Potato soup

April 2, 2021

 

   

We had a soup craving over Easter and wanted something to get us through a few long weekend meals. Cindy googled for potato soup recipes and knew that we could trust Smitten Kitchen for something good. We simplified Perelman's fancy garlic steps and made tofu chicharrones to top things off instead of bacon bits, but the basics are the same: a rich and creamy soup, with a good hit of garlic that warms up your insides. 

Potato soup

(a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, 

where it's credited to Cook's Illustrated)

3 tablespoons butter

2 leeks, washed and sliced small (white and light green parts)

5 cloves garlic, minced

5 cups veggie stock

2 bay leaves

1 kg potatoes (we used Dutch creams, the recipe asks for russets), peeled and cut into 1cm cubes

1/3 cup sour cream

salt and pepper, to taste

Melt the butter in a big saucepan and then throw in the chopped leek, stirring frequently for 5-10 minutes until it softens (you don't want it to go too brown though). Throw in the garlic and cook for another minute or so.

Add the stock, bay leaves and a good shake of salt - at least half a teaspoon (although it depends a bit on how salty your stock is). Add in the potatoes and simmer over medium heat until they're tender - about 20-25 minutes.

Pull out the bay leaves and stir through the sour cream. Whizz everything together with a stick blender until it's beautiful and smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste and then serve.

We topped it with spicy tofu chicharrones and a shake of parsley, but you can add bacon bits, grated cheese, or whatever you feel like.

The Veganator

February 20, 2019

This month I've done something that seemed almost unthinkable four months ago: I resigned from my job of more than a decade! While I was really very happy there, something new and intriguing popped up and I felt ready for a change. 

My longtime workplace is full of wonderful folks who sent me off with the most thoughtful and personal gift: a cookbook made just for me. It's colour printed and spiral bound, with a picture of everyone on the front and 36 recipes individually contributed by my colleagues. The recipes are variously typed, and handwritten and sometimes even illustrated, with extra little notes to me and tips on how to make them best. I LOVE THIS BOOK.

It was actually Michael who dug into it first, and fast: he picked out one of the more weeknight-friendly meals to cook on my first day at my new job. It's a hearty vegan soup of zucchini and rice that's livened up with lots of lemon, fresh herbs and a dollop of coconut yoghurt. It's something that Elise and Dani make together, and they hand-wrote and diagrammed it out on some cute graph paper. It was such a comfort to come home to, and also very handy to microwave at my new workplace for lunch - by then it almost had the texture of a risotto. 

Looks like I've got a 2019 cooking and blogging project all cut out for me.

The Veganator, aka Zucchini Rice Soup
(a recipe shared by Elise and Dani)

1 onion, chopped
1 cup rice (Elise recommends brown, but we started with basmati)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 sprig rosemary, stem removed
2L stock
3 zucchinis, grated
zest and juice of 3 small lemons
salt and pepper
1 tablespoon of coconut yoghurt per person
lots of chopped fresh mint
nutritional yeast flakes, to taste

Set a very large pot over medium heat and throw in the onion, rice, garlic, rosemary leaves and stock, and cook them for 40 minutes. Add the grated zucchinis until they turn soft.

Add the lemon zest and juice, and season with salt pepper and nooch to taste. Serve garnished with a spoon of coconut yoghurt and plenty of mint leaves.

Pumpkin, saffron & orange soup

November 7, 2018

We just keep going back to Simple. I was keen for a soup and this pumpkin one was the pick of the small selection in the book. It all takes a bit of time - you've got to do a bunch of chopping and roasting before you even get to the soup making. It's worth it though. This is probably the best pumpkin soup recipe we've made - the creaminess of the crème fraiche is nicely balanced by the twin punches of the orange zest and chilli. The roasted pumpkin seeds were the star of the show though - so simple and so, so delicious. You could just make them as a snack. They work brilliantly with this soup though - we'll definitely make it again.

Pumpkin, saffron & orange soup

(from Yotam Ottolenghi's Simple)

60ml olive oil

2 onions, sliced into 2cm wedges

1.2kg of butternut pumpkin, peeled, seeded and cut into 3cm cubes
1 litre of vegetable stock

2 tablespoons harissa (we just used a chilli paste, because we couldn't track down harissa in the supermarket)

1/4 teaspoon saffron threads

zest of 1 orange

180g crème fraiche

parsley leaves to garnish
salt and pepper

80g pumpkin seeds

2 teaspoons maple syrup

1/4 teaspoon chilli flakes

Preheat the oven to 170°C.

Mix the pumpkin seeds, syrup and chilli flakes in a small bowl with a sprinkle of salt. Spread them on a lined baking tray and roast for 15 minutes until they starting to brown. Set aside to cool.

Turn the oven up to 220°C.

Combine the oil, onion and pumpkin in a large bowl with a good sprinkle of salt and pepper. Mix well and then lay them out on a baking tray. Roast for 25 minutes until everything softens up nicely and then take them out of the oven and set aside.

Put the stock, harissa, saffron, orange zest and some more salt and pepper into a big pot. Bring it all to the boil and then add in the pumpkin, onions and baking oil. Stir, reduce the heat and simmer for five minutes.

Take everything off the heat, stir in the crème fraiche and then blend it all up with a hand blender.

