A Pumpkin Soup

We're moving away from thick soups this time of year, but we did enjoy this is a vibrant tasting version of pumpkin soup several times over winter.

Hot Carrot and Pumpkin Soup
Serves 4
Adapted from Gordon Ramsay

2 tbsp olive oil 2 red onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
270 g carrots (3 medium), peeled
1.1 kg  butternut pumpkin, peeled and deseeded
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 birds eye chillies
1.5 litres water
150 g small pasta shapes
Freshly grated parmesan, to serve

Sweat the onion and garlic in the oil over a medium heat for 5-7 minutes until soft. Chop the carrots and pumpkin into 1.5cm dice and add to the pan. Finely slice the chilli and add. Season and cook for another 5 minutes until the vegetables start to soften.

Add the water, stir and bring to the boil. Simmer for 25-30 minutes until the carrots and squash are soft and beginning to break down. Remove from the heat and puree the mixture.

Add the pasta shells. Stir well and return to the boil. Simmer for about 15 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Check the seasoning and sprinkle with parmesan and serve.

April Leftovers

April was filled with visitors, books, birds and perfect autumn weather. We also ate very well.

For my recollection, internet recipes we enjoyed were
*This sweet potato and chipotle soup, topped with sour cream and a handful of crushed corn chips.
*Pasta with broccoli and ricotta,  which although simple, is worth remembering.

March Leftovers

*Youtube is a great resource for learning to cook International cuisines. I made cookingwithdiog's yakisoba noodles and I really liked them.

*I made Nigel Salter's onion soup to use up some Gruyere, I think I prefer a onion soup with more onion.

*The Accountant loved this chickpea salad from Gordon Ramsay. So I made it too. It's very nicely balanced and delicious with some finely slices medium-rare lamb steak mixed through.

*I've been trying to eat more fish, we had teriyaki salmon with pickled vegetable salad. I liked the salad a lot, but I wasn't convinced by the salmon - it's probably better pan fried to achieve some different textures.

*I made these blueberry pancakes, but used all yoghurt instead of butter milk. They were great, but it's uncommon to go terribly wrong with a pancake recipe.

*Nigel Slater's oven method for rice pudding got well-tested this month, but I still haven't decided on the optimal amount of sugar, and the timing is off too. Letting the pudding cook slowly in the oven is much more convenient that the stove top method.

Barley, Beans, and Greens

A simple vegetable soup, with lots of greens. Season well or it's slightly bland.

Barley, Bean and Vegetable Soup
Serves 4
Adapted from Bill Granger, delicious March 2009

115 g barley
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 small bunch silverbeet (about 700g), finely shredded
2 red skinned potatoes, cut into 2 cm cubes
1 L chicken or vegetable stock
400 g cooked cannellini beans
2 zucchini, cut into 2 cm pieces200 g green beans
85 g peas
Grated parmesan to serve

Place the barley in a large saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer for 45 minutes or until barley is tender. Drain and set aside.

Meanwhile, heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally for 5 minutes. Add garlic, silverbeet and potato, and cook, stirring occasionally for 5 minutes or until the silverbeet has melted.

Add the stock and 1 litre of water and bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the cannellini beans and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Add cooked barley, zucchini, green beans and peas and simmer for 5-10 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Season, then serve topped with grated parmesan.

August Leftovers

I cooked a lot of stir-fries and recipes from cooks books in August; the internet recipes I tried were

*Turkish carrot, tomato and lentil soup; unadulterated this soup is kind of grainy from the lentils, it definitely needs some sort of dairy added to improve the mouth feel.
*Nigel Salter's braised lamb shanks with leeks and haricot beans was enjoyed by the Archivist while I was out of town. Not too heavy for an early spring meal while leeks are cheap.

July Leftovers

*I inherited an unnatural affection for soup from my Dutch grandfather, as a result we eat soup weekly year round. Curried black-eyed pea soup has been in my bookmarks for a while. I withheld the bacon, doubled the spices using sambar masala instead of madras powder, after puréeing 3/4 of the bean mix I added a box of fresh baby spinach that I had chopped roughly. I added fried bacon to bowls just before serving. This soup was nice enough to add to my big mental list of soups, I'll be making it again.

*Continuing with soup experimentation I made a pot of spicy cashew tomato soup. I puréed the lot as recommended by the Culinate editors and only added the optional cayenne. Delicious and very filling, Afghan bread makes a nice accompaniment.

