Soup: celeriac and bramley apple

Last winter for a while I posted a soup recipe every week. This winter, as soon as the cold winter started, I started making soup again. For a long while I got away with last year's recipes, but eventually I got bored and started again.

 

I like this soup because the smooth, earthy flavour of the celariac goes so well with the sharp freshness of the apples. It's tasty, filling, easy and healthy - next to no fat, and no Weightwatchers points.

A soup so scrumptious it got me blogging again: Thai carrot and coriander

The weekly huge batches of soup started up again about six weeks ago. Once again it's cold enough in Edinburgh for a huge mug of warm, comforting soup to be the best possible lunch option.

Up until this weekend I'd been repeating myself, cooking things I'd done (and usually blogged) before. One week the weekend was so busy we bought a stack of cans of soup instead. The world didn't end, although gratifyingly they weren't as good, as healthy or as cheap as the ones I make.

But this one is so good I had to share. It's based on one my aunt gave us for lunch when we went to visit last weekend - a delicious bought fresh soup. The budget's too tight for us to buy fresh soup for weekday lunches, so when we got home we decided to experiment, and came up with the following. It's got a kick to it, and is thoroughly warming and filling on a cool day. Lovely. And if you care about such things it's very low fat, and only one propoint a portion.

Soup of the week: cheat's pea and ham

I love pea and ham soup, but rarely bother to cook it. The version I tend to make is a time-consuming process: split peas have to be soaked overnight, and either a ham hock boiled for hours, the stock reserved and the meat carved, or I need to have left over boiling liquid from a gammon joint and leftover shreds. And that's before I even cook the peas or make the soup! The result is delicious - salty, thick, comforting, filling - frugal, and absolutely the perfect thing in deep midwinter. But to be honest, I can rarely be bothered to make soup that needs me to plan it out the day before.

So when I saw this Heston Blumenthal for Waitrose recipe, using garden peas, skipping stock and frying bacon with the onion instead, and chucking in bought ham hock at the end, I was tempted.

But then I looked more closely at the method. Um, thawing peas on a baking tray lined with kitchen paper? It gave me visions of peas everywhere but the tray. And as for the mint oil and careful sieving - for a dinner party maybe. Not for a weekday packed lunch.

So below is my heavily modified recipe.

You'll see that we start with the same ingredients, minus the faffing round for mint oil doubled up as ever to make eight portions, although I didn't double the ham hock because I didn't want to pay for two preprepared packs, and I used a 275g pack of bacon, rather than the 320g that would have come from strict doubling, because that was the size of the packet in front of me.

To make 8 portions I used:
Splash olive oil
7 shallots (the amount left in the bag in my drawer)
1.5l veg stock
275g unsmoked bacon
One 180g pack pulled ham hock
1.8kg peas

Rather than carefully defrosting the peas, I just didn't put the bag in the freezer when I got it home from the supermarket!
An hour or so later, I fried up the diced shallots and scissor-cut bacon in a splash of oil to stop things sticking before the bacon gave up its fat.
I then bunged in the stock and brought it to a rolling boil.
Then I added the peas, which were still pretty much frozen, and waited for the mix to come back to the boil, which took a while. Long enough for me to wash up everything else!
I left it boiling for a minute, mostly because it had taken so much effort to get it there I wanted to leave it for a bit.
Then I got out my trusted stick blender, and ta-da!

Yeah, I'm fully aware it looks more like I've pureed Kermit the Frog than a kilo of peas, and that not sieving it has left it distinctly rustic looking. I've made my peace with that.

I then divided up the soup into containers, and popped bits of ham hock on top.

As you'll see, there was still plenty to go round, even without doubling up - in fact, there would have been far too much for my tastes if I had.

The result was completely different from the pea and ham soup I normally make. Fresh tasting, and predominantly sweet, because of the peas and the unsmoked bacon - I think next time I might try smoked to add another flavour it. And although it had much more actual meat in it than the version I usually make, which relies on stock for flavour, it had less of a ham flavour. To be honest, I think it would be nicer - as well healthier - made with a ham stock, rather than by pureeing up all that bacon, all the bacon was a very useful short cut.

But I like the simplicity and the lurid colour that comes from using frozen garden peas rather than yellow split peas, and will try that again next winter.

I say next winter, because I think soup of the week may be about to take a bit of a break. It's getting warmer and sunnier here in Edinburgh. I've got some holiday coming up, which means I won't be needing weekday lunches for a bit. And when I come back, I think it might be times for salads, cous cous, bulgar wheat and other warm weather alternatives. I hope so! I'll blog the ones of these that feel more like recipes and less like desperately thrown-together mixtures. Although I'll share the good ones of those too.