Serve, topped with pumpkin seeds and parsley.

Spinach, pear & blue cheese soup

May 8, 2017

This soup recipe has waited more than eight years to have its moment in our home. I bookmarked it in 2008 soon after it was posted by Jac on Tinned Tomatoes, and this month it was the perfect thing for bringing together the onion, potatoes, spinach and pear that arrived in our vege box. With garlic already in the cupboard and some home-made stock in the freezer, all we had to buy was the blue cheese.

It's a simple formula that I made my tweaks to. I took my time cooking the onions down to soft caramelisation, Michael left the skin on the potatoes when he chopped them, and I retained the spinach stems too. It would all fall prey to the stick blender, after all! When that time came, my soup wasn't as gloriously green as Jac's, and I needed an extra cup of water to smooth its way.

In our khaki soup, I was surprised how easily I could pick out the pear's sweetness from the pungency of the blue cheese, and the thick carbohydrate comfort of the potatoes. It was a comfort and a pleasure; well worth the wait.

Spinach, pear & blue cheese soup
(slightly adapted from a recipe on Tinned Tomatoes)

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3 medium potatoes, skin on or off, roughly diced
1 bunch spinach, washed and roots removed
1 large pear, peeled, cored and diced
750mL vegetable stock
100g blue cheese
2 teaspoons vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
extra blue cheese, cayenne, nutmeg, and/or fresh herbs to garnish

Heat the oil in a your largest saucepan over low-medium heat. Add the onion and saute it gently until soft and sweet, about 10 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for 2 minutes. Add the potatoes and cook for a further 2 minutes. Add the spinach and cook until wilted. Add the pear and pour over the stock. Place a lid on the saucepan and cook for 30 minutes.

Crumble in the blue cheese and stir until melted. Season with Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper to taste. Blend until smooth with a stick blender. Pour into bowls, garnish and serve.

Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

June 24, 2016

Cindy bought me a copy of the Cinnamon Snail cookbook for my birthday (and whipped up an amazing meal from it while we were in Stockholm), and I wanted to take it for a test drive before she jetted off to the US. Melbourne was turning on typically soup-friendly weather, and this broccoli/beer soup seemed like something I could tackle on a Friday night. 

It came together really easily - you can cook the soup while the 'chorizo' is cooking. The sunflower seed chorizo is worth the effort too, smoky and spicy with a little bit of crunch. This recipe made way more than we needed, but I enjoyed the soup so much that I made a second batch straight afterwards to use it up. The soup itself come out nice and thick thanks to all of the blended up potatoes - it's part soup/part mashed potato, with the nooch adding some cheesiness. Ours didn't come out the kind of vibrant green that was pictured in the book - the broccoli colour was swamped by the beer and tamari, so we got more of a khaki. 

This is a solid winter dish - it'll slot into our regular soup rotation for sure. 

Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

(adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

Sunflower chorizo

1.5 cups sunflower seeds

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning (we found some in Woolies)

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 tablespoons tamari

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1.5 teaspoons liquid smoke

1/4 cup olive oil

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

Soup

3 tablespoons peanut oil

2 shallots, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (don't be heavy-handed with this, the cayenne really packs a punch)

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

2 tablespoons tamari

1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped

1 stubby beer

2 cups Massel 'chicken' stock

3 small potatoes (the recipe specifies Yukon golds, we used Pontiacs I think)

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

The first step is to make the chorizo. 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and line a baking tray with baking paper sprayed with oil.

Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse for about a minute - you want to combine everything and break the seeds up a bit, but you don't want it to grind to powder or anything.

Crumble the mixture over the baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes, until just before it starts to burn - if you've spread the mixture out it should go a bit crispy.

Then, onto the soup.

Heat the oil in a big pot and saute the shallots, garlic and celery for about 4 minutes. 

Throw in the mustard, cayenne, paprika and tamari and stir-fry everything for another couple of minutes. 

Stir in the stock, beer, broccoli, nooch and potatoes. Cover the pot and bring the mix to the boil, cooking until the potato chunks are soft (about 15 minutes for us).

Allow the mix to cool a bit to lower the burn-risk and then blend everything up with an immersion blender. 

Serve, topped with a generous sprinkling of the chorizo.

Vegan baked potato soup with mushroom bacon

May 16, 2015

We had a spare Saturday afternoon and thus decided we finally had the time to commit to one of the overly complicated recipes that Serious Eats put up during their recent vegan month. I'm pretty keen to have a crack at the mapo tofu or the creamy ramen, but they both required fancier ingredients than we could lay our hands on at short notice. Instead, we went for this wintery roasted potato and cauliflower soup, with the added bonus of some mushroom bacon.

This is still a time-consuming and complicated recipe - I'd guess that we spent more than two hours putting everything together and we dramatically simplified the original (no stove-top smoking, lots of stick-blending and no soup straining). The mushroom bacon could be made well ahead of time, although you've got a good hour to do the laborious mushroom slicing while the veggies are roasting, and the oven's already on so you can pop them straight in. 

I'd say the pay-off was just about worth it - the potato and cauliflower soup was rich and had a cheesy texture thanks to the blended up cashews and cauliflower. It was quite mildly flavoured - you could boost the chipotle/adobo levels if you wanted more of a kick, but otherwise just season it heavily to make sure it doesn't turn out bland.

