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.

A simple, special lunchtime salad

I can hardly call this one a recipe - it's more an idea, based on happening to have some rather lovely food in the fridge.

After the asparagus shopping spree I mentioned yesterday, I still had a couple of bunches in the fridge on Bank Holiday Monday.

And so when lunchtime came, I decided to use them in a warm salad at lunchtime. I also had parma ham left from wrapping salmon fillets a few days before. When the Husband went out to the shops for a breakfast baguette, I asked him to pick up goats' cheese as well, and with that, the contents of the fridge, and some leftover baguette, a lunch was born.

Asparagus and hot goats' cheese salad
Ingredients (for two for a main meal)
Bunch or two of asparagus
One head little gem lettuce, or whatever nice lettuce you have lurking in your fridge
Quarter of baguette, split lengthways
100g goats' cheese
4 ish slices of parma ham if you have it in or particularly fancy it, and eat the stuff (very optional!)
Wedge of lemon each

Boil a kettle and warm the grill while you prep the asparagus and spread the goats' cheese on the baguette pieces.
Cook the asparagus however you like to - I put it in boiling water in a covered pan for five minutes off the heat.
Pop your posh cheese on toast under the grill and keep an eye on it as it can turn quickly - I tend to find it takes about five minutes to go melty and slightly brown and lovely.
Wash your lettuce, tear into bite size chunks and put on the bottom of the plate.
Add your drained asparagus when ready, and your goats' cheese on toast and parma ham, if using.
Put a wedge of lemon on the side of the plate and serve!
I don't think this needs a dressing - the cheese and ham are rich enough without the extra oil - so I squeeze lemon juice over instead.

Friday night curry

A couple of years ago I bought myself Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy. I hadn't watched the TV series - strangely, I don't much like watching cooking on television, I'd much rather read about it (although I'll confess to being addicted to Masterchef - largely because it's not really about cooking!)

It took me a while to get into it - for a long time I was slightly too scared of all the ingredients in each recipe. One or two I couldn't even find at the shops. But then Caroline over at Second Hand Shopper came to stay and told me how much she liked the book. She even posted me some dried mango powder to get me going.

And I'm very glad she did! There are a number of recipes in the book I love, but the one I come back to again and again is this one. 

Just to warn you - it's another marinade recipe so requires a little thinking ahead. What we always do is pop the chicken and marinade in a freezer bag in the fridge the night before we want to eat it.

It's enough food to feed an army, and so I tend to quarter the amount of chicken, but halve the amount of sauce and marinade - partly because to quarter it would result in just too little sauce to marinate anything in, and partly because the sauce is amazing.

The reduced quantities mean that the yogurt would reduce too quickly if I left it as it is, so I tend to pop a quarter pint of water in at the beginning and keep an eye on it. I've never made full quantities but suspect it wouldn't be a problem if you were.

And it works perfectly with low fat yogurt, which means that you can actually make it astoundingly healthy.

But the magical thing for me about this recipe is the taste of the sauce - it's spicy but not hot, fresh and just beautiful. Although the recipe says chicken, as the star is the sauce I think it would work equally well with vegetables, chick peas or meat substitute, adjusting the cooking times accordingly.

The result is pretty damn tasty. So tasty, in fact, that when I photographed it I did so in a screaming hurry to go away and eat, and didn't check the results before digging in. Hence dodgy blurred photo below. Apologies - just take it as proof of how good it tastes!

 

Recipe: bean and/or mince chilli to feed an army

Every now and then I like to do a huge batch of cooking. There are certain recipes that are a bit too much hassle to do well to feed two people on one evening - but scarcely any more effort to cook a huge quantity.

They tend to be recipes for delicious, relatively cheap food - dal, spaghetti bolognese, and this one - chilli.

I like waiting until I have a quiet Sunday afternoon and doing my future self a favour - cooking a huge pot of food, and freezing it up into two person portions in old takeaway containers to be defrosted and eaten, once a week or so, over the next month.

I know from experience that as I come home from work to a beautiful slow-cooked meal that actually took me ten minutes to throw together, I am deeply grateful for the little time spent a week or two before.

This time, I made chilli. I looked for recipes, but in a house with about 30 recipe books I found I only had two - a 30 year old Delia Smith that only had one spice in it, and a Nigella Express that cheats slightly eccentrically, with chorizo and sweet chilli sauce.

So I made up my own. Because we're trying to save money and eat more healthily, I've scaled down the meat and upped the beans. You could skip one or other altogether, to be honest - just double up the quantity of meat or beans.

I was planning to do enough for four meals, but as it bubbled over the top of my very biggest pot, I realised I'd overdone it slightly. It filled five takeaway containers - enough for ten hungry people. At a portion cost of about £1 a head, I reckon, and that's shopping at Waitrose, something I happily pay a premium to do because I don't want to kill people while I'm in there.

You'll see there's cocoa in the ingredients. Don't panic, try it. But do use cocoa, not sweetened drinking chocolate! This version is quite mild with a slight kick - if you like it hot, double the chilli.

Ingredients (serves 10, it turns out. Halved will serve four hungry people!)

1kg mince
Four cans beans - I used three kidney, one black beans, because three packs of kidney beans were cheaper. Drained and rinsed.
Four can tomatoes, or two huge ones
Two onions, diced
4-5 cloves garlic, sliced
Four peppers, diced
Two red chillis, chopped
1 tbsp cinammon
1tbsp ground coriander
1tbsp ground cumin
2tsp cocoa powder

Soften the onion, garlic, chillis and peppers in a large (enormous!) casserole dish.
Add the mince and stir till brown.
Add the beans, tomatoes, spices and cocoa.
Boil away till reduced - half an hour to an hour, depending on how much of a vat you're produced. Stir it every now and then so it doesn't stick.

Portion up, cool down and freeze.
I'll have some of this with baked potatoes and sour cream, some with rice topped with a bit of cheese, some with tacos - and if I'm feeling adventurous, I might try to turn some into burritos.

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).