*I got a specific request for black bean quesadillas for dinner this month, I use this NYT recipe for simmered black beans. I like that the beans in this recipe are not heavily seasoned during cooking. The beans are great over Spanish rice with sour cream, avocado, and hot sauce or puréed and smeared in a tortilla with cheese, jalapeños, and fresh coriander, or served in huevos motuleños.

*With a recent yum cha meal on my mind, I made steamed spare ribs with black bean sauce. The marinade does not need the a tablespoon of salt in addition to all the other salty condiments. Easy to prepare and it didn't taste bad, but there was too much sauce and the flavour was too generic.

*I wanted a rice pudding recipe that serves two, I found on on Simply Recipes. The Archivist loved it, I though the egg yolk gave the pudding an unpleasant grainy texture.

*It seems July was the month of orange cakes, since I had a whole three kilogram bag of oranges to use up. Milk and Cookies' orange and yoghurt cake was the first cake of the month. It is dense and tasty as written and great smeared with raspberry jam, cut into batons and covered in hot custard, if you're in to that sort of thing. With some oranges still lingering in the fruit bowl I made this orange cake. I thought the cake tasted far too greasy. I also made a jaffa drizzle loaf from the BBCs Good Food. It sunk so I didn't bother with the drizzle, I suspect is was over-leavened since I finally got an oven thermometer and used the right size tin. The orange and yoghurt cake is the only recipe of the three that I'd make again.

One From Nigel and One From Gordon

Foccacia topped with a paste of sun- dried tomaotes, garlic and oregano; Persian-style Onion Soup and Rocket salad

It's a cool evening, a storm has just passed over leaving the ground barely damp. I'm finishing off last weeks vegetables, cooking a pot of potatoes to make home fries for breakfast tomorrow and a big pot of lamb bones, carrots and aromatics are simmering into lovely stock for a soup next week. Dinner tonight is foccacia, a rocket salad and a bowl of warmly spiced onion soup from Gordon Ramsay recipe. The Accountant bought a Ramsay cookbook last year, the only recipes that interested me were the soups, I've got to say that he does make a fine soup.

Foccacia
Serves at least 6
Adapted from Nigel Salter via Blake at the Paupered Chef

450g bread flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp fast-acting yeast
400ml warm water
cornmeal
3 tbsp olive oil

Put the flour and salt and yeast into a large bowl, mix well then pour in the water to make a sticky dough. Mix well with a wooden spoon then knead in the bowl using a silicone pastry scraper to fold the mixture and make a smooth dough, this takes about 5 minutes. Alternatively use a stand mixer. Foccacia is a particularly wet dough and you don't want to be adding a lot of flour to make it possible to knead by hand. Once the dough has been kneaded, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp clean tea towel and leave it until it has doubled in size, which may take up to 1 hour.

Prepare a baking tin (30 x 20 cm rectangle; 30 cm diameter circle) by coating with olive oil and applying a thin layer of cornmeal. Preheat the oven to 220°C.

Remove the dough from its bowl, then push it into the baking tin. Trying to cover the base of the tin. Cover with plastic wrap then let the dough rise for another 30 minutes.

Create a seasoning mixture from garlic, fresh herbs, salt, with olives, sun-dried tomatoes or caramelised onions. You will need about 3 tablespoons of a seasoning mix to cover the loaf of focaccia. When the dough has risen for the second time push several holes deep into the dough with your index finger, then spread the seasoning mixture over the dough.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until the top is golden. Drizzle with the remaining olive oil and let the loaf rest for 5 minutes, then remove from the tin and serve while warm.

Persian-style Onion Soup
Serves 4
Adapted from Healthy Appetite by Gordon Ramsay

3 tbsp olive oil
800 g onions, peeled and thinly sliced
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
2 tsp fresh mint or 1/2 tsp dried
2 tbsp plain flour
1 L vegetable or chicken stock
1 cinnamon stick
Juice of 1 lemon or some preserved lemon
1 tsp raw sugar
A few flat-leaf parsley sprigs, chopped

Place a heavy-based pan over a medium heat. Add the olive oil, the onions and 1/2 tsp salt. Cover and sweat for 12-15 min until the onions are soft, lifting the lid and stirring occasionally. Remove the lid and increase the heat slightly. Add the spices and mint, then stir in the flour. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3-4 min.

Gradually pour in the stock, whisking as you do so to prevent any lumps forming. When it has all been added, drop in the cinnamon stick and simmer over a low heat, for 30-40 min.

Stir in the lemon juice and sugar, if using preserved lemon dice the peel of half a lemon and add to the soup with the sugar, then taste and adjust the seasoning. Discard the cinnamon stick and serve with parsley.

