another option is to serve the hot soup and have people pour in the amount of cream that they want. This cools down the soup a bit, allows everyone to add cream to taste and also helps when reheating because you easily avoid curdling the cream.

This soup is definitely a 4.8 on 5 in our book.

Roasted Squash Soup

Though autumn is coming to an end - evident in my neck of the woods by the fact that there's snow on the ground - the season is ripe for squashes, potatoes, onions, carrots and other such homely vegetables. So once again perusing through the market, looking for something to inspire my mediocre (at best) culinary skills, I found a lady selling a bunch of squashes. I'd seen and cooked with acorn, spaghetti and butternut squashes before, and I couldn't tell you the specific name of the squash I chose....the above photo will have to suffice for now.

Now being an amateur of soups, I turned the yellow fleshed squash into nothing more elaborate than a roasted squash soup. All I did was cut the squash in half, sprayed it with olive oil, salt and pepper and popped it into the oven till the flesh was nice and tender. Accompanying the squash was one of the purple potatoes I've got sitting in my kitchen. Though the lady at the market said that she throws in the peel and everything of the squash in her soups, I went for a more conservative preparation of simply using the flesh of the squash, that of the potato, an onion, some garlic, chopped carrot, chicken stock and a some thyme. I would have put in some celery to complete the mirepoix, but we ran out a few days before. Anyways, once every vegetable was nice and soft, I put the whole thing in the blender and served it pureed.

A simple and light meal. You just can't screw up when it comes to soup.

Soup & Stew

I had frozen soup I made about a month back in my freezer and have ventured into the not always successful practice of reheating previously fresh food. The soup I mimicked from a small café here in Moncton. With sausage meat balls, lots of chick peas, onion, carrots, celery, garlic, canned chopped tomatoes, and some fresh ginger, this soup is really nice. The added ginger also give it a suprising flavour you wouldn't expect.

I like making soups because you could basically try any flavour combination as a test run to see if they blend well together. The required cooking time and usual suspects - broth, carrots, celery, onions, and garlic - welcome almost anything you throw at them. Any protein is welcome along with any starch and vegetables. Soups, I think, are one of the most versatile food. Plus, when you do fall upon a delicious combination, you can always take from the soup stage and try to make those flavours stand alone.

Another deliciously variable cooking process is the stew. For this particular stew I tried to deviate from the usual by using Asian ingredients. The recipe list goes as follows: bacon, stew beef, kimchi cabbage (yes I still have some and am trying to use it as much as possible for nothing more than to get rid of it), sliced onion, carrots, potatoes, canned sweet peas, beef broth, rice wine vinegar, red chilli paste, sesame oil and a bay leaf. The end result - cooked all day in a crock pot - tasted pretty much like your everyday stew. Good. But average.

Mistake 1: I should have put some of the kimchi "juice" in with the stew. Mistake 2: Cooking the stew for a shorter period of time would possibly have kept the Asian flavours intact. Happy discovery 1: Vinegar in stew is really good. I've tried beef bourguignon before which is made with red wine but vinegar really gives the stew an added dimension.

So, in conclusion, I can't push soups and stew enough. Eat them always with a nice little sandwich and life is good...not to suggest that life without these cannot be good but the chances dramatically decrease with the absence of homecooked food.

Panini Smoked Meat Sandwhich & Roasted Carrot Soup

Alone at home while I wait to go to work, I can think up some pretty crazy ideas when it comes to food seeing as my flavour matching still needs alot of tweeking. However, you'd have to be a total ignoramous to mess up a smoked meat sandwhich.

Seeing as the smoked meat (Montreal style has a very cured and smoked brisket) has a very powerful taste, you must pair it with equally intrusive flavours. Traditionally this includes rye bread, a side slice of kosher pickle, and mustard. I went a few steps further and put the pickle slices in the sandwhich, used grainy mustard instead of boring old prepared mustard, and added some monterey jack cheese. Sandwiched between a smoking panini press, the added crunchiness of the bread and warmth of the ingredients - lets not forget the melted cheese - really made a huge difference. With all of these very strong flavours, the sandwich was like an explosion of taste, perfect for any meal.

On a lighter more sofisticated note, I tried a recipe for roasted carrot soup that I found in a magazine entitled "The Best of Fine Cooking: Fresh, spring/summer 07". Included in this magazine are over 70 recipes geared towards the lighter seasons where - at least in the northern climates such as my own - everything is fresher especially at the farmer's market. The recipe in question is really a suprisingly smooth and yet lively taste for carrots. The liveliness comes from the ginger you add to the soup. But anyways, enough about me, here's the recipe.

Roasted Carrot Soup

1 lb. carrots, peeled and cut into 3-inch lengths (try to find the freshest garden carrots you can)

1 tbs. olive oil

1 tbs. unsalted butter

1/2 medium onion, diced

1 large celery rib, diced (I used a bok choy rib which worked just as well if not better)

1 tbs minced fresh ginger

2 cups chicken broth

Salt & pepper

1. Preheat oven at 375 degrees.

2. Toss chopped carrots in a baking dish with olive oil and seperate so that the pieces don't touch.

3. Place carrots in oven for 30 minutes, turn and cook for another 30 minutes.

4. Sauté onion in butter in a medium saucepan till translucent. Add celery (or bok choy) and ginger and cook for another 4-5 minutes.

5. Add roasted carrots, chicken broth, 2 cups of water, salt and pepper. Bring to boil then reduce to medium simmer for about 45 minutes covered.

6. Once cooked, let the soup cool completely.

7. Once cooled, purée soup in a blender and place to cool for a few hour or, better yet, overnight. When ready to eat, just reheat soup and enjoy.