Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for soup/stew
May 29, 2010 at 5:46 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Recently, a guy I work with became a father. So a bunch of us decided it would maybe help him and his wife out a bit if we brought them food they could freeze – or even not freeze, there’s nothing wrong with just eating it right away. This is what I made for them, although I don’t think it needs to be reserved for major life milestones like having a baby. In fact, I had to debate with myself over maybe saving a little of this for myself. I didn’t do it – what do you take me for, taking food out of the mouths of babies? Or at least their parents? COME ON – but I thought about it.
The recipe is from My Kitchen Addiction, although apparently it gets around – it went through at least 2 iterations before she got it, and here I am iterating it a bit more. Not a lot, though. I mean, I forgot that I needed an onion, so I didn’t have one, so I decided what it really needed was some garlic instead. Can’t go wrong. And I did huck a bunch of it in a blender at the end (because my birthday had not yet occurred, so Matt had not yet given me an immersion blender, whee, best husband in town!), but I don’t know if I really should have done that… I feel like it probably froze better that way rather than if it was all liquid, but, y’know, whatever. Most people who make this will probably be eating it right away, so its freezing properties are kind of moot. The picture at the top is pre-blender; at the bottom is post-blender. Oh, er, wait, maybe I am iterating more than a little. I forgot that the original called for andouille sausage, obviously, but my grocery store didn’t have them and I’m still a little too nervous to go into MEATLAND, so I went with the never-a-bad-choice chorizo. And finally, I used some of my homemade veggie stock instead of chicken stock, basically because I had it on hand.
Cajun Bean Soup
Ingredients
1 chorizo sausage, diced (about 8 oz, anyway)
olive oil if necessary
1 cup celery, diced (that was about 3 ribs, for me)
1 cup red and green peppers, diced (about half a pepper of each colour, but again, your mileage may vary)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp Tony’s or other Cajun seasoning… are there other kinds? I live in Boston, I don’t know anything
about 1 1/2 cups dry pink beans, soaked, drained, and rinsed (I really need to start writing these right away afterwards, because I can’t remember exactly how much I used… I just used up the rest of the bag I had in the cupboard), or 3 15-oz cans
~3 cups vegetable stock
Method
Over medium-high heat, cook the chorizo in your big soup pot, for about 5 minutes or until you wouldn’t die of eating it.
Scoop it out to drain on paper towels, but leave the paprika oil that rendered out of it in the pot.
If you need to add more oil to the pot, add it, otherwise just go ahead and saute the celery and bell peppers with the Tony’s in the chorizo grease.
Saute for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic and saute for another minute.
Add the veggie stock and deglaze the pot, if you hadn’t already.
Throw in the beans.
Bring to a boil, then turn it down to medium-low and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
At this point, if you’re going to puree any of it, go for it – I put about 3 ladles of it into the blender, but if I’d had my immersion blender I’d have just given it a few whirls around the pot. Blend as much or as little as you’d like, depending on what texture you’re going for.
Stir the chorizo back in, and serve!
May 9, 2010 at 11:06 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
As you might infer from the title, this is a version of chili that contains some flavours familiar from Asian cooking – it’s got soy sauce, sesame oil (of which I love) and ginger in it, as well as bok choy – but don’t be confused by the “chicken chili” part of the name. It’s not a chicken chili as you might usually know it, but with the added Asian bonus. It’s more like a regular chili as you might usually know it, but with chicken and with the whole pan-Asian thing. Or pan-east-Asia; it annoys me when people say “Asian” and basically mean “Chinese and Japanese and maybe Thai and Korean.” It’s the world’s biggest continent! It’s diverse! But anyway, my point is that it’s not a white chili, like most chicken chilis I’ve ever heard about are. It’s got tomatoes; it’s sort of… orange.
