Corn Soup aux homards

Does it seem like there are a lot of soup recipes on this blog? Are you quite sick of soup yet? Alas, this will not stop soon. I've mentioned before that I don't like repeating other people's recipes too much. So I only feel comfortable writing up recipes that I've altered a great deal, that I know are unavailable to the general public, that are from my family, or that I've invented wholesale. And let's face it, one of the easiest ways to invent new recipes is to make soup. You just throw everything in a pot and cook!

This particular dish came from a bout of pantry cleaning, and indeed, it is the perfect pantry dish. It could have been made very simply, but I wanted to use some of my fancier ingredients, namely, Coconut Oil and Lobster Base. So I tarted things up a little. But the recipe itself could not be easier to do. I decided to keep the aromatics simple and subtle, so as to let the broth and corn play center stage, but to add a dash of chipotle for a layer of spice. Fry, boil, puree, and that's it!

Corn soup aux homards

Ingredients

• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil (or vegetable oil, or ghee)
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 4 cans sweet corn (can use 2 lbs frozen)
• 6 cups lobster broth (or any broth you have handy)
• 1/2 teaspoon chipotle powder (less if you want a milder soup)
• 1/4 cup roasted pepitas
• 1/4 red onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup sour cream

Cooking Directions

1. Heat the coconut oil over gentle heat, add the chopped onion and fry until just soft and translucent, 2-3 minutes.
2. Add the chopped garlic cloves, and fry around 1 minute, but do not brown.
3. Throw in the canned corn, the lobster broth, and chipotle powder.
4. Boil for about twenty minutes, then puree with a stick blender.
5. Garnish with sour cream, chopped red onion, and pepitas, and serve!

The Hungry Reader's Peanut Soup

Lately, I've acquired a pretty full collection of books by John Thorne. The obsession started with Simple Cooking, which I thought was exquisitely written. I remember writing Thorne, and receiving a very kind note back from him. I picked up a few more of his books from Amazon, and while Simple Cooking remains my favourite, I've enjoyed picking through the others too.

The thing about Thorne that appeals to me (other than his lucid writing) is that he seems to cook the way I do. When he wants to make a recipe, he looks up every variation of that recipe he can find in his collection of cookbooks, and then he makes up his own version. It's the cooking of someone who loves to read and research, but who doesn't have the will or the discipline to follow directions.

This is a preface to my peanut soup, a recipe with quite a few inspirations, but no real source. I've been craving an African-style peanut soup for a few weeks now, and every now and then would take a book off my shelf and find yet another version of it. Most of the ones I know basically use leeks and some peanut butter at the end, but I wanted something more, something richer. I wanted this:

The technique for this is pretty simple, one I use for all pureed soups. I gently fried three chopped onions, an inch of ginger (peeled and chopped), and almost half a head of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped). Then I put in three celery stalks (my advice? use just two), a large sweet potato (cubed), and five or so carrots (scrubbed and chopped). Then, because I thought all that richness would need a bit of spicy counterpoint, I seeded and chopped two jalapenos and threw those in too.

To make it hearty, I poured in enough beef broth to cover the vegetables, a cup of tomato juice, and two tablespoons of peanut butter. After cooking the veggies to softness, I pureed the soup with an immersion blender, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and mixed in a can of coconut milk.

The result was rich and satisfying, with just enough of a hint of peanutiness. I do think I put in a bit too much celery, but the flavour blended in by the second day. The first day I served the soup with roasted pumpkin seeds and a bit of sliced scallion. When I served what was left as a New Year's Day breakfast (nobody present had energy for much else), I tossed some sunchoke slices in olive oil and sea salt and roasted them for 10 min at 400 degrees F. (I was inspired by the garnish for this walnut soup recipe), and added them to the other garnishes. As I expected, the nuttiness of the roasted sunchokes was just as good on peanut soup as it was on walnut soup.

The Environmentalist's Squash Soup

Last week, in a hazy, happy holiday mood, I decided to make fursecuri cu stafide. I made a haphazard but tasty variation of my previous recipe (will post soon), and I worked with a different set of measurements -- one that yielded a much larger amount. The only problem was that while mixing the batter doesn't take very long at all, baking all of these cookies, even with four cookie sheets at my disposal, took the better part of two days.

It also occurred to me that quite a bit of oven energy was going to waste for these hours and hours of cookie baking. So I thought I could use the energy for two purposes, and roast some squash alongside the cookie baking. I cut two smallish butternut squashes in half, touched them up with a bit of olive oil, put them in a pan and loosely covered them with tinfoil. The oven was at 375 degrees F.

I probably left those squashes in there for at least an hour and a half, if not more. What came out was -- candy. I love to make squash soup, but I usually spice it heavily and just peel and boil the squash raw. Roasting, especially for a long time and at low heat, transformed butternut squash into a sweet bomb of squashy flavour. When I tasted this, I decided not to mess with it too much.

