Tag Archives: soup

Friday food links – 22 Jan 2016

Lunch: Sunday vat of soup with cooked chicken added, leftover Zuni bread salad with extra radicchio and crumbled Lancashire cheese #leftovers

I’ve been trying out a Hello Fresh box this week. [disclosure: I haven’t been given anything for free by Hello Fresh, or been approached by them to write this post. I don’t do that sort of thing here.] If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid their marketing bombardment, they are a recipe box delivery company. You get three recipes delivered each week, along with all the ingredients to make them, in just the right quantities. This means everything from fresh prawns to leeks to sachets of balsamic vinegar and tiny bottles of oil. The only things missing from my box were salt, pepper and vegetable oil.

I’m still not convinced by this model, especially for already competent cooks, but I will write another post when I’ve thought about it some more. My first impressions are that it is useful to have the decisions about which recipes to make made for you, and it’s also useful to have just enough to make the recipe and no more. For instance, one recipe came with a mini-block of feta. Normally, I would end up with half a packet unused, which would gradually go off in the fridge. But the recipes themselves tend to require more attention and steps than my usual weeknight fare.

Apart from those three recipes, the rest of the week was all about slow and patient cooking: salting chickens for roasting a day and a bit ahead of time; roasting a head of cauliflower for an hour on a weeknight; making a big pot of soup to last the week. For me, that’s a much more satisfying form of ‘easy’ cooking, and not much more time consuming.

Recipes:

  • At the weekend:
    • Zuni Chicken bread salad
    • Five O’Clock Apron apple flapjacks
    • Honeyed rye bread and a Sunday Vat of soup (sweet potato and butternut squash) from Anna Jones’ ‘A Modern Way to Cook’
    • Ham, cheese and leek scones from ‘The Violet Bakery Cookbook’
  • Three from Hello Fresh:
    • Firecracker prawns with Chinese leaf and rice
    • Butterflied chicken with leeks, feta and tomatoes
    • Steak stir fry with broccoli and noodles
  • Whole roasted cauliflower – from the New York Times. Served with meatballs (from the freezer) in tomato sauce.

Without a recipe:

  • Chicken, cheese and avocado quesadillas
  • Meatballs in tomato sauce

Reading:

Friday food links – 8 Jan 2016

Sunset, Boston Manor

This week has felt like proper winter for the first time this season – actual frost on the roofs some mornings, a chilly wind that forced me to do up my coat for just about the first time this year. Sunshine, and showers, and clouds so dark and grey there might have been an eclipse, and evening sun setting into a perfect blue sky, with a whisp of a crescent moon. I’ve been pointing the moon out to E some evenings when we come home from nursery in the dark, and now she sometimes demands to see it – a tricky request to fulfill when it is new and hardly there.

A week into the New Year, and I feel like it’s going, tentatively, fairly well. I have stuck to my resolution and written at least 750 words every day. (Many of those words are nonsense, and certainly not publishable, but that’s not the point). I have been reading Bee Wilson’s wonderful ‘First Bite’ when I get a moment, and think it’s an excellent book, carefully researched and well written. And there has just about been enough time for work, for play, for writing, for laughing, and for cooking. A good week.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Lasagne, using the last of the rib of beef ragu
  • Roast chicken, with roasted vegetables and broccoli
  • Chicken pie
  • Fish cakes/fish fingers and crinkle-cut chips
  • Fish curry with potatoes and peas
  • Slow-cooker chicken stock (that went into the chicken pie, the soup and some I’ve kept back to cook with beef shin this weekend).

Reading:

Using miso

Shiro miso

Miso is a fermented paste that is an essential part of Japanese cooking, but has also started to show up in recipes for everything from roast pork to soup to butterscotch sauce. I started reading about miso, and then picked up the bag of shiro (white) miso in the picture from The Japan Centre.  If you’ve had miso soup from somewhere like Wagamama, or even Pret, you have an idea of the sort of savoury flavour that comes from miso.

Making miso

While reading up about soy sauce, I came across this interesting idea:

“soy sauce and miso paste were originally the same
preparation, but the liquid became soy sauce, and the solids
left behind became miso”

Miso and soy sauce are both produced by fermentation. Miso can be produced by many different grains, but the most popular types are produced by soybeans with rice and/or barley, and some rice colonised by an Aspergillus fungus, called Koji.

Miso is has both savoury and sweet aspects. Both of these elements come about because the fermentation creates enzymes that break down both the starches and proteins in the soy and rice grains. Breaking down starch produces sugars, (starch is just the name for a long chain of sugar molecules joined together). Breaking down proteins produces amino acids for the same reason. Glutamate is the amino acid which creates the taste of umami.