The recipe’s from The Taste Traveller, where it is billed as being spicy; maybe it’s because I used chili sauce instead of chili paste, but mine wasn’t particularly spicy. It was delicious, though – I don’t regret having less fire. And anyway one can always add more dashes of hot sauce to your own serving. Let’s see, what else did I change? Well, I halved it, of course, and I used a chopped actual tomato instead of a big can of tomatoes because there aren’t small cans of tomatoes. Also, she used chickpeas but said to use whatever was handy, and I felt that chickpeas were too far from a traditional beany bean to really evoke “chili” in my mind or Matt’s, so I went for pinto beans instead. That… might be all? So I don’t know if this tastes anything like the original version. I can definitely vouch for this version, though. Completely yumface.
Asian Chicken Chili
Ingredients
1/2 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
say about a 1-inch piece of ginger, minced
3 green onions, chopped
1 bell pepper – I used an orange one and savaged it in the food processor so Matt wouldn’t know it from carrots (and it worked, too!), but use whatever colour you want and dice it or something
2 carrots, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 heads bok choy, chopped (both stem and leaves)
1 tsp chili sauce, or more
1/2 lb chicken – I used breasts, but use what you like – cut up into bite-sized pieces
1 biggish tomato, diced
1 14-oz can pinto beans, or something else, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 cup flat-leaf Italian parsley
Method
Get your big soup pot out and heat the oil in it.
Saute the garlic, ginger, and green onions for about 30 seconds.
Add the bell pepper, carrot, celery, and hot sauce, continuing to saute until these are softened.
Stir in the chicken.
Cook until the chicken is white on all sides.
Add tomatoes and simmer, covered (or, y’know, not – doesn’t really matter), for about 30 minutes.
Stir in the beans, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, and soy sauce.
Cook for another 10 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in sesame oil and parsley.
April 25, 2010 at 9:40 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Let’s not lie. This is not soup. However, in the comments to the original blog post on which I found this, namely on Ezra Pound Cake’s site, I found out that it also goes by another name which equally fails to describe it: Frito Pie. It isn’t pie, either. What it is, essentially, is chili. It does have this one distinguishing feature – not to say that it doesn’t stand out by its taste or anything, it’s delicious, but it tastes like another variation on the theme of chili – and that is that instead of maybe garnishing it with tortilla chips, or scooping it up with them as we’re wont to do in my family, you serve it on a bed of Fritos. Or, in our case, broken-up bits of regular tortilla chips from the bottom of the bag.
Oh my wordy word. Why had no one thought of this before?!? (The South: “AHEM.”) Ok, so clearly someone has thought of it before, but to paraphrase an old VICE Do-and-Don’t entry, you know something’s good when it makes you mad at everyone else for not thinking of it sooner. It doesn’t matter that it’s been going on for donkey’s years and just nobody told me. This is going to be my preferred method of consuming chili from now on.
This particular chili? Well, it’s good. I’m not going to throw over my existing recipe for it, but I do like the addition of corn, although I can’t say I’m going to make that addition to my normal chili – I don’t think Matt prefers to have it in. I was going to cook it in our slow cooker, at first, but I made it when a friend was over, and we spent the whole day doing the BARCC Walk for Change – for which I have a (still-active!) fundraising page through the website that I work for. Which, P.S., you should all also make fundraising pages for your own favourite charities. You’re welcome, work! ANYWAY, we did that, and then we went back to my friend’s alma mater, which is here, and she gave me a tour of the place. And we also snuck into their library – thrill! And because of all this, I wasn’t able to start the chili early, so I just made it in a pot.
And I halved it and there were 3 of us and we still had leftovers. So there. In the course of doing so, though, I had to make some changes – I don’t like having to use half a can of something, so I improvised with the un-canned counterparts and whatnot. So the amounts here are the amounts I made up based loosely on halving the original recipe. And I added some water, because I didn’t think the tomatoes were going to express enough liquid, and I don’t know if I was right or not but even the small amount of water I added cooked down nearly completely. So I’d recommend it.
