Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Seafood Chowder Let there be no doubt about it: I love seafood chowder. If I see it on a menu anywhere I have to try it. It's my adventure, my search for a culinary holy grail. Sometimes I am very pleased with what I eat, sometimes I am very disappointed. Recently I was having a quick lunch in a hotel bar in Waterford. Seafood chowder was on the menu and I ordered it, only to be advised that it would take twelve minutes to cook, too long to wait if I wanted to catch my train. I made do with a very disappointing tomato and fennel soup. Let's just say if you have ordered a soup with tomato as the main ingredient, you would expect fresh tomatoes rather than canned ones. So, back to my own little chowder venture on the 15th February. Still trying to get value out of our various cookery books, I picked on one I bought a few years ago: Complete Comfort Food edited by Bridget Jones. (I used it last weekend to make boeuf bourguignon and key lime pie for the spouse's birthda...

Split Pea and Bacon Soup Last Sunday was another sunny day in Dublin so why did I make a hearty winter's day soup? Partly because I had the packet of split green peas from last weekend and partly because I love bacon-flavoured meals. The other ingredients included smoked streaky bacon, celeriac, carrot, leek, potato, dried marjoram and onion. The first task was to get the peas cooking in water. Then in went the piece of bacon. In the meantime I sliced and diced the vegetables and added them to the peas with some marjoram. When the bacon was cooked, I took it out of the pan, chopped it up and it back in the pan. I fried the onion in a second pan and then I was ready to dish up. I stirred the fried onions into the soup and sprinkled chopped chives over the top of each bowlful. Verdict: Delicious. I'll definitely make this soup again one cold winter's day. Bee is for Baking I've been very busy lately and haven't had much time for doing some of the things I l...

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...

Manhattan Clam Chowder Chopped clams in a ramekin Today I made my first clam soup from The Soup Book . The spouse called into his favourite fish shop to see if the clams had made their appearance and obviously they had, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging today. The recipe specifies thirty-six live clams among its ingredients, so the spouse bought forty-five, just in case any of them died before we were ready to kill them. The first step in the recipe is to discard any open clams before shucking them. We didn't know what shucking was, so the spouse looked it up on the internet. Once he had finished shucking, I asked him to chop the clams. Shucked and chopped, the clams barely filled a ramekin. We wondered if Transatlantic clams would be bigger. We also reserved the juice from the clams, as instructed, and topped it up with water to make 600ml. Manhattan clam chowder with bacon and thyme The other ingredients for this clam chowder include streaky bacon, onion, floury ...