Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Turnip Soup with Chilli, Pimento and Noodles Just like buses, you wait ages for unusual root vegetable recipes to arrive, then two turnip together! Sorry, I couldn't resist. You see, I was shopping on Saturday 20th October and there were those red-skinned turnips, just like the ones pictured in The Soup Book , so I bought them. It was decided that I would cook the dinner that evening and the spouse would get some of the ingredients for me. He's discovered this wonderful shop not too far away and has come home with tales of wondrous types of honey. I shall bestir myself to venture to this awesome place. So, I arrived home from work on Wednesday (24th October) and laid out my ingredients: spring onion, turnips, jalapeno, dried chilli flakes, star anise, tomato puree, soy sauce, stock, Chinese egg noodles, preserved pimento and coriander. Carolyn Humphries advises you to use larger turnips with a stronger flavour - I consider myself lucky to find any turnips at all. P...

Hot and Sour Chicken Broth Open a book, any book. Ready? Is it a cookery book? Is it a book with soup recipes? Is it The Soup Book ? Now, open it and find a recipe, one you haven't made before and one that won't require too much effort to find the ingredients. It's getting trickier, isn't it? Let's look in the Poulty, Game and Meat section. Aah! There's one and it's by Roopa Gulati , so there's a good chance we'll all enjoy the finished product. I looked at the ingredients: ginger or galangal, lime leaves, garlic, coriander (the stems!!!), lemon grass, chicken breasts, bird's eye chillies, shallots, lime juice, fish sauce, sweet chilli sauce, pak choi and bean sprouts. Yes, I could get anything I didn't already have at home. Off to the shops and then home. I spent yesterday afternoon (20th October) baking for a cake sale: apple and fig cake, lemon and ginger cake, banana, coconut and walnut cake, and fudge. Phew! I was exhausted. An...

French Cabbage Soup This weekend's foray into soup-making involved Savoy cabbage, onion, garlic and lardons (I used ordinary rashers). When I was out at the supermarket I spotted pre-chopped cabbage, which I eventually bought when I couldn't find a whole head. Incidentally, after my long search last weekend for turnips, what did they have this week in the supermarket? Only white turnips!!! I thought I'd buy them for the remaining turnip soup recipe in The Soup Book (turnip soup with pimento, chilli and noodles). Could I get my phone to work so that I could ring the spouse at home and get him to check the ingredients? No, of course not. It was one of those mornings: I thought I'd lost my house keys and went into every shop looking for them, only to find them at the bottom of an empty shopping bag when I got home. It's all sorted now. Deep breath. Anyway, I started to cook yesterday evening at about 5.30pm. The pre-chopped cabbage saved a lot of time, so all...

Turnip Soup White turnips: what greenery? For some time now I've been keeping an eye out for turnips (red- or white-skinned ones, not swede turnips) as there are a couple of recipes for them in The Soup Book . I haven't seen them around very often. I did the shopping on Saturday (6th October) but didn't see any turnips in the supermarket. The spouse tried down the road in Young Stephen's - no luck. I brought the younger offspring into town and chanced to go down Moore Street. None of the stalls had the sort of turnip I was looking for and I was about the give up. Fortunately, my curiosity drove me into an Asian shop where among all the more unusual vegetables were a few white turnips. "They'll do," I thought to myself despite their rather flaccid appearance. And so to my kitchen. Alice Waters ' recipe instructs the reader to remove the greens from the turnips and keep them for a later stage of cooking. There wasn't much greenery to remove....