“Taco Soup” Chili
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
1 onion, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 15-oz can black beans
1/2 cup dry pink beans, soaked overnight (or all day, in my case) and drained
1 8-oz can whole kernel corn, drained
1 4.5-oz can chopped green chilis
1/2 an envelope taco seasoning
1/2 an envelope ranch seasoning
chipotle powder (for smokiness)
1/4 cup water
Fritos or broken tortilla chips to serve over, plus more chips for garnishing (or eating with, in my family’s case)
sharp cheddar cheese, grated, to garnish
green onions, chopped, also to garnish
Method
Brown beef with onions in a large skillet over medium heat.
Transfer to a large dutch oven, using a slotted spoon to drain while you transfer (multitasking!). You’d think I’d just say to brown the meat in the dutch oven from the get-go, and it’s true that way you can get more fond in your life, but you wouldn’t get to drain it in the slotted spoon, and the whole tilting a heavy pot and trying to pour out the grease without pouring out the actual food thing is miserable. So do it this way, it’s easier.
Add everything else except the garnishes (which, to recap, are the chips, cheese, and green onions… don’t add those, add everything else).
Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, or longer, depending on what your schedule looks like, stirring every now and again.
Put some Fritos (or broken tortilla chip bits) in the bottoms of the bowls you’re going to eat from.
At any point after the 30 minute mark, if you feel like eating and can’t take the delicious smell anymore, serve the taco soup into the bowls over the wee chips.
Garnish with grated cheese, green onions, and regular-sized tortilla chips.
You may not need to add the water – the tomatoes and onions do emit moisture after all – but by the next day, the leftovers had just the perfect amount of sauciness, so I guess it depends if you’re planning on eating some the next day. I mean, it is chili, so, like all chilis and stews, it tastes even better the next day. This is an immutable law of the universe!
March 6, 2010 at 10:50 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
As many of you know, I was in Vancouver for the first week of the Olympics, because when the Olympics come to your hometown, you go. And when I’m home, I always like to cook something. Not just to be nice to my parents to thank them for putting us up, but because it’s nice to get to use their huge kitchen, buy produce at Top Ten (p.s. to Boston, why have you not embraced the concept of produce stores?), use different brands of stuff, and see if they like the stuff that I like. So this time I made this “Spicy Mexican Lentil Stew,” which… I don’t know if maybe I messed it up (not impossible… far from it), but it wasn’t all that spicy. It was flavourful, and like all stews it deepened in flavour the next day, but spicy isn’t really what I’d call it. So that’s good news if you’re not into spicy things – don’t be put off, it’s delicious.
The only real alteration I made was to ditch the cilantro; I can’t handle the stuff, and my family didn’t know it was supposed to have been there, so they couldn’t miss it. Oh, and I chopped 4 stalks of celery before realizing the recipe only called for 3. P.S., on day 1 it’s basically a soup. Stew-osity comes after sitting in the fridge overnight. But since this makes tons, odds are good you’ll spend more time eating it as a stew than as a soup, so I’m leaving the title as it is.
Mexican Lentil Stew
Ingredients
2 cups dry lentils (the original recipe called for red, and that’s what I used, but only because that’s the only kind the supermarket by my parents’ house had. I wasn’t going to be picky and I don’t see why you should be either)
4 cups water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, diced
4 stalks celery, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 14.5oz cans or 1 28oz can diced tomatoes (I’d have used the fire-roasted kind if the store had had them)
4 cups vegetable broth (I’d have used my own stock if I’d been at home… alas)
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp cumin
10 dashes hot sauce (although the original recipe said you could go up to as many as 15, and if you want any spiciness to speak of, you’ll probably want to do that, since 10 was basically unnoticeable)
1 lime, sliced into quarters or 8ths
Method
Put the lentils and water in a pot and bring to a boil.
Turn off the heat, cover, and let sit for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, saute the onion in the olive oil in the bottom of a big stew pot.
A couple minutes later, add the garlic.
Next, throw in the celery.
Keep sauteeing everything until the onions and garlic just start to change colour – you’re not really trying to brown things here, but it’s obviously impossible to stop just before they get brown.
At this point, dump in all the rest of the ingredients except the lime and the lentils (which might not be quite ready yet anyway).
Once it’s hot, the lentils ought to be ready (by which I mean they’ve absorbed all the water), so throw those bad boys in as well.