Cooking with miso

Shiro miso paste

As I read more and more about miso, it became clear that there are a huge number of different types of miso, all with different characteristics. Still, the ones you are most likely to find easily in the UK are shiro miso, or white miso – a pale, fairly sweet miso; and aka miso or red miso, a more savoury and stronger paste. Both of these can be used to make miso soup, by combining them with dashi, a savoury stock made from dried kelp and dried bonito (tuna) flakes.

However, the sweet-savoury nature of miso makes it much more versatile. The current issue of Lucky Peach, an American food quarterly, includes a recipe for burnt miso butterscotch sauce and for miso mayonnaise. (You have to love a magazine that entitles an article on different types of miso paste ‘Miso Horny’. And if you don’t love that, then Lucky Peach is probably not the publication for you.)

You can use it to enhance the flavour of soup, to glaze steak or pork, to marinade salmon, or in salad dressing. It’s a flavour enhancer, which makes it very versatile. I’ll be trying to use more of it this year.

The recipe I started with was Smitten Kitchen’s Carrot and Miso soup. You can head over to her site for the details, but a summary of what I did is below. This is a great way to introduce yourself to miso. The carrot soup is fine without the miso, but with it you get a rounder flavour that brings together the sweet and vegetal tastes of the carrots.

Carrot and miso soup

Carrot and miso soup

  • Chop two small onions, a couple of garlic cloves and about 10 medium carrots.
  • Cook gently in olive oil until the onion is translucent.
  • Add a thumb-sized piece of ginger, chopped finely. Submerge everything in about a litre of Marigold vegetable bouillon (made weak so it’s not too salty). Simmer until the carrots are soft.
  • Blend in the pan with an immersion blender.
  • Take a ladleful of the pureed soup out into a small bowl, and mix in a couple of tablespoons of white miso. As soon as you mix the miso with the hot soup, you get a burst of that miso soup smell. Mix the soup back in and taste. If it needs more miso, repeat this procedure.
  • Serve with a few dots of toasted sesame oil on top.

Eating the soup

Ribollita – robust vegetable soup

Ribollita ready for freezing

Ribollita is really just a robust vegetable soup, but the Italian name gives it an air of the exotic that plain old mixed veg doesn’t have. And it’s quite a plain thing, and even boring if not done carefully.

The essential elements are:

  • Onions, carrots and celery – a standard  soup or stock base, although I wouldn’t worry if you don’t have celery in the house.
  • Beans of some sort – a white bean like cannellini usually, but I have also subbed chickpeas in the past
  • Kale – usually cavolo nero, also called dinosaur kale which has long narrow green-black spears. You could instead use chard, regular kale, spinach, Brussels tops.
  • Even more starch – traditionally toasted bread is layered with the soupy part to make an almost sliceable bake. Skye Gingell’s innovation is to use farro (spelt), making it much more reheatable. You could probably use pearled barley to similar effect
  • Water

And that’s it. You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound very tasty so far, and I have some sympathy with that. Combined without care, it can be very dull. To make this work you need some patience and attention – not something I can always be relied on to provide. The vegetables need to be softened to extract and develop flavour before being swamped with water; you need a good amount of salt to season it properly, and some umami. Umami is the taste of savoury. It’s the flavour of glutamate, a type of amino acid, that is found in grilled meat, porcini mushrooms, parmesan, ketchup, soy sauce – almost anything that is used a condiment.

To get the umami flavour into the soup, using good stock helps, or just a stock cube, which are fully of precisely this flavour. Parmesan rinds (they freeze really well) cooked with the soup are very useful – the whole thing starts to smell of faintly of melted cheese, which can’t be a bad thing.

This soup, with perhaps a slice of bread, is a really filling lunch, freezes well and clears out pretty much your entire vegetable drawer in one go. What more could you want?

Ribollita

(adapted mainly from Skye Gingell’s ‘My Favourite Ingredients‘)

  • olive oil
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 2 sticks of celery, chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • large pinch dried chilli flakes
  • 4-5 sage leaves, finely sliced
  • 2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
  • about 150g farro, rinsed
  • 1 can peeled plum tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 can cannellini beans (drained) – I used chickpeas because it was what i had in the house, but I think the creamy texture of the beans would have worked better
  • Chicken stock or water, around a litre
  • 1 bunch cavolo nero (or kale), thick stalks removed and roughly chopped
  • parmesan rinds (optional)

Heat olive oil in a casserole or large saucepan. Soften the onions over a medium heat. Add the carrots and celery, and fry gently for a few more minutes. (I tend to chop the onions before heating the pan, then just chop each vegetable as I go, adding to the pot, then moving on to chop the next one.) Add the garlic, sage and chilli and stir to fry and make fragrant. Add the potatoes, and farro, stir and heat again. Add the tomatoes and their juice, then add chicken stock or water to just cover the vegetables, and the parmesan rind, if using. Simmer for about 20 minutes until the potato and farro are cooked. Add the beans and the cavolo nero, and simmer for about another hour. Then either serve, or cool down, divide into portions and freeze.