Minnie's Soup Kitchen

It's 5th January and I have been busy in the kitchen. We started the new year with a favourite old recipe - cinnamon duck with redcurrant sauce - from Good Housekeeping (April 1992).  Basically, you sear duck breasts in a pan with a stick of cinnamon, then transfer the breasts to an oven (skin side up) to roast while you make a sauce with onions, thyme, stock, red wine and red currant jelly. A delicious start to the year.  Getting ready to roast tomatoes Yesterday I decided to make soup from one of our cookery books other than The Soup Book . I selected River Cottage Veg Everyday! (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, 2011, Bloomsbury) but didn't go for a straightforward recipe. In order to make Hugh's Mexican tomato and bean soup , I first had to make roast tomato sauce (1.5kg of tomatoes yielded about 550ml of sauce) and go on the hunt for a tin of black beans. Finding black beans was the hard part. Once I found them, there was no holding me back. The spouse said o...

Soup Review Mixed mushrooms Since my last post on 13th November I have made three soups: mushroom soup (on the 17th), Thai chicken soup (18th November) and garbure (25th November). All that activity has meant I've now completed 149 soups since I started working my way through the recipes in The Soup Book back in December 2009. Nearly three years after I made spinach and rosemary soup I can hardly believe I'm three quarters of the way through the book. I am not sure that I will get through all the recipes and so will change my approach to making soup. I may make it less frequently and try out soup recipes from other cookery books that the spouse and I own. We'll see. Mixed mushrooms: chopped and cooking The spouse and I now have a new favourite vegetable shop . It's not cheap nor is it especially convenient to get to from where we live, but the selection of fresh fruit and vegetables and other produce is impressive. The spouse has been talking about this p...

Bigos Nestled in the Winter Vegetables section of The Soup Book is Marie-Pierre Moine's recipe for bigos , a meaty Polish stew rather than soup , according to many internet sources. I identified the recipe last weekend and thought it would be a substantial "soup" for sharing with others, but only sent out invitations yesterday afternoon. We had two guests to share our meal with and there was a substantial portion left over. The ingredients include Savoy cabbage, sauerkraut, smoked bacon, smoked Polish sausage, duck breast (you can substitute venison), a red onion, garlic, brown mushrooms, smoked paprika, a bay leaf, juniper berries, marjoram, caraway seeds, red wine and beef stock. Getting all the ingredients together was the fiddliest part of a fiddly soup. The spouse might as well have gone to Poland when trying to find the smoked sausage and sauerkraut. Or so he said. I went out yesterday evening after the rugby match had started to buy a bottle of red wine and...