The mushroom bacon really kicks things up a notch too. I'd probably up the liquid smoke in the marinade next time and try to find bigger mushrooms to avoid the fiddliness of chopping and flipping hundreds of little mushroom slices, but the recipe in general is a winner. Keep in mind that the mushrooms shrink an awful lot, so you might as well do a big batch - we started with three full oven trays and wound up able to squeeze everything onto a single tray for the final roast.

I was very impressed by this recipe - we'll definitely be going through the Serious Eats vegan archives again when we've got an afternoon spare.

Crispy mushroom bacon 

(based on this recipe from Serious Eats)

500g Swiss brown mushrooms

spray oil

salt and pepper

4 teaspoons maple syrup

1/4 teaspoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke

 

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Slice the mushrooms really finely, just a couple of millimetres thick.

Line a couple of baking trays with baking paper and grease it up with spray oil. Lay out the mushrooms (we had to do things in a couple of batches - there was too much for even two full trays). 

Generously season with salt and pepper and pop them in the oven. After 20-25 minutes, take them out and flip each mushroom piece over. Give them another light spray with oil and some more salt and pepper and put them back in for another 25 minutes. You want them to dry out and crisp up - don't be afraid to go for longer than 25 minutes if you need to.

While the mushrooms are cooking, mix together the syrup, garlic powder, paprika and liquid smoke in a big bowl. Once the mushrooms are ready, stir them all through to coat them with the marinade and lay them back out on a baking tray (they'll have shrunk such that 3 tray loads will now fit on one!). 

Give them another 5-10 minutes in the oven to caramelise the sugars in the marinade and pull them out when they're a bit crunchy and a bit chewy.

Fully loaded vegan baked potato soup

(based on this recipe from Serious Eats)

1 head of cauliflower, halved

2 large floury potatoes, scrubbed and with a few holes poked in them with a skewer

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 tablespoons coconut oil

1 large leek, sliced finely

2 ribs celery, sliced finely

6 green onions, sliced finely with white and green parts kept separately

5 cloves garlic, sliced

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, plus a bonus teaspoon of the adobo sauce

1 cup roasted cashews

1 litre almond milk

1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke

1 small bunch chives, sliced finely

1 head broccoli, cut into florets and steamed (for serving)

water

salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C and roast the potatoes and cauliflower for about an hour, until they're very soft but not burnt (the cauliflower will brown up a lot, but that's okay). Set aside to cool.

In the meantime, heat the coconut oil in a large saucepan and add in the leek, celery, garlic and the white parts of the green onions. Cook over low-medium heat for 10-15 minutes, until everything is nice and soft but nothing is browning up. Stir through the paprika.

Combine the cashews with about 1 cup of the almond milk, and the chipotle and adobo sauce, in the spice grinder attachment of your food processor (or a blender if that's your preference). Give it a good whizz, you want it as smooth as possible.

Pour the rest of the almond milk and the liquid smoke into the saucepan and scoop in the cashew paste, stirring everything together thoroughly. Whizz the soup mix up with a stick blender - you want the leek and onion bits to blend into the soup as much as possible.

Peel and dice the potatoes and cut the cauliflower into bite-sized chunks, discarding the stem. Throw the veggies into the soup mix in batches, stick-blending as you go. Add some water along the way to keep things at the texture you want - we added about a cup. 

Once you've blended everything together as smoothly as possible, stir through the chives, season with salt and pepper and add in about a third of your mushroom bacon. 

Serve, garnishing with some more mushroom bacon, the broccoli and a sprinkling of the green parts of the green onions.

Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

November 1, 2014

Our veggie box included a couple of heads of broccoli and some silverbeet, so Cindy's recipe radar went off when she came across this soup on My Darling Lemon Thyme. It was perfectly designed to fill our post-Halloween lazy day - a simple soup, easy to whip up and healthy to help our recovery from all the cocktails and over-eating at Smith & Daughters.

Ah, if only. This was basically a disaster - our stick blender blew its motor in the middle of the process, our tahini sauce sank like a stone rather than swirling neatly on top of the soup and I managed to splash the half-blended soup all down my front. Good times. Luckily, there was enough leftover for us to re-blend the soup on Monday with a new stick blender and for me to eat it with less of a grump on and actually enjoy it. The tahini sauce in particular is excellent - tangy and salty and providing some depth to the flavour of the soup. I think I've been scarred enough by this soup not to put it into high rotation, but it's not really fair to blame the recipe for our appliance breakdowns and my clumsiness - go and look at the great photos on My Darling Lemon Thyme to get inspired.

Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

(slightly adapted from a recipe on My Darling Lemon Thyme)

tahini & lemon sauce

1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon pine nuts
4 tablespoons tahini
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
water to thin things out if necessary (the recipe recommends 2 tablespoons, but our mix seemed plenty runny without it).

soup
1 leek (the white parts), roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cumin
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 heads broccoli (stems and florets), roughly chopped
1 litre veggie stock
1 x 400ml can coconut cream
a small bunch of silverbeet leaves, stemmed and roughly chopped

1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 tablespoons dukkah (the original recipe wanted za'atar)

Start with the tahini sauce. Smash up the garlic, salt, allspice and pine nuts in a mortar and pestle until it's a thick paste. Stir it together with the tahini and the olive oil and season and then set it aside.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the leek and garlic with the salt and cumin until it all softens nicely. 