Soup of the week: spicey red lentil with cumin and tomato

This recipe has stood me in good stead for at least three years now, and it's probably the single recipe I've pressed on people most. There have been winters when we've had it pretty much every other week because all other inspiration has departed. Now, I try to have it less often, because that way I remember how truly delicious it is and appreciate how incredibly easy and cheap it is, without getting bored with it.

But we spent last weekend at a wedding, and I have to say by the time we got back on Sunday afternoon, exhausted, hungover and smiley, I was pretty proud of myself for heading towards the kitchen at all, even if it was just to heat up a supermarket faux takeaway, knock up another batch of blondies rather than trying something new, and to make the easiest soup I know.

The thing that's galling about this recipe, though, is that I've never managed to improve on it. I must have cooked it twenty times, but I've never found an adjustment that improves on the original. Changing the spicing slightly? Meh. Making it thicker, or thinner? Not right.

The only thing I've learnt is that it tastes better using a stock other than marigold bouillon powder. It's fine with it (and nine times out of ten that's what I have in the cupboard), but with chicken stock, real or cubed, or even another veg stock cube or powder that doesn't reek quite so much of celery, it's a bit nicer.

So here are the ingredients:

Here is a link to a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  recipe so good I can't improve it (I do tend to ignore the yoghurty bit though - life is short).

And here is the finished result, doubled up so it serves eight as ever.

Oh, and did I mention that, made with the right stock, not only is it veggie but it's also vegan? Man is a genius. That is all.

Soup of the week: cauliflower, smoked cheese and paprika

This week's soup comes from dashing out in my lunch-hour to pick up origami paper (yes, it was an urgent lunchtime dash, I'll explain all another time).

My office is in the West End of Edinburgh. It's surrounding by dinky sandwich shops, chi chi clothes shops for people paid rather a lot more than me, and the sort of places you can get origami paper at the last minute. So as I made my dash, I passed a number of chalk boards advertising various soups of the day. One of them said smoked cheese and cauliflower. I don't remember which shop it was, and I didn't nip in to pick some up - I'd already had a portion of butter bean, thyme and chilli oil soup - but the idea stayed in my head.

So when it came to making this week's vat of soup on Sunday, I decided to give it a go. And the result was great - I dipped a teaspoon in to taste it when it was done, and kept going back for more.

Ingredients (makes 8 portions)

 

Two cauliflowers

Two or three sticks of celery

Two onions
Two or three potatoes (afterthought - not pictured)
1.5 l or 3 pints veg stock (for a thick soup, add an extra half litre/pint for something thinner)
Two teaspoons smoked paprika (sweet)
150-200g smoked cheese (I used applewood smoked chedder)

Dice onions, celery and soften in a little oil.
Chop cauliflower into florets, finely chop stem, and add. Peel and dice potatoes, and add.
Add stock, paprika and bring to boil. Leave bubbling away for 20 minutes.

When soft, add grated cheese and blend using a stick blender.

Soup of the week: butter bean, thyme and chilli oil

Well, seeing as I cook a big batch of soup pretty much every week to see us through workday lunches, and seeing as a large proportion of my posts seem to be about said soup making, I might as well call it a regular feature.

Here are the ground rules. I tend to cook a big batch of soup on a Sunday - eight portions, to see us through Monday-Thursday at work. Friday is treat day. They get shoved into tupperware on Sunday, sometimes the ones for the end of the week are frozen, sometimes we decide the fridge is cold, Edinburgh is cold, and we've both got decent immune systems, and they just stay in the fridge. Our freezer is basically just an ice box at the top of the fridge, and looks very full with a bag of peas, some stock and some ice cubes, so risks have to be taken. The lack of freezer space also explains the soup monotony - I'd love to be able to freeze ahead and mix it up, but it's just not possible right now.

The enormous quantities required mean I spend a lot of the time doubling recipes, so it's safe to guess that my recipes can be halved. quartered and so on!

We aren't veggie, buy my soups are almost always suitable for veggies - if I've used meat stock because it's what I have in, substitute with veg. And the dairy can pretty much always be skipped to make them vegan friendly too.

When the weather gets warm, or we get fed up of soup, soup making is suspended and replaced with salads, cous cous etc made rather more piece meal throughout the week. However, I live in Edinburgh. The summer is short. Soup's a feature of life here!

So here's this week's soup - Butter Bean, thyme and Chilli Oil

The recipe originally comes from here but I upped the quantities, used tinned rather than dried beans and fiddled round with the proportions, so I'll tell you what I did. It wasn't difficult.