Give everything a good hearty stir and don’t be too precious about it, go ahead and bash some of those lentils around a bit. Breaking them will allow them to thicken up the stew so it’s less of a soup.
Heat through.
Serve with a lime wedge, which you can squeeze into your bowl to suit your taste.
Also, can we talk about my adoptee? Crystal, she of the Cozy Kitchen, is the new foodblogger I’m mentoring through Adopt-A-Blogger 4. She’s just redesigned her site and it’s super inviting, so you should all go check it out. While you’re there, be sure to coo at her adorable son and vote in her weekly poll. It’s a great idea to build community, so go help her build it by being a part of it!
January 26, 2010 at 12:38 am · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
This stew, from No Recipes, is very manly. And masculine. It is basically a roiling pot of testosterone.
Er, well, I don’t know, actually. I mean, all beef stews are manly, because big hunks of beef are basically the manliest meat there is, short of going out in the woods (or, for extra manliness points, the tundra), and killing some animal with your bare hands. No wussing around with guns. You need to PUNCH THAT DEER OUT.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the manliness of this stew. Right, so big hunks of nicely-browned beef and potatoes (big chunks are manlier than bite-sized bits, obviously), that’s pretty masculine, so’s a thick, gravy-like sauce, beer, bourbon, and rendering down pork fat to saute things in instead of mincing around with butter or olive oil. But although it had a bare minimum of vegetables in it (peas and carrots), it would be manlier with none at all, and also? Couldn’t it have used some bacon? And never mind the juniper berries I omitted from the original recipe. Berries. Decidedly not masculine, even, as I said in the comments on the original post, if you do make gin out of them. So if I made this stew again, I’d probably throw down with some bacon. If it was Matt only, there wouldn’t be vegetables, either (although I liked having them there, but I am an admitted girl). But really, all beef stews are pretty masculine, and this is still manlier than most, so it’s still head and shoulders, or something, ahead of the competition.
P.S., I halved it, although I screwed up some of the proportions, and we’ve still got a bit left.
Manly Man Stew
Ingredients
a 3/4″ cube of fatback, cut into 1/4″ cubes
1 lb beef chuck, cut into the manliest size possible while still remaining manageable…
1 1/2 tbsp flour
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, smashed
2 tbsp bourbon
1/2 a beer (so, 6 oz), and the original recipe says to chug the rest, but I found out it’s best to wait and chug it a little later in case you wind up needing it
1 cup chicken stock, and if you wind up not having enough, make up the difference with beer (see? what did I say?)
1/2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 a bay leaf, more or less
1 large potato, peeled and cut into manly chunks
1 large carrot, peeled and cut into manly chunks
1/2 cup peas (I used frozen peas to no ill effect)
a generous amount of salt and pepper
Method
Put the fatback cubes in a big pot over medium heat and let them render. I honestly don’t know if you’re supposed to wait until they’re literally completely dissolved, but I wound up taking mine out once they’d gotten all brown and dry. If you’re more knowledgeable than me about the correct properties of salted pork fat, then do the correct thing.
Toss the beef with flour, salt, and pepper.
Brown the beef, 4 or 5 minutes per side, turning when necessary. And I mean brown, not just “not raw.”
Once you’ve got a crusty brown crust all over the beef, add in the onions and garlic.
Saute those until soft and browned, about 7 – 10 minutes.
Then pour in your bourbon. It will probably boil pretty much immediately.
Add your beer, stock, and possibly more beer.
Bring to a boil, although mine pretty much just went ahead and boiled without me having to turn the heat up, and then turn down to a simmer.
Leave to simmer, partly covered, for about an hour.
Toss in the carrot and potato and let it cook at least another half hour, or however long it takes for the potatoes and beef to be tender.
**Note – the liquid was reduced down to thick gravy by the time I threw in the vegetables, so I added about a cup of water so that the potatoes would have something to cook in. Do this if necessary, and don’t worry – that amount reduced down to thick gravy as well.**
Add the peas.