Stir in the broccoli for a minute or two and then pour in the stock and simmer everything for 15 minutes or so. Throw in the silverbeet leaves and cook for another few minutes before adding in the coconut cream. 

Let the mixture cool a bit and then stick-blend until the soup is smooth (or your blender explodes). Serve with a dollop of the lemon-tahini sauce on top and a sprinkling of the pine nuts and the dukkah.

Gnocchi pesto soup

September 8, 2014

This week I pulled out Isa Does It for weeknight dinner inspiration. I was quite taken by the pesto pasta dish that Linda made recently but we'd just had pasta ourselves; instead I transferred my pesto enthusiasm to Moskowitz's recipe for pesto soup with gnocchi, beans and greens.

The thickness of this soup comes from blended cauliflower and basil with a touch of arrowroot, so it's not excessively rich. Then it's dotted with white beans, gnocchi and chard (or in my case, spinach), providing lots to get your teeth into. Like the book's sweet potato and red curry soup, it comes off as much a stew as a soup.

I used homemade stock so I increased the amount of salt in the recipe. While I loved the textures of this soup, I thought that the flavour was lacking a bit of depth - again that might be down to my vege-scrap stock, but I reckon I'll try stirring a bit of white miso into the simmering broth in future. Otherwise, the only thing preventing me from making this all winter long will be the unseasonal basil - I guess it will be better savoured as an autumn recipe.

Gnocchi pesto soup
(slightly adapted from a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Isa Does It,
which also appears on PPK)

2 teaspoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 large head cauliflower, cut into florets
1L vegetable stock
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon salt (add some white miso next time?)
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon arrowroot
1 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves
250g fresh gnocchi
400g can cannellini  beans, drained and rinsed
1 small bunch spinach leaves, roughly chopped
toasted pine nuts, to garnish

Pour just enough olive oil into a large pot to cover the base; set it over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook it, stirring, for about a minute, ensuring it doesn't burn. Add the cauliflower and 3 cups of the stock. Stir in the thyme, salt and pepper (plus future miso). Place a lid on the pot and bring it to the boil, cooking for around 10 minutes until the cauliflower is tender.

Place the arrowroot in a cup and gradually pour in the remaining stock to form a smooth paste. Remove the lid from the pot and pour in the arrowroot-stock, stirring it around and cooking for 5 minutes until thickened (mine never did). Turn off the heat and stir in the basil leaves. Blend the soup until smooth, preferably with a stick blender.

Return the soup in the pot to medium heat. Add the gnocchi, replace the lid and cook for 3 minutes. Pour in the beans and spinach leaves, stirring everything together gently, until the leaves are wilted. Serve in bowls, sprinkled with pine nuts.

Curry soup

July 28, 2014

A few months after it hit the newsstands, Cindy and I finally grabbed a copy of The Saturday Paper for a lazy weekend browse. Alongside the in-depth articles on the various ways that the Abbott Government is destroying Australia and the excellent arts coverage was a nice little food section, featuring recipes from Andrew McConnell (of Cutler & Co, Cumulus Inc and elsewhere).

The theme for this wintery week was soups - we skipped the chestnut, celeriac and cabbage soup recipe and focussed on McConnell's curry soup. The recipe included a big pile of mussels, but we were assured in the text that it was just as good mussel-free, so we swapped in a can of chickpeas and garnished with a few fried mushrooms instead (we also left out the butter to keep things vegan). Once you chop up all the pumpkin it's a very straightforward recipe and the end result is loaded with spicy-sweet flavours from the array of aromatics that are simmered in. The chickpeas were an okay addition, but next time I might try to think of something a bit chunkier to take the place of the mussels - I feel like some big potato cubes or diced mock-meat would work well. This is definitely a good base for a spicy winter soup - we'll report back on any future experimenting we do.

Curry soup

(adapted from this recipe in The Saturday Paper)

1 onion, diced finely

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1 teaspoon turmeric

2 red birdseye chillies, sliced finely

4cm piece of ginger, chopped finely

410g can of chopped tomatoes

600g pumpkin, peeled and diced into 1cm cubes

1L veggie stock + an extra 250ml or so of water

410g can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed

aromatics

6 makrut lime leaves

15 curry leaves

2cm chunk of ginger

2cm chunk of galangal

1 tablespoon palm sugar

1 teaspoon garam masala (we'd run out, so I made up my own with a mix of ground mace, cinnamon, cloves, cumin and nutmeg)

400ml can of coconut milk

Heat the olive oil in a big saucepan and throw in the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli, cooking for 5 or 10 minutes, until everything is soft and the onion has gone a bit golden.

Add the tomatoes, pumpkin, stock, turmeric and the extra water. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for about 20 minutes.

Attack the mix with a stick blender until you've managed to turn all the pumpkin and onion pieces into a relatively smooth paste (if you've got a real blender you can transfer the soup and do it properly)

Throw in all the aromatics and simmer again, for about 10 minutes. Fish out the ginger and galangal chunks as well as the lime and curry leaves and then stir in the chickpeas, cooking for another 5 minutes or so.