Ingredients all laid out

Ingredients
Four tins butter beans
Two litres veg stock (cubes or powder are fine)
Two onions, diced
Three large carrots, chopped
Four large sticks of celery, chopped
Two fat cloves of garlic, chopped
Two bay leaves
A few sprigs of thyme leaves
Chilli oil
1-2 tbsps low fat Creme Fraiche - optional (and not an option if you're cooking the vegan version)
Olive oil
Pinch cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

1. Soften the onions and garlic in the olive oil for a minute or two. Add the carrots and celery and soften while you drain and rinse the butter beans throughly.
2. Add veg stock and butter beans, bay leaves and a couple of sprigs of thyme, cover and boil for 20 minutes or until everything is soft.
3. Taste and adjust seasoning. At this point I thought it was a bit "meh" so whacked in more salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper and some creme fraiche I had in the fridge that needed using up, which seemed to help.
4. Fish out thyme sprigs and bay leaves. Puree using a stick blender.
5. Dish up. The original recipe suggests swirling chilli oil prettily on top. I attempted this but it was pretty much mixed in to the rest of the soup by the time I got it to work. However, I could taste it and it did lift it from a plain bean and veg soup. I divided the rest of the thyme leaves between the pots, they made a big difference too.



The finished product. I'd already dished up half
before I remembered to take a picture.

It looks bland without the chilli oil and thyme, but with them it became great - soothing, certainly, but with a bit of a kick from the chilli oil and cayenne, and a freshness from the thyme.

Yes, more soup.

Mmm.

Ok, ok... it does taste a lot better than it looks

Anyone who's stuck with me through various interruptions will have gathered one thing: I cook a lot of soup. It's really all about practicality - there isn't really a nicer, easier way to have a warm, healthy, cheap and delicious lunch at work, especially in the Edinburgh winters and the deceptively cold Edinburgh springs.

Now we've given up on the veg box, though, I'm not faced with a once-a-fortnight recipe challenge involving a pile of unappetising, knobbly-looking veg and a stock cube. This means I can have more variety - look, no beetroot! - but also means I've been running out of ideas.

So when I read this recipe for Black Bean soup in Saturday's Guardian I had to give it a go. It's a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, with tomatoes, beans, chilli and spices. I doubled up the quantities and there was enough for eight medium portions. I didn't bother blending any of it - he said to blend just half, but life's just too short for blending that can't be done easily with a stick blender in the cooking pot. I was out of ground coriander so substituted garam masala. I'm adding a dollop of sour cream and a couple of coriander leaves to each in the morning before taking it to work.

It's absolutely delicious. I was worried it would be too hot, but actually it just has the smallest kick - I might throw an extra chilli in next time. But it's both rich and fresh tasting. I can't wait to finish it all up.

Yet more soup

I've realised that almost all the recipes I've posted so far have been for soup.

This will end soon. But not quite yet.

May I bring you a recipe for the best coloured soup in the world?

This, like many of my soups, has sprung from necessity. Every fortnight, I separate the veg box (yes, I know, bloody Guardian-reading smug middle class nonsense. Guilty as charged) into what will be used in our every day dinners, and what just won't. The alien lifeforms below? Just won't.

And recently, the just-won't pile consisted of not one but TWO celeriac alongside several beetroot. Necessity being the mother of invention, I turned them into the following soup. Just look at that colour - and it even tasted good.

Bright pink and surprisingly yummy soup
 (This being a made up on the spot recipe, the quantities are imprecise. Taste as you go along and see what you think)
Two small or one big celeriac
Three medium beetroot
Small tub sour cream or creme fraiche (or half of each if, like me, that's what you've got hanging round your fridge)
Stock to cover (cubes are fine - I used beef, but veg or chicken will be fine)
Juice of one lemon
Tsp ground ginger
A slosh of red wine vinegar
Serves eight

1. Attempt to scrub your celeriac. Chop off the bits that won't come clean, peel and cut into large dice.
2. Peel and chop beetroot. Don't answer the front door until you've washed your hands or you'll be arrested for murder.
3. Bung in a massive pot and cover with stock/boiling water and roughly the right number of stock cubes. Boil until soft - about 15 minutes.
4. Puree with a stick blender.Check texture - if it's so thick it resembles a bright pink building material, add more water and blend more.
5. Lob in cream, ginger and lemon juice. Puree again to mix. 
6. Taste. I'm deeply suspicious of sweet tasting main courses, so I tend to lob in a tablespoon or two of red wine vinegar to sharpen it up. If you like it as it is, leave it.
7. Divide up into lots of containers - we had enough for 8. Freeze or keep in fridge, depending on when required.
8. Reheat in the microwave at work and enjoy, admiring the colour.