Cook until heated through, then eat with manly noises and scratching.
January 16, 2010 at 12:19 am · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
This was supposed to be made with leftover turkey, but we ate all that before I made the soup. So I just chucked a chicken breast in the oven with some appropriate herbs and then shredded it when it was cooked, and pretended it was leftover turkey. It tasted good, even if not distinctly turkey-esque, so while this is not the same as the original (from the always fabulous Tokyo Terrace), it’s not dissimilar, particularly since I used miso paste as well. By which I mean I got to use up some of my zillion-dollar jar of red miso paste sitting in the back of the fridge. It’s not going to go bad, or anything – it’s already fermented, after all – but I don’t want to feel like I wasted a bunch of money on an ingredient I’d only use part of, in one thing, and throw out the rest.
This is the halved version for two people.
Chicken Ramen with Miso
Ingredients
2 cups chicken stock
2 packets dry ramen noodles (which I, and nobody else not from Canada, call generically “Mr. Noodles” in the same way you might say “Kleenex” or “Crock-Pot”), not counting the flavour-packets
a mushroom or two, sliced
1 rib celery, diced
1 carrot, julienned or matchsticked or whatever slim stick-type cut you like to do (or can do)
about a cup of cooked chicken, shredded – I just used a smallish chicken breast and didn’t really bother about measuring
1 tbsp red miso paste (or, well, I only have the one kind, I don’t know if you used some other kind of miso paste, it would probably be good)
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 green onion, chopped
2 tsp ginger, grated (or just chopped really small; it gums up my grater so I don’t generally grate it)
Method
Make the ramen according to package directions, except for the part where you add the flavour packet.
Once you’ve taken the noodles out to drain, use the same pot to bring the stock to a boil.
Add the miso paste and the soy sauce to the stock and stir until all the miso is broken up.
Now it’s time for assembly! This is assembled food!
Divide the noodles amongst the bowls.
Put the veggies and meat on top.
Pour the broth over everything.
Garnish with ginger and green onions.
December 29, 2009 at 9:11 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
My chili! It’s a recipe I got on a non-food-related messageboard, oddly enough in a thread about slow-cooker recipes despite not being made in one. The guy whose recipe it was… I don’t know anything about him anymore. We weren’t friends; I don’t think I’d like to hang out with him – although if it involved him making the chili, you know, maybe. I’ve made some little changes to it, but really, not much. I even left the amounts the same, because even though it makes a ton, halving it would involve halving a can of tomatoes or something, so forget that. Chili’s better the next day, anyway, and it freezes well, so it’s ok to make way too much.
The main base for the liquid is canned enchilada sauce. I’m sure you all have excellent recipes for homemade enchilada sauce and would never dream of opening one of these cans. Knock yourselves out. I don’t know the first thing about making enchilada sauce and don’t need to learn, since we never make enchiladas anyway. I’m happy with using the cans here. Do what you like better, but I am getting pre-emptively defensive about the canned sauce because I suspect it would make a lot of food bloggers turn up their noses, and if there’s anything I hate, it’s having a nose turned up at me. You know what? I’m pretty sure no one who reads this regularly (like, all two of you) would do that, and if you just got here and can feel your nose edging up towards the ceiling, we’re not going to get along anyway, so you might as well just not bother with this blog in the first place… snob.
Chili
Ingredients
2 lbs ground beef
1 onion, diced
1 tbsp oil (or less, depending on what fat percentage your beef is… I didn’t need this much because I bought el cheapo 25/75 beef)
1 tbsp seasoning salt
1 tbsp garlic salt
1/2 tbsp chipotle powder
1/2 tbsp chili powder
1/2 tbsp pepper
1 can tomatoes with green chilies (the guy who gave me the original recipe is from the south, so naturally he specified Ro*Tel, but you can’t get that here, so I just used store brand and it was fine)
2 cans enchilada sauce
3 cans beans, whatever kind you like – I actually used 3 different kinds (the original recipe called for chili beans, but I think that’s, again, a southern thing… or at least a not-around-here thing)
1 26-oz can tomatoes
I happened to have some chipotles in adobo hanging around, so I smashed up one of them (took out the seeds, though, because we’re babies… whatever, leave them in if you need more heat in the chili) and added that as well as a spoonful of the adobo
Method
In a big skillet, heat the oil.