Sweet potato & red curry soup

April 18, 2014

I've somewhat foolishly signed up to do the Oxfram Trailwalker this year - a 100km walk through the Dandenongs over the course of a weekend, inevitably resulting in pain, tears and ruined friendships. Our team decided to make use of the Easter weekend to get a last burst of training in and headed out Warburton way to sample a section of the trail.

Sadly, Melbourne's forecast of 'a few showers' turned out to be more like 'buckets of freezing icy rain,' leaving me wet, cold and cranky on my return home. Luckily, the meal I'd planned for the evening was the perfect antidote - a spicy, thick soup, bursting with flavour and loaded with fresh veggies.

It's another recipe from Isa Does It and had the twin virtues of being pretty simple to make and being able to thaw the ice in my bones. There's a bit of veggie chopping required to get yourself set up, but from then on it's a big one-pot dish that simmers away quietly filling your house with wonderful aromas. The curry paste and coconut milk give everything a very Thai feel, while the root veggies and kale give it a slightly heartier vibe and the lime juice adds a bit of zing. Now I just need to convince Cindy to make this on the weekend of the actual walk - I can't imagine a better dish to come home to.

Sweet potato & red curry soup with rice and kale
(based on a recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Isa Does It)

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 brown onion, diced
2 teaspoons salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced ginger
3/4 cup jasmine rice
4 cups veggie stock + 2 cups water (use 6 cups of stock if you've got it)
2 tablespoons red curry paste (we use Maesri)
the leaves from 1 bunch of red kale, shredded
half a sweet potato, peeled and diced
2 carrots, diced
400g can coconut milk
juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon maple syrup
fresh coriander for garnish

Heat the olive oil in a big pot and throw in the onion and one teaspoon of the salt. Cook for five minutes or so, stirring often, until it's softened up.

Add the garlic and ginger and fry for another minute or so.

Tip in the stock and water, the rice, and the rest of the salt and cover. Bring it all to the boil.

Once it's boiled, drop the heat until you get it at a nice low simmer. Throw in the curry paste, kale, sweet potato and carrot and stir everything together thoroughly. Cover and cook for another 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the coconut milk, lime juice and maple syrup, stir in some of the coriander and kill the heat.

Serve, garnished with remaining coriander.

Thick golden dahl

August 7, 2013

We needed a simple meal to get us through the ludicrous task of packing up our house - moving always leaves you eating takeaway for the best part of a week, so we also wanted something healthy. Luckily, the calendar recipe this month delivered - a very straightforward dahl recipe loaded with lentils to fill us up and give us something nutritious.

There's really not much too this - some onions, lentils and a decent combo of spices. It's warm and hearty, with a mild chilli kick and some ginger and lemony tang. Using the ground up cardamom pods really makes a difference as well - the cardamom flavours came through strongly. Combined with a fresh baguette from Baker D Chirico and you've got yourself a pretty tremendous meal.

Thick golden dahl

10 cardamom pods

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 onions, chopped

3 cloves garlic, sliced

2 teaspoons turmeric

pinch of ground chilli

1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger

2 cups red lentils, rinsed

6 cups vegetable stock

1 bay leaf

juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper

Crush up the cardamom pods in a mortar and pestle and grab the seeds (throw the crumbled pods away)

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add onions and then cover and cook for about 5 minutes - they should go nice and soft.

Add cardamom seeds, garlic, turmeric, ground chilli and ginger and stir-fry for another five minutes or so. 

Add the lentils, stock and bay leaf and bring the mixture to the boil - drop the heat down so that it's just simmering. Cook uncovered for about 25 minutes - it'll thicken up nicely (the photo above is from the day after, when the lentils had soaked up even more of the liquid - it was still a bit soupy on the night). When it's ready to eat, stir through the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper.

Watercress & chickpea soup with rosewater & ras el hanout

May 10, 2012

   

We've been eating out a ridiculous amount lately, so we had two problems: 1) our veggie box produce was starting to turn, and 2) we needed to eat something healthy. Typically Ottolenghi had the answer to both our problems: a watercress and chickpea soup that was about as healthy as you can imagine.

It's a pretty simple recipe, maybe half an hour of fiddling about. The soup itself isn't ridiculously flavourful - it's basically blended up greens with a bit of stock and a dash of sweetness peaking through from rosewater and sugar. The whole package is made by the topping though - roasted spiced carrot and chickpeas. We had just enough ras el hanout lying around (from five years ago!) to make this and I'm glad we did. It's a fantastic combination of sweetness and spice and really made the soup pop. I just wanted to eat bowlfuls of the carrot and chickpea mix. So good - we now need to find a new batch of ras el hanout so we can put this into our regular winter rotation.

Watercress & chickpea soup with rosewater & ras el hanout
(based on this recipe from Ottolegnhi's Guardian column)

1 large carrot, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon ras el hanout
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 x 410g can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained
2 small onions, sliced finely
600ml Massel 'chicken' stock
1 thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and sliced finely
220g watercress, stems trimmed off
100g baby spinach leaves
2 teaspoons caster sugar
1 teaspoon rosewater
salt

Heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Stir together the carrot pieces with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil, the ras el hanout, the cinnamon and a generous sprinkle of salt. Spread them on a lined baking tray and pop them in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes and then add half of the chickpeas, stirring to get them a bit coated in the spicy oil. Pop the tray back in the oven for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, get a large saucepan (or frying pan) on low heat with the rest of the olive oil and sauté the onion and ginger for 10 minutes or so, until everything is nice and soft. Add the greens, leftover chickpeas, stock, sugar and a pinch of salt and bring the mix to the boil. 