 (That picture is the only picture in this post where I've messed around with the colours, as it was taken on my phone. The more unnatural looking pink in the first picture? That's the colour the soup really is).

A chicken in the pot

Starting a blog, posting twice and then abandoning it for a fortnight really wasn't the plan. But life is what happens when you're making other plans, so onwards and upwards. 

When life gets hectic, which it has been recently, cleaning is the first thing to go in my life. Anyone who has seen my bathroom would correctly surmise that life is usually hectic. Tidying clings on for a little longer, but eventually that goes and I even lose the ability to put things away.

But one sure sign that everything has gone utterly tits up round here is when I stop cooking "real" food.

So after a fortnight at the Gin Palace involving five takeaways, two sets of leftovers, a dinner skipped in favour of canapés and several ready meals, when life calmed down and I'd had some sleep, it was time to get in back in the kitchen and wrestle culinary order out of calorific madness.

On Thursday night, the Husband worked late, and I was home alone. On Friday afternoon, I took back some of the overtime I've been putting in at work. With hours alone in the house, there were a thousand pressing admin and cleaning tasks to do. So I ignored them and cooked. Two cover-the-kitchen-with-vegetable-peelings, stuff-the-freezer-full cooking sessions. I cooked chilli, I cooked bolognese sauce and I cooked two types of soup, now safely stored in the freezer for work packed lunches and weeks as hellish as this one. And as I chopped, stirred and tasted, everything settled into place in my head, as well as in the freezer. Order restored.

So to keep it that way, on Sunday night we cooked a chicken, which is now feeding us for the whole week.

Normally we roast it, carve it all but only eat one breast, and then pop the rest in tupperware to feed us for a week while the carcass simmers in the stock pot late into the night.

But this week, frankly, I couldn't be arsed. So we poached it instead - boiling the chicken in the stock pot with the stock aromatics for 90 minutes, fishing it out and eating it with potato dauphinoise, and then saving the succulent, gently scented meat which fell off the bones and the dark, rich poaching liquor which became the most amazing stock.

Tonight, Tuesday, we're having straight forward leftovers - a bit of the chicken, warmed through in a few spoonfuls of the stock, and the remaining dauphnoise, warmed up, with carrots on the side. Bliss.

Tomorrow, we'll have risotto, frying up onion, bacon and garlic, before adding the rice, some wine, and ladleful by ladleful the rest of the stock, stirring in the chicken with the last spoonful of the stock, and a handful of parmasan just as it's all absorbed.

And on Thursday, we'll have an adaptation of what my mother calls "Swiss-style" chicken. I'm not sure if I can share the recipe without her hunting me down and killing me.

But yesterday, we had one of my favourite meals - chicken noodle soup. And here's what we did to make this fabulous, sweet, sour and hot steaming and delicious meal. An wonderful inauthentic hodge-podge. That just takes ten minutes.

Incidentally, to my mind there are two types of soups - the sort that make a very nice lunch, with some bread, healthy and virtuous but a teensy bit disappointing for supper. And this, which is in a class of its own.

Chicken noodle soup

Ingredients

Leftover chicken - two handfuls or so of meat, breast or leg or anything will do.

Two pints chicken stock - homemade is better, but cubes will do.

125g of noodles - I find very fine broken up soup noodles sold in the kosher section perfect, but failing that, the type sold for stir frys, or even little pasta stars, will do. 

2-3 tbls soy sauch

2 tsp Nam Pla (fish sauce)

Juice of 1-2 limes

LOTS of coriander

Small can sweetcorn, drained.

2-3 spring onions, or one small leek, peeled and sliced.

Dried chilli pepper

Serves 2-3 (2 round here)

1. Bring the stock to the boil and add the pasta, and the dried chilli. Boil for however long you're meant to - this recipe assumes 10 minutes, so if you're using the 3 minute type, bung everything in and *then* add the noodles.

2. Add soy sauce, nam pla and lime juice. If you're using bought stock, you'll need less soy sauce or it'll be too salty, homemade definitely needs quite a lot. Taste as you add - you want something that's salty, sour and lovely. Remember the heat will develop the longer you leave the chilli in - whack it out early if it's getting too hot for you.