Brown the beef with the onion.
Drain, or just scoop the beef and onions up with a slotted spoon and plop them into your big pot (and you will need a big one – did I mention this makes a ton? It makes a ton)
Add in all the rest of the ingredients and give it a stir.
Simmer, uncovered, for at least an hour, preferably longer.
Serve with cheese, green onions, tortilla chips, and/or any other accoutrements you like.
The guy whose recipe it was originally also mentioned that if you can find and afford ground buffalo meat instead of beef, it is very excellent in this chili. I’ve never made it that way, though.
Oh, another P.S., the banner image across the top of the site? That’s from a previous time I made the chili. I had just thrown in all the spices, and it looked cool, so I took a picture of it. I wonder if I have the whole thing around here somewhere…
What do you know, I do! It’s in my old pot that I don’t have anymore.
October 31, 2009 at 5:55 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I had a couple of sweet potatoes left over from the failchips, because for some reason I had been thinking I was doubling the recipe when I was at the store. I wanted to make soup anyway; not that I adhere to these rules, but it was “soup weather.” So I went through my soup file to find one that would help me use up these sweet potatoes, and I found this one, from Cooking Books. I could say something horrible here like “synergy!” but then I would have to kill myself, so let’s not.
I unfortunately had to skip the green pepper, because Matt hates it, and obviously if it’s simmering away in the soup, it’ll flavour up the whole thing with green-pepperiness. Which, to me, would be a plus. But part of being married is sacrificing things you like when your partner doesn’t like them, is it not? Am I being profound, or just a 50s cliche? Does it matter? The point is that if you can, you should put the green peppers back in. They’ll really enhance the visuals of the soup as well, in fact. In her original post, Andrea of Cooking Books said it’s supposed to be a primarily orange and green soup. But I found that it made a rainbow – red tomatoes, orange broth and sweet potatoes, chickpeas stained yellow from the turmeric, and green celery. It didn’t hurt that I cooked it in a blue pot, either.
Gypsy Soup
Ingredients
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, smashed with the flat of your knife
2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
3 stalks celery, sliced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas, or 1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked and brought “back to life,” so to speak – p.s., I was so proud of myself for figuring out how much to use all on my own
4 cups water
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp salt
pinch cinnamon
pinch cayenne
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp soy sauce
Method
Heat the oil in the bottom of your soup pot.
Saute the onions, celery, garlic, and sweet potatoes for 5 minutes.
Add the water and all the spices – paprika, turmeric, basil, salt, cinnamon, cayenne, and bay leaves. I guess salt isn’t a spice but let’s move on.
Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
Add the tomatoes and chickpeas (and the green pepper, if you’re using it – chop up one, in case you’re wondering how much) and continue simmering for another 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.
Stir in the soy sauce right at the end, and serve.
I suspect Matt agreed to eat it in the first place because it is gypsy soup, and who doesn’t think gypsies are cool? Well, actually, tons of people, and they get horribly persecuted, but I guess what I mean is what good person doesn’t think gypsies are cool?
September 26, 2009 at 8:09 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
We had our Fall Food Fest and it was fantastic. There was so much food:
(this photo not by me – none of the food fest ones are, except the ones of my two dishes)
- and that’s just the savoury/entree side, minus my soup and one other.
But right – my soup. I got the recipe out of a cookbook called One Pot – no author – that I bought while I worked at a bookstore. Since the idea was to bring in enough for 2 – 4 people, since everyone would just be having sample-sized amounts, I didn’t cut down the recipe at all, because it said it served 4. Well. I had a big tupperware that I brought in, and I also have a smaller one with about 2 servings in it sitting in my freezer. The rule here is never believe a recipe when it comes to how much it makes – it always makes more than it says it does.