Kill the heat after a minute or two and let it cool a bit before whizzing it all up in a blender or with a stick blender. Add in the rosewater, taste for seasoning and add salt if required. Serve the soup up with a few spoonfuls of the insanely delicious chickpea/carrot mix on top. Enjoy!

August 10, 2011: Legume Noodle Soup

By the middle of August, the Melbourne winter really starts to get you down. It rained for hours on Wednesday as Cindy's cold turned her into a grumpy, snotty couch-hog. The only solution was soup. And what better soup than this amazing treat from Ottolenghi's Guardian blog (first drawn to our attention by Kathryn at Limes and Lycopenes). It's a rich and hearty combination of proteins and carbs, with spinach to make you feel healthy plus loads of fresh herbs and a crucial twist of lime juice for flavour. It's like comfort in a pot - the perfect cure to winter's worst blues.

We took some lazier options than recommended by Ottolenghi - canned chickpeas and beans, packaged stock and linguine rather than Iranian noodles. The stock was probably a tad on the salty side - this would no doubt work better with home-made vegie stock but if you're using store-bought like we did, I'd recommend leaving the seasoning until right at the end. You might find it doesn't need anything extra. Regardless, this has gone straight onto our list of classic winter meals - I'd say we'll get back to it again even before this one is over.


Ash-e reshteh/Legume noodle soup
(based on this recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi)

80g butter
1 large onion, thinly sliced
10 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
half a bunch of green onions, sliced finely (white and green parts kept separate)
1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
salt and pepper
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 can butter beans, drained and rinsed
225g yellow split peas
2 litres vegie stock
2/3 cup chopped parsley
2/3 cup chopped coriander
1/3 cup chopped dill
150g baby spinach leaves
100g dry linguine
200g sour cream
1 1/2 tablespoons white vinegar
limes

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and sautee the onion, garlic and white parts of the green onions for about 20 minutes, until completely soft and starting to brown up. Stir in the turmeric plus some salt and pepper (maybe skip the salt here if you're using salty stock) and cook for a minute or so. Scoop out about a third of the onion mix and set aside for garnishing purposes.

Add the chickpeas, butter beans, split peas and stock and bring to a simmer. Cook for 30-40 minutes until the split peas are nice and soft, scooping off any frothy scum that comes to the surface.

Add in the fresh herbs, the green onions and the spinach and stir everything together. Cook for another 15 minutes or so. Add in the linguine and cook for 8-10 minutes until the it's nicely cooked. Stir through 150g of the sour cream plus the vinegar and add salt and pepper as necessary.

Serve garnished with a spoonful of the reserved onion mix, a dollop of sour cream and with the juice of half a lime stirred through. And with a home-made naan if you've got any lying around.

June 14, 2011: Roast onion soup

Cindy and I came back from an impromptu weekend away that had been filled with snacks, wine and chocolate, so we decided to make something vaguely healthy to make us feel human again. We perused Cindy's bookmarked soup recipes and settled on this autumnal offering from Lucy at Nourish Me. We rarely have the energy to make our own stock around these parts, but Lucy's helpful integration of a speedy stock recipe to fill the onion-roasting time meant that I gave it a shot. I got a bit too rushed by the end of making this, so next time we'll probably make it on a weekend (which would have the added benefit of more stock-simmering time).

I'm not sure how much different/better it was than using pre-made stock, but it's hard to deny that this was a wonderful soup - the sweetness of the roasted onions was given some zing by the lime leaves and chilli and smoothed over by the coconut milk. The big chunks of soft onion were a nice textural treat as well. We made a few small changes to the recipe - mostly through my inattention or shopping inability - but it still worked out a treat.


Roast Onion Soup 
(shamelessly pilfered from Nourish Me)

4 brown onions
1 teaspoon olive oil
8 kaffir lime leaves
1 knob of ginger, grated
2 tiny red chillies, diced finely
2 tablespoons of tamari
165mL coconut milk
1 - 1.5L of stock
Splash of lime juice

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Halve the onions (leaving the skin on) and toss with the oil. Bake for 30-45 minutes, turning once (ours were super soft and browned up by about 30m possibly because our oven was too hot).

(Make the stock while the onions are roasting.)

Cut the lime leaves up into tiny little ribbons, discarding the stem in the middle.

Once the onions are ready, the skin should peel away easily. Chop the peeled onions into coarse pieces (you probably need to wait for them to cool before doing this - or use a fork as Lucy suggests).

Combine the chopped onion, stock, lime leaves, chillies, ginger and tamari in a big pot and bring it all to the boil. Simmer for 20 minutes and then add in the coconut milk plus extra tamari and salt and pepper to taste.


Speedy vegetable stock 
(also via Nourish Me)

2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1 cup or so of parsley, roughly chopped (stalks and all)
1/2 cup of white wine
6 cups of water
1 teaspoon of stock powder

Fry the bay leaves, onion, carrot, celery, garlic and parsley in the oil for 5-10 minutes.