3. Five minutes before the cooking time is up, add the chicken, leek or spring onions, and drained sweetcorn.

4. One minute before cooking time is up, sprinkle on the coriander.

5. Serve in large bowls and relish!

Sunday, lovely Sunday

Sundays have acquired a certain pattern here at the Gin Palace. After a Friday night of getting drunk in a dressing gown in front of the telly, a Saturday morning-into-afternoon of supreme laziness, and a Saturday night where at least a modicum of effort is made, Sunday is our day for getting things done. Partly this is done out of necessity, but it also helps fight off Sunday Night Syndrome - I find I can face the week if everything's sorted at home.

Today, the Husband has gone through some of the piles of junk he thinks I've forgotten about (I never forget), changed the sheets, done laundry and attempted to iron his shirts for the week, defeated after the first one by a blown fuse in the iron, and no fuses in the house.

Meanwhile, I've been pottering away on chores at the computer, and cooking.

Every fortnight we have an organic veg box delivered. Every fortnight we stare a pile of muddy organic vegetables and wonder what on earth to make with them. And every fortnight I make two piles - one of things to eat as they are, and one of things to make into soup.

This time's soup pile was promising - carrots, parsnips, fennel, and some celery left over from last week. I sweated some onions in my biggest pan with cumin, added the scrubbed, peeled and chopped veg and left them to simmer away in enough stock to cover (made from a cube as we haven't had a roast for ages) for about half an hour. I blended it and had to add another two pints of water as it resembled mash more than soup. But I now have six pints, divided into eight tupperware boxes which will see us through the working week.

And then it was time for fish pie.

My fish pie is based on my Mum's. She would make it once a year on Good Friday, poaching haddock in milk, using the milk to make a bechamel sauce, then topping the whole lot with piles of creamy mashed potato. As she lives 400 miles away, I now have to make my own.

One of the first things I learnt to cook was a bechamel sauce, to make macaroni cheese. My Mum would melt an ounce of butter, stir in an ounce of plain flour, and whisk in half a pint of milk. As I watched, she would stir it while it slowly thickened, explaining that this happened because the starch molecules in the flour heated up, expanded and burst. She also told me, very sternly, that it was always worth measuring out the quantities, rather than doing it by eye, or otherwise everything would go wrong. 

There's something so soothing about the process - the fact that it must be done slowly, that done carefully it will always work out, and the fact that the results taste of home.

So here's my fish pie recipe, bubbling away in the oven while I go off to sit down with Husband and a glass of wine. Suddenly, Sunday Night Syndrome doesn't seem so bad at all.

Gin Operated's Fish Pie

 (sorry for mixing metric and imperial, but for reasons outlined above, I can't do bechamel in metric!)

600g assorted fish (a mix of firm white fish like haddock or cod with whatever else you like - smoked haddock, salmon or cooked prawns are all nice, but you can just use white fish, frozen is fine)

1 pint milk

Celery, parsley, bay leaves - whatever you have in.

1oz plain flour

1oz butter

LOTS of parsley - 30g at least, chopped finely

Salt and pepper

800g potato

A splash more milk

A knob of butter

Heat the oven to 180C

1. Poach the fish (except for the prawns) in the milk, using a couple of sprigs of parsley, a bay leaf and some celery to add flavour if you have them in. Simmer for 5-10 minutes, until the fish is soft, opaque and cooked.

2. While the fish is cooking, peel and chop the potatoes and leave to boil in salted water for 20 minutes.

3. Pull out the fish, and strain & keep the milk. Take the skin off the fish if it has any, break it up into fork sized pieces, and put it in a low, flat oven proof dish - the type you'd use for a pasta bake.

4. Melt the butter in a small pan over a medium heat, add the flour and stir to combine, and then whisk in the milk slowly. Keep stirring for a while until it thickens (see description and my Mum's science bit above!)

5.If you're using frozen prawns, rinse off the worst of the ice and stir them into the sauce to warm them through. Add a generous pinch of salt if it needs it and the chopped parsley. It will go very green!

6. Pour sauce over the fish, and mix it all together so you get a different type of fish with every mouthfull. Obviously less important if you're only using one type of fish!

7. Your potatoes are probably done by now. Mash them thoroughly, with a splash of milk, a knob of butter, and salt and pepper. Use a bit more milk than you would normally so the mash has a spreading consistency.

8. Spread the mash gently but firmly over the fishy saucy mix. You can smooth the top with a knife, or decorate it with a fork. Or write "fishy fishy" on top and draw a big fish.

9. Either put it aside and heat it up later, or put it straight into the oven for 30-40 minutes, till the top has gone slightly crispy, and slightly golden.

This serves 4-6, depending how hungry you are and what you have on the side. The Husband and I tend to have half on Sunday night, and then the other half reheated on Monday - knowing you've already cooked dinner, and it's delicious, is always helpful if the day drags slightly.