Minnie's Soup Kitchen

New Recipes Since my last post I have tried out a few new recipes. Well, not exactly new as I have owned the books in which I found the recipes for many years. Except for the muffin recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi' s Ottolenghi: The Cookbook . Couscous with seafood and fresh tomato sauce On the 7th February I made coucous with seafood and fresh tomato sauce. The recipe is from Claudia Roden 's Tamarind and Saffron (first published in 1999). The sauce was delicious, rich and interesting. For the spouse's birthday on the 9th February I made Gill MacLennan 's seriously chocolatey muffins. The spouse is on a man diet but told me he'd like muffins with chocolate chips in them. I knew I could rely on Gill. The recipe came up trumps and was worth the effort of tracking down chocolate chips. For Shrove Tuesday (12th February) I made apple and yoghurt pancakes with blueberry and honey sauce using a recipe in the Irish Times magazine. A little bit of effort but agai...

Chunky Turkey Soup Still on the theme of Christmas, today's soup (the forty-first since I began the project and the first of 2011) is Angela Nilsen 's chunky turkey soup. Another theme is thriftiness. In my blog entry of 19th December I mentioned the possibility of buying turkeys cheaply after Christmas and the spouse duly bought a turkey leg for €5! There is plenty of meat on it. He cooked it for our new year's day lunch party. I used some of the remaining meat for today's soup and I'll be using the bone, meat scraps and limp vegetables from the fridge to replenish my supply of stock. Good value or what! The Soup Book recipe for chunky turkey soup calls for onion, potato, carrots, leek, peas and turkey. Then it is served with hot garlic bread. In my prevailing mood of thriftiness, I used leftover bread to make croutons (crush a clove of garlic in olive oil, coat slices of French bread in the oil and "bake" in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes). My ...