Throw in the wine and cook it on high until it evaporates away.

Add the water and bring to the boil, before simmering for half an hour or so. Stir through the stock powder right before turning off the heat. Strain the stock with a sieve over a bowl, pressing the veggies to get the most liquid out of them.

March 14, 2011: Sweetcorn soup with chipotle and lime

We had half a pumpkin to use up and a fairly lazy evening in which to cook - once again, we turned to Ottolenghi (it may soon be time to decommission this blog and just reroute Ottolenghi's RSS feed). This time, we came up with this recipe, which used up our pumpkin perfectly while providing a tangy and rich delight for us. It's not the most substantial meal, so don't expect anything especially hearty, but it's so flavoursome and vibrant that we were happy enough with just a small bowl each and some grilled tortillas.


Sweetcorn soup with chipotle and lime (via Ottolenghi's Guardian blog)

3 tablespoons olive oil
5 green onions, chopped finely
5 garlic cloves, minced
3 celery sticks, diced small
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon grounder coriander
400g peeled pumpkin, diced
2 bay leaves
3 kaffir lime leaves
1 litre water
1 chipotle, diced finely, with a few dabs of the adobo sauce it lives in
Kernels from 4 corn cobs
150g sour cream
Juice of 2 limes (3 if they're not very juicy)
1 handful torn coriander leaves
Salt

Heat the oil, and then fry the onions, garlic, celery, cumin and ground coriander with a shake or two of salt for 10 or 12 minutes, until the celery has softened.

Add in the pumpkin, bay leaves, lime leaves, chipotle and water. Cover until the pot boils and then simmer for 10 or 15 minutes, until the pumpkin is tender. Add in the corn kernels and simmer for another five minutes.

Scoop out half of the vegetables and set aside, and throw away the bay and lime leaves. Blend the rest of the soup until everything is nice and smooth, pop the vegetables back in and stir in half of the sour cream and the lime juice.

Serve with a sprinkling of coriander leaves and a generous dab of sour cream on top (with some grilled paprika tortillas on the side).

December 20, 2010: Chickpea, tomato and bread soup

I'd made first use of Cindy's new cookbook Plenty to whip up a salad for Lisa's Christmas potluck, and its success inspired me to go digging for more options. The unseasonal December weather meant that I was up for something hearty and the beautiful picture of this chunky soup in Ottolenghi's book was enough to get me inspired.

The combination of the bread, veggies and chickpeas meant this was almost a stew rather than a liquidy soup. Still, it turned out fantastically well, rich in flavour and filled with chunky chickpeas and deliciously soggy chunks of bread. I think the bread pieces give it a slight illusion of heartiness - we both took what we thought were massive leftovers for lunch the next day and found ourselves needing afternoon tea to get through the day. Regardless, this was a definite success and will probably get another run out when winter rolls around next year.


Chickpea, tomato and bread soup 
(from Ottolenghi's Plenty)

1 large onion, sliced
2 small fennel bulbs, sliced
1 large carrot, peeled and sliced
3 celery sticks, sliced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 cup white wine
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 tablespoon chopped oregano
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons sugar
1 litre vegie stock (we made up some Massel 'beef' stock)
~200g old bread, ripped into chunks
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
4 tablespoons basil pesto
a few fresh basil leaves
salt and pepper
olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

In a large pot, sauté the onion and fennel in 3 tablespoons of the oil for about five minutes. Add the carrot and celery and keep cooking, until the vegies soften a bit (about 5 minutes). Stir in the tomato paste and cook for another minute, before pouring in the wine.

Let the wine bubble for a few minutes and then add in the canned tomatoes, the herbs, sugar, vegie stock and some salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, toss the read chunks with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Lay them out on a baking tray and bake in the oven for about 7 minutes - until the bread is completely dry. Take them out and put them aside.

Crush the chickpeas roughly in a bowl, leaving some whole and add them to the soup. Simmer everything for another five minutes and then season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve the soup up into bowls, dolloping some pesto on top and garnishing with fresh basil.

November 3, 2010: Menudo

Menudo (no, not the Puerto Rican boy band) is a traditional Mexican soup, commonly made with cow's stomach. Which is gross. Luckily Chow Vegan has invented a wacky vegan version, which we were determined to replicate.

Vegan Menudo required trips to two of our favourite specialty grocers: Casa Iberica for hominy and Minh Phat for yuba sticks.

The yuba sticks (which are made of dried bean curd) fill in for tripe, providing at least something texturally appropriate - I'm pretty sure bean curd tastes nothing like cow's stomach but I wouldn't actually know.

This is a spicy and hearty stew rich with vegies. The interest comes from the slightly nutty hominy and the chewy bean curd, both of which make this more interesting than your average soup. It packs a bit of a punch (even more the day after) and is best eaten with a tortilla or two torn up and dunked in it.


Vegetarian menudo (recipe courtesy of Chow Vegan)

1 tablespoon olive oil
4 garlic cloves, smashed and roughly chopped
1 small white onion, diced
2 medium potatoes, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
4 celery stalks, diced
1 x 400g can crushed tomatoes
1/2 x 800g can hominy drained and rinsed (or 1 x 400g can if you can find it)
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 tablespoon cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1 cup 'chicken' stock
3 cups water
100 grams yuba sticks, soaked to rehydrate and cut into 3 cm pieces

Heat the oil in a large pot and fry the garlic and onions for about 10 minutes, until the onion is translucent. Add in the potatoes, carrot and celery and fry for a couple of minutes.