This was the easiest soup in the world to make: I took a good gop of butter, sauteed a couple of finely chopped onions in it over low heat, slowly, until they became sweet too. I added a few sliced garlic cloves (I would usually use a ton), and let them become translucent too. For the spices, I just put in a bit of ground ginger (probably around a teaspoon) and a dash of Ras el Hanout (mine is made according to the recipe in Ana Sortun's Spice), and fried them up with the onions. As the onions were becoming soft, I scraped off every last bit of squash from the skin, and threw it in there, finally adding just enough vegetable stock to cover. After twenty minutes of cooking, I pureed the soup with my immersion blender, probably one of the best kitchen purchases I've ever made. (I have a cheap little Proctor Silex that works like a charm for soups.) I seasoned with salt and white pepper, and added about half a cup of cream for the richness. It was Christmas, after all.

This was probably one of the simplest and most mouth-filling soups I've made. After all, I was also baking cookies all the while I made the soup! I'm a sucker for pureed soups made with Indian or Moroccan seasonings, but this one had such an intensity of flavour that it needed nothing but butter and cream to highlight it. And while I wouldn't usually spend two hours roasting squash just for a soup, in this case, the recipe was piggybacking onto my cookies. As you can imagine, it smelled good in my house that day.

Grandma's tomato soup - Supa de rosii

When I was very little, I was an incredibly difficult eater. It's hard to believe now that I have a voracious and pretty catholic appetite for food, but my family spent most of my childhood trying desperately to convince me to eat. For, as you may know, in Eastern Europe a child who doesn't eat is nothing short of a tragedy. It never seems to occur to anyone that the kid will eat when she's hungry, and so will most likely not starve. No -- she must be cajoled, threatened, forced, and constantly reminded to eat!

The upshot of this for me was that my grandmothers especially would latch on to any food item I seemed to eat with relish, and would compete with each other to provide it whenever I was at their house. I remember a visit to Bucharest when I was twelve or so. At that point, I had discovered I liked meat (an overnight sensation), and I wasn't all that finicky anymore. But there were certainly things I liked more than others... and one of these dishes was tomato soup with noodles.

The visit took place over the summer months, and I alternated between the homes of my grandparents, the way I had as a child. Every time I went to my grandmother Nadia's, she would make me tomato soup with noodles, and I would eat bowls and bowls of it, expressing a particular desire for extra noodles. So the next visit, the soup would have a greater proportion of fine, angel-hair noodles, and I'd finish it off with even more delight. I remember by the end of the summer sitting at her kitchen table, and Nadia putting a bowl in front of me: there was a mound of noodles, barely moistened by soup. This was now pasta with tomato sauce. I looked at the bowl, looked at her, and we both started laughing.

Well, despite making some delicious squash and carrot and African peanut soups in the past few weeks, what I've really been craving is tomato soup... with noodles. I called up Nadia for the recipe, and it turned out she had had the same craving. It also turned out that this soup is ridiculously easy to make -- and I simplified it even further.

You basically boil a carrot, a stick of celery, and some onion in a litre and a half or so of water, for half an hour. Then add half a litre of tomato juice, season appropriately, let it cook a little. Finally, throw in some noodles -- I used thin Italian egg noodles that come in little bird nests, crushed a bit. I made the recipe even easier by using a good vegetable bouillon instead of the real veggies (which can be crushed into the soup of course, or just removed). There are better tomato soups out there, I'm sure -- but this one is ridiculously easy, done in less than twenty minutes, and satisfies me like nothing else.

The Romanian's French Onion Soup

It's a bit of a running joke in my marriage that I like onions and garlic. Now, when I say I "like" them, you might be tempted to think that I sort of enjoy them, or that I appreciate a well-placed sliver of red onion, or that I think roasting some garlic for an hour and then pureeing it into the hummus is a good idea. And while these things are true, it's more accurate to say that I'm obsessed with these sulfurous bulbs. After all, growing up my father used to make a salad out of white onions alone (seriously -- I'll post the recipe one day), and one of my favourite snacks to make for myself was to rub a raw garlic clove all over a piece of toast until it disappeared, and then to butter the toast. Romanians, like Iranians and Indians, often have raw onion as a side dish; this is either a nicely washed green onion or a wedge of white onion, either of which is dipped in salt and eaten raw.

Given this upbringing, it's no surprise that given any recipe, I regularly double the onions and triple the garlic. I love the intensity of flavour this brings, and I regularly change even Indian recipes. (In the back of my animal brain is a suspicious little voice saying the recipe-writer must have adjusted the onion and garlic quotients down to suit Western tastes, as with the spice...)

Last night, feeling a bit of a cold coming on in the late November chill, I decided to make some French onion soup. Things started out just fine. I had an easy recipe by Richard Olney, but although he gave specific instructions for how many onions were needed, I couldn't help but keep slicing and slicing and slicing... needless to say, gently frying this mass of onions, waiting for the sugars to caramelize and for the slivers to turn a deep brown was an even greater pleasure than eating the eventual soup. One of my recent food reads has been Coleman Andrews' Everything On the Table: Plain Talk about Food and Wine, and at one point in the book he writes about falling in love with cooking when he realised the magic of frying onions, the superb power to transmute a substance into something delicious and luscious using only the application of heat. Making an onion soup means reenacting the first step of civilisation.