The theme of the Food Fest was fall; it originated with my friends and I going apple-picking and having the idea of making something with our pickings, so I made 2 things with apples in them. Not everyone stuck to apples, though; the winner of the savoury category was a homemade lasagna, of all things – not sure how it’s “fall,” but I suppose lasagna is comfort food, and you want comfort food in the chilly fall evenings? – which was monumentally delicious, and the judges invented a third category for soups, because there were so many, in which a clam chowder won. You can see the lasagna covered in foil in that photo, and the clam chowder is in the crock-pot on the end.
Potato, Apple, and Arugula Soup
Ingredients
4 tbsp butter (this sounds like a lot, I know, but this makes a TON of soup, so per portion it’s not much at all)
2 lbs waxy potatoes, peeled and diced
1 red onion, quartered or eighthed, depending on how big it is
1 tbsp lemon juice
4 cups chicken stock
1 lb apples, peeled and diced
pinch ground allspice
1 cup (or more) arugula or baby spinach, plus a handful more for garnish
salt and pepper
Method
Melt the butter in a large soup pot.
Saute the potatoes and onion in it for 5 minutes, stirring constantly, which you’ll have to do since I guarantee you this will be a greater-than-one-layer situation. Some stuff won’t even be touching the butter unless you’re always stirring it.
Stir in the lemon juice, chicken stock, apples, and allspice.
Bring to a boil.
Turn it down and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
Add the arugula or baby spinach (which I had to use since my grocery store apparently doesn’t believe in arugula… whatever) and cook 10 more minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.
Now the fun part: ladle half the soup into a blender and puree for about a minute. I made an effort to get most of the big onion chunks into the blender, because I didn’t want to eat big old pieces of onion like that.
Stir the puree back into the pot and heat through.
Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Garnish with more leaves and serve.
September 13, 2009 at 10:55 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I’m back! I just made something in my new kitchen! It was this garlic and vegetable soup from Cooking Pleasures! I am so excited (apparently)!
This was an interesting soup. I liked the garlickiness of it – I mean, I’m normal – and the vegetable mix I used had water chestnuts and snap peas in it, which added something a little different. There are also oats in it. This might seem weird at first. Oats are for baking, right? Or breakfast. Not for going in a soup. But why not? All sorts of other grains go in soups without a second thought. How is this different than, say, barley? If there are people who get weird about their food categories in your house, I suggest not telling them beforehand, because they won’t mind once they eat it, but the cognitive dissonance of it might make them pre-judge the soup negatively.
The original recipe made a perfect amount for us and about a portion of leftovers, so I didn’t have to change anything except for eschewing the cream to be added at the end – Matt doesn’t love creamy soups, and I wasn’t sure how it would work with this specific one. Might have been fine. It was fine without it, though. I under-salted it, although that was easy to remedy in each specific bowl, and if I make it again, I’m going to use stock instead of water, because I think it could use a boost of flavour in the broth.
Garlic Vegetable Soup
Ingredients
1 cup mixed vegetables, made spoon-size (I used a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, because I don’t know how much of a carrot, for instance, to cut up to make it the appropriate proportion of a cup, and anyway I’d wind up with a bunch of partially cut up veggies. I recommend this approach. Plus, the frozen ones are usually pre-sliced!)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot, diced
1 tsp olive oil
2 tbsp oats
3 cups water (except use veggie stock, it’d be even better)
salt and pepper
Method
Heat the oil in a soup pot.
Saute the garlic and onions until the garlic starts to brown – the original recipe said until the onion was browned, but the garlic would be burnt way before that. So, you know, go until it’s delicious.
Throw the vegetables in and close the lid for just a minute or two.
Now add your water or stock and salt and pepper, and stir, releasing the fond from browning the onions and garlic.
Bring to a boil.
Add the oats and turn it down to a simmer.
Simmer for another 5 minutes, then eat.
I’m going to make other things soon and have more time to mess around with the lights and with my camera settings (found the manual for it, too). I know it’s unrealistic and weird to expect a new apartment to lead to better photos, but there IS a lot more light in here.
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