Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Salma's Chicken and Yogurt Soup with Chili and Lemon Yes, it's been a while since I last wrote a blog entry but I have been making soup. We had a lovely October bank holiday weekend here in Dublin. The two offspring were away at different events, so the spouse and I relaxed and had plenty of time to cook. I made this soup using Salma Hage's recipe from The Lebanese Kitchen . Ingredients: leek (sliced), garlic (crushed), a bay leaf (picked from the garden), chicken stock (home-made and thawed out), chicken breasts (cut into strips), cornflour, yogurt, canned chickpeas (drained and rinsed), chili flakes, lemon juice, chopped coriander, and a pinch of paprika. I sweated the leek in butter and olive oil, before adding the garlic and bay leaf. In went the chicken stock and then the chicken strips, which were then left to simmer. I took out the chicken strips (difficult to separate out the leek slices) and then tried to thicken the soup with a little cornflour paste. This...

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...

Lamb Meatball Soup Yesterday I decided to go off piste from The Soup Book . I leafed through The Lebanese Kitchen by Salma Hage and found a fairly simple recipe for lamb meatball soup. Meatballs, tomatoes, sweetcorn, spices: what's not to like? Whenever I think of minced meat I think of minced beef rather than minced lamb, but minced lamb is becoming increasingly available. The recipe calls for seven spices seasoning (also known as Lebanese mixed spices ), which I haven't heard of before. The spouse searched on the internet for me and found several different combinations of spices. Eventually I opted for a mix of black pepper, cumin, paprika, coriander, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamon. Decision made, I set to making the meatballs. These consisted of minced lamb, grated onion, flour and the spice mixture. Rings off and hands washed, I began mashing and pounding the ingredients together. I then shaped seventeen meatballs, all the while thinking of an old song my f...

Mango and Curry Leaf Soup Yesterday was a sunny Saturday afternoon - our second hint of summer in six days. I had spent the previous evening baking Ottolenghi's marzipan muffins  (adapted - I didn't make the plum compote) and making fudge and  Nigella's rocky road  for a parish  fête . My teeth were on edge from checking that everything was up to standard and I had spent yesterday afternoon manning (personning?) a stall. But, I still wanted to make soup. I hadn't made anything from the fruit section of The Soup Book for a long time - since the 15th March 2012, in fact.  The recipe for mango and curry leaf soup is by Roopa Gulati , of whom I usually expect great things. I gathered together the ingredients: Alfonso mangoes  (I'm not sure that mine were Alfonso), black mustard seeds, curry leaves, red chilli, dark muscovado sugar, turmeric, coconut milk, lime juice and coriander. Roopa gave the preparation time as fifteen minutes: a huge un...

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...

Harissa and Chickpea Soup A couple of week's ago the spouse expressed an interest in making this soup from The Soup Book . Well, it's my blog and I make the soups. That said, I let him make the harissa that's needed to flavour the soup I made last Saturday (10th November). The recipe is by Roopa Gulati so I expected spice and richness. We weren't disappointed. The spouse is becoming a collector of harissa pastes and enjoyed making this one, which called for a red pepper, olive oil, seeds (coriander, cumin and caraway), tomato puree, garlic, red chillies, smoked paprika and lemon juice. I don't know how this was made as the spouse was the boss of the harissa. I needed only a couple of tablespoons for the soup, but we can use the rest with couscous (a favourite with the younger offspring). By the way, we now have three jars of smoked paprika due to inadequacies in our spice filing system. I hope that binding them together with a rubber band will help prevent any m...

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...

Harira Harira: browning the meat and bones Oh, happy day! Oh, happy tastebuds! Yesterday's soup was one of those soups that I have no qualms about adding to my "make it again" list. Using Sophie Grigson 's recipe for this Berber speciality, I made a soup that  all four of us enjoyed: the spouse, the younger offspring, Juno (my mother-in-law) and I. Yes, that's right: even the younger offspring was unstinting in his praise. All it took was an onion, a shoulder of lamb, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, parsley, coriander, brown lentils, tomatoes, vermicelli, chickpeas, flour and lemons. And my smaller dekshee.  I chopped what needed to be chopped then set to cooking. First I fried the onions until translucent, after which I added in the ground spices, the chopped herbs, the meat and the bones. Next in were the brown lentils, chopped tomatoes (tinned) and sundried tomato paste. When these were well mixed I poured in water and left the lot to simmer. H...

