Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Corn and Crab Soup with Coriander Last weekend I dipped into one of those books that sits on my kitchen bookshelves waiting to be pulled out, dusted off and put to use: The Essential Seafood Cookbook  edited by Wendy Stephen.  I'm not sure why I chose this recipe - perhaps I liked the idea of the tang of lemon grass and ginger together with crab (tinned) and coconut milk. Other ingredients included garlic, Asian shallots (I stuck with western shallots), chicken stock, frozen sweetcorn kernels, fish sauce, lime juice and brown sugar. Unfortunately, the spouse wasn't able to find fresh coriander. I did my prep work. I added chopped garlic, shallots and lemon grass and grated ginger to heated oil in a pan. Next in were the stock and coconut milk. Then in went the sweetcorn. The last additions were the crab meat, fish sauce, lime juice and sugar. The four of us sat down to sup. I was a little disappointed by the blandness of the soup, despite the appetite-whetting spice an...

Crab Gazpacho I'm trying to catch up in the fish and shellfish section of The Soup Book. I've made less than 60% of the fish soups so far (the same goes for the meat soups) so I chose crab gazpacho for this weekend's effort. The spouse had brought home some cheap pre-packed crab during the week and I thought I'd use it up. The recipe is by Marie-Pierre Moine and a little on the fiddly side. The ingredients include clams or mussels (I chose the latter), shallot, spring onions, garlic, dry sherry, parsley, fennel seeds, piquante pimenton (which I discovered is a type of paprika after I had substituted a type of whole chilli), tomatoes, boiled eggs, sherry vinegar (never heard of it before), and crab meat. The brown meat is, strictly speaking, not an ingredient of the soup as it is mixed with oil and chopped egg, then spread on croutes and served floating on the soup. I'll come to the crab meat presently. The spouse was working outside Dublin yesterday, so I ha...

Crab Bisque If you'd asked me last weekend which soup I'd be making next, I wouldn't have have said crab bisque.  The choice was made because last Friday (6th August) the spouse fortuitously spotted and bought a pair of frozen crabs from his new favourite fish shop on Upper Rathmines Road. As soon as I saw them, I thought "Soup!" and looked up crab recipes in The Soup Book .  There are two options - the bisque and gazpacho.The latter requires clams or mussels, so we chose the former and began thawing the crabs ready for cooking yesterday afternoon. There is quite a lot of preparation involved in this recipe - crab meat to remove from shells, onions, carrots, celery, leeks, fennel, ginger and garlic to chop, as well as cooking, blending and sieving - so I called upon the younger offspring's pair of hands.  I bashed the crab shells with my rolling pin and cracked open the legs with the kitchen scissors so that the child labourer could prise out the meat.Then ...