Long & Short Soup

Gōngxĭ fācái!

Apparently Long & Short Soup is named for the long thin egg noodles and the short fat pork won tons it contains. Tonight's version contained fresh egg noodles, blanched kai-lan, and pork and shitake won tons cooked in a tangy soup. To save another call to the Accountant so she can read me the recipe, this is the soup base I like to use. The dumpling are cooked in the soup, then the dumplings and soup are spooned over blanched fresh egg noodles (70 - 100 g per person) and Asian greens (blanch if the vegetable has dense stems, otherwise it will cook easily in the soup) in large bowl. Garnish with scallions, coriander and/or garlic chives.

Long & Short Soup Soup
Serves 2 as a main
Adapted from Takeaway by Les Huynh

1.25 L chicken stock
2 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp saoxing rice wine
1 tbsp Chinese black vinegar
1/2 tsp white pepper

To make the soup bring the stock to the boil in a large saucepan. Add the soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar and white pepper. Cook fresh dumplings in the soup for 4-5 minutes.

A Persian Experiment

Gözleme filled with silverbeet and feta, the soup was not so photogenic

I've recently been reading a lot about the Food of Turkey, Lebanon and the Middle East and was inspired by this post from the Canberra Cook to try and make gözleme. Gözleme is a super-thin, filled Turkish pastry. I checked my copy of turquoise by Greg and Lucy Malouf, they list yufka as the ideal wrapping, filo as a substitute (further reading leads me to believe that gözleme dough is different to both these pastry's). I thought the photo on taste.com.au looked pretty good, so I lazily used their recipe with leavened dough. A wet leavened dough is not easy to roll thin, the Archivist tried his best, but the resulting pastries turned out more like a tasty pide than the gözleme I had imagined. Where the dough was thin, the siverbeet and feta were enhanced with a squeeze of lemon and tasted sublime. Those hints of the real thing make me want to try again, next time I will try this version.

The unmitigated success of the meal was the accompanying soup, from New Flavours of the Lebanese Table by Nada Saleh. This lemony green lentil soup is rich, sour and oddly compelling.

Adas Bi-Hamud
Serves 4
Adapted from New Flavours of the Lebanese Table by Nada Saleh

225 g green lentils
1.5 L water or stock
1 large onion (200g and over), peel and finely diced
2 medium potatoes (350-400 g), washed and diced into 1.5 cm cubes
6-7 large silverbeet or swiss chard leaves, remove the main rib and cut into fine ribbons
6 sprigs of fresh coriander
4 garlic cloves, skin removed and crushed
1/2 tsp of salt or to taste
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp lemon juice

Put the lentils in a medium saucepan, add the water or stock and bring to the boil. Add the onion, potatoes, greens and bring to the boil again. Reduce the heat to medium and leave to simmer for 15 minutes. Add the garlic, coriander, salt and pepper and simmer over a low heat for 20 minutes or until the lentils are soft. Add the oil in the last 5 minutes (you can omit the oil if you have used a stock that contains some fat). Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Spicy Lentil Soup

The Archivist had to get a wisdom tooth removed; the procedure wasn't especially traumatic by his account, but the dentist recommended soft foods be eaten on the following day. I love soups and braises, and the weather here had turned unseasonally mild. For lunch I made a soup inspired by one my mum used to like to make - using a can of Sanitarium Savoury Lentils and a can of tomato soup with some fresh vegetables added; my version uses some short cuts but is far more satisfying. I used half green and half Australian puy lentils, the puy held up well to the long cooking time and and green started to disintegrate making the tomatoey broth rich and hearty.

Spicy Lentil Soup
Makes 6 serves

1 tbsp olive oil
2 small brown onions, diced
3 small carrots, cut in half length ways and into half-moons
1 cup of celery, cut into crescents
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp Spanish smoked paprika
1.5 liters chicken or vegetable stock or water
300 g lentils
3 small potatoes, diced into 2 cm cubes
600 ml tomato passata
1 zucchini, cut in half and into half-moons

Sweat the onion, carrot and celery in olive oil in a saucepan of about 3 liter capacity over a low heat, the onions should turn translucent and the vegetables should soften - if the vegetables stick or brown the pan is too hot. Grind the cumin, coriander and black pepper, add these spices and the paprika to the pan. When the spices are fragrant add the stock, lentils, potatoes and passata and let simmer over a low heat for about an hour and a half. Add the zucchini about 10 minutes before serving, other delicate green vegetables like broccoli or baby peas could also be added at this point. Add salt to taste.

This soup reheats well, but you may need to add some water on the second day. It also freezes well.