Olney's recipe also calls for a bit of tomato paste, which I haven't seen elsewhere. It's unexpected, gives a certain richness and depth and heartiness to the soup, but it also makes it unlike any other French onion soup I've had before. Because I am also obsessed with tomatoes (any good Romanian should be), I like the result, but I also initially found it too sweet. So I checked what Mark Bittman and my fancy and mostly-useless 1997 Joy of Cooking had to say about French onion soup, and wound up adding a pinch of dried thyme and a glug of cognac to brighten the soup a bit. The result was wonderful -- I had two bowls last night and ate it for breakfast again this morning. We served it with croutons (just bits of stale bread fried in some butter), but this morning I had crackers and brie as a side dish. The soup is so heavy and thick that it doesn't really need extra cheese and bread in it!

How to do it: thinly slice four or five medium to large onions. (You should have about a mixing bowl's full.) Take the pot you'll make the soup in (I like a cast iron Dutch oven), heat three tablespoons of clarified butter or ghee until it's very hot, toss in the onions, then reduce the temperature a bit. Do not leave the stove! Keep stirring the onions for about half an hour, until they become brown. Not golden... brown. Be patient. Put a podcast on or something. Savour it.

When they are ready, throw in four or five cloves' worth of chopped garlic, about a teaspoon of salt, and give your arm some exercise grinding pepper over the whole thing. Lots of pepper. Stir and fry for another minute or two -- the onions are only getting sweeter.

At this point, pour in about five cups (or a bit more) of beef bouillon. Now, if you have the real homemade stuff, I'm sure that's great. I rarely cook meat, and so I never do. What I love though is Better Than Bouillon beef base, the organic kind. It takes up almost no space, tastes better than canned or liquid broths I've tried, is less salty, and is much cheaper in the long haul. (I get it in the supermarket, and stock up when it's on sale.) Add a large tablespoon of tomato paste. And simmer gently, covered, for twenty minutes.

Finally, add a pinch or two of dried thyme, and throw in some cognac -- why not? -- but heat the soup for a bit to boil off the alcohol. And serve, in all its oniony goodness!
 
The base recipe is from:

Saving the Soup; or, Creamy Bean Curry

A little while ago, possessed of a small package of mixed beans and desiring to improve their place in the world, I made the Tuscan Multi-Bean soup from The Daily Soup Cookbook, by Leslie Kaul and Bob Spiegel. It's a vegetarian soup, so it doesn't have the hearty flavour of meat stock. It does have celery, garlic, onion, rosemary, bay leaves, tomatoes, and a variety of beans, however, so I expected a bowl of beany bliss at the end of all the work. Alas, this was not the case. Maybe my tastebuds have been spoiled by the rich flavours of Indian and Middle Eastern food, but these beans were just banal.

Unfortunately, the recipe resulted in enormous amounts of the bland brew. I decided to freeze most of it, figuring it could be saved with some spicing some time in the future. This is a little like the attempts to freeze the bodies of incurably ill people in the hope that one day, in the future, there will be a medicine for what ails them. I had faith enough in progress to believe I would, one day, find a solution for these beans. Well, in progress, and in my masala dabba:

When their turn finally came, I turned to another book for inspiration, the tantalizing but somewhat overwhelming 660 Curries, by Raghavan Iyer. I knew I wanted to use yoghurt to make the beans into a creamy curry, and sure enough, Iyer has a recipe for Kidney Beans with a Cardamom-Yogurt Sauce. This I used as a starting point for technique. I also introduced garlic and ginger into the recipe, and used slightly different spices. And, of course, the beans themselves had already been cooked into a soup with the "Tuscan" spices and with tomatoes, so this curry wasn't going to look anything like Iyer's version.

First, I heated two tablespoons of ghee, and sauteed a finely chopped onion for a few minutes, along with 6-7 cardamom pods. I then added chopped ginger (about an inch), and chopped garlic (3-4 cloves -- I love garlic!). I added two teaspoons of turmeric, sauteed for a while, and then dropped in two cups or so of tart, Greek-style yoghurt. The next step was to cook the yoghurt for ten minutes or so to reduce it down to its curds. This was the most fascinating technique I learned from Iyer's recipe; I know to put yoghurt at the end of a curry and to keep it from curdling, but it had never occurred to me that you could boil down yoghurt into a tart sauce at the start of a curry.

After the yoghurt had cooked down for a while, I folded in several cups of bean soup. I spiced it with two small teaspoons of sea salt, two teaspoons garam masala, and a pinch of cayenne.

After cooking it for fifteen minutes more, I had a rich and intensely spiced bean curry, a dish worlds away from the blandness of Tuscan bean soup. It was perfect with some Dallas-bought injera.

The result may not look too different, but I assure you, this dish is worlds away from the original. This was the rebirth of the bean.