Pour in the tomato and the hominy and stir through the spices, making sure everything is mixed well.

Add the stock and the water, along with the drained yuba sticks. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 40-50 minutes, until everything is nice and soft.

June 13, 2010: Carrot-maple soup

Our recipe calendar is very seasonally appropriate, so as the cold weather came in this month, it offered up a perfectly warming soup recipe.  This is a neat combination of flavours, with the ginger and maple syrup adding a bit of sweetness and bite to what is otherwise a straightforward carrot soup recipe. The whole process takes a bit of time - you've got to roast everything first and then turn it into soup, but it's all quite simple to do and the end result is worth the effort.  It's quite sweet, but it feels healthy and hearty and was perfect for a cold night at home.

Carrot and Maple Syrup Soup

1kg carrots, sliced 2cm thick

2 onions, roughly chopped

4cm piece of ginger, grated

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/3 cup maple syrup

4 cups vegie stock

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Toss together carrots, onions, ginger, garlic, oil and maple syrup with salt and pepper.  Spread them out on a lined baking tray and roast, turning a couple of times, for thirty minutes.  The carrots should have just started to brown a bit.

Tip the vegies and juices into a big pot and pour in the stock.  Bring to the boil and then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes until everything is tenderised.  

Mush everything up with a stick blender, doing your best not to spray the kitchen with carrot juice - it should be thick and smooth.

Serve it up and drizzle with maple syrup to garnish.

January 7, 2010: Slow faux pho

Well, I didn't go through all that seitan kneading with no idea of what I'd make with it! I had my eye on the slow pho, another recipe from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. It has its own stock that takes a solid 6 hours to infuse - star anise and cinnamon ensure it's an aromatic brew, but I couldn't actually detect any heat from the chilli or ginger. It soaked into the seitan strips just as I'd anticipated but all up it wasn't quite as vibrant as I'd hoped.

Even so, this bowl o' broth had something to teach me - the comfort of noodle soups. Any number of food bloggers have described their nourishing, consoling and healing properties but I've always preferred the heavier European potatoes and pastry for this role. Now I think I get it. I'm not sure whether I'll come back to this recipe again, but my one experience with it has me keen to explore this corner of cuisine further.

Slow faux pho
(based on Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson)

1 onion, roughly chopped
1 large red chilli, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon mince ginger
2 whole anise stars
1 cinnamon stick
3 tablespoons soy sauce
5 cups vegetable stock
200g rice vermicelli
1 tablespoon peanut oil
125g seitan, sliced into strips
2 tablespoons miso paste
3 tablespoons vegetarian oyster sauce
juice of 1 lime
To garnish: bean sprouts, coriander leaves, basil leaves, more chilli, ...

Place the onion, chilli, ginger, anise, cinnamon, soy sauce and stock in a slow cooker; cook them on Low for 6 hours.

Place the rice vermicelli in a bowl and cover them with water, allowing them to soak for 15 minutes to soften. Fry the seitan strips in the peanut oil until they're lightly browned on both sides. In a small bowl, dissolve the miso paste in a small amount of boiling water. Whisk in the oyster sauce and lime juice.

When the slow cooked stock is ready, strain the liquid and return it to the slow cooker. Strain the vermicelli and stir them into the stock. Mix in the seitan and the miso mixture. Cook the pho for a further 10 minutes, before ladling it into bowls and topping with your chosen garnish.

September 29-October 3, 2009: The couscous experiment - phase II

The second stage of the couscous experiment involved soup. I decided that the ideal candidate recipe already in our repertoire was savoury harira soup - there's lots of spicy liquid for the couscous to soak up, and the recipe is already dotted with onion, celery and lentils to trigger the teeth into action. I reckoned on 1/2 cup of couscous to 2 cups of soup, though this brought us slightly soupy grains rather than the slightly grainy soup I was aiming for. With the different soup styles being eaten over a few days, this isn't the fairest or best controlled experiment. Nevertheless, the results were interesting and not entirely what I expected.

Product #1, the standard supermarket couscous, took very little time to cook through. Not soaking up all the liquid, this version was Michael's favourite of the set.

Product #2, the pearl couscous, also had a lovely moistness to it. I liked it most fresh from the pot but I found that the leftovers the next day had lost their bite and were almost mushy.

Product #3. After more than 20 minutes simmering in soup the moghrabieh was still too much to chew. However its texture was toned down as a leftover lunch, and by then it was my favourite of the bunch.

Product #4. The couscous-alternative quinoa soaked up a lot of the liquid and was ultimately a bit dry. Clearly it needs to be used in small doses when soup is on the menu.

Although these dishes were less liquidy than I intended, a flavour-packed base recipe guaranteed some tasty meals. Texture-wise there's no clear winner - Michael preferred the standard version, while I'd use pearl for a short simmer and moghrabieh for the long haul. And I can't help thinking that the quinoa didn't quite get a fair go from my failed design.

I think we've got at least one more couscous recipe in us. Stay tuned for the final phase and wrap-up.

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You can read the first instalment of the couscous experiment here.