Keralan Prawn Soup I have been longing to make this Keralan prawn soup by Roopa Gulati! It needed a special occasion and the occasion was the older offspring's last home-cooked dinner before returning across the water. In her introduction to the recipe Roopa writes: "This fragrant soup takes the best ingredients from a cottage garden in the southern Indian state of Kerala." I'm not sure that you'd find king prawns or coconut (milk and cream) in your Keralan cottage garden, but perhaps you would find mustard seeds, coriander (seeds and leaves), fenugreek seeds, red chillies, garlic, root ginger, curry leaves, onions and lime. For everything else, go to your Keralan shops. Keralan prawn soup This was one of those recipes where most of the effort goes into the preparation. I had to roast then grind peppercorns with the three different types of seeds. After that I chopped and processed the red chillies, garlic and ginger. Then the real cooking began: the cur...

Pineapple Broth with Cod Perhaps recent enthusing about  Roopa Gulati 's recipes has tempted fate. Today's recipe was ... well ... a little disappointing. Her introduction to the recipe in The Soup Book states that this combination of South Indian and South-East Asian flavours is "a marvellous match" for any firm-fleshed fish or seafood. Those flavours are derived from onion, peanuts, coconut, ginger, coriander, sesame, cumin, poppy seeds, tamarind, turmeric, chilli, pineapple, lime and mint. Add caption I started by preparing the paste: chopped onion, peanuts, desiccated coconut, ginger and four different seeds (coriander, sesame, cumin and poppy) heated until the coconut darkened. When cooled, I put the mixture into my processor, but didn't have much luck creating a coarse paste. So I got out the stick blender and had a go with that. I then added the tamarind paste, turmeric and chilli powder, but the blender was no match for the tamarind paste. It ret...

Pork Vindaloo Broth Making Roopa Gulati's pork vindaloo broth from The Soup Book has been a two-day event. It began yesterday morning with my ruling out recipes because I didn't know where to get curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves . Eventually I decided upon pork vindaloo broth because I knew where I'd be able to obtain the necessary  tamarind pulp  if it wasn't available at the supermarket we use most frequently. The spouse was working outside Dublin so I had to take up the supermarket shopping slack. And what did I find in the spice section? Only dried curry leaves and kaffir lime leaves! Later on I had to accompany the younger offspring to a party in town and I planned to call into the Asian shops near the city centre in search of tamarind pulp or paste. I bought the tamarind on Drury Street before heading off to Lower Clanbrassil Street to see if I could buy fresh curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves. First I stopped into an Indian sweet shop the spouse had told ...

Creamy Pistachio Soup I have yet to be disappointed by any of Roopa Gulati 's recipes in The Soup Book  and today's effort was no exception. It's been an erratic day weather-wise on this May bank holiday - heavy rain interspersed with lovely sunshine. We had most of the ingredients in the house: pistachio nuts, cardamon pods, mace, coriander seeds and leaves, garlic, spring onions, root ginger, garam masala, vegetable stock and cream. All I had to do was dash out between showers to buy a green chilli from Young Stephen. This was not a soup to be hurried as there was a lot of preparation involved. I got the younger offspring to to shell the nuts for me - he only really got into when I handed him the meat tenderiser so that he could bash open the more reticent shells. I then cooked the shelled pistachios in boiling water for a couple of minutes and then spent more time than anticipated removing the skins. Sensing fiddliness, the spouse volunteered his skinning skills. Th...

Allotment Soup  The recipe for allotment soup by Thane Prince is the first in The Soup Book and in the summer vegetables section. I made it last Wednesday (11th April) in advance of visitors coming the next day, one of whom (a friend of the younger offspring) is a vegetarian. The listed ingredients include dried haricot beans (I used canned cannellini beans), leek, turnip (I don't think I've ever cooked white turnip before), carrots, courgette, celery, potato, tomatoes, garlic and green beans. I increased the quantities stated in The Soup Book , just in case there wasn't enough to go around: I wanted a lot of allotment soup. The most labour-intensive part of the preparation was dicing the vegetables and I'm glad I avoided soaking dried beans. The only things I had to do to finish the soup for my guests on Thursday were to reheat the soup and add in the fresh green beans and cannellini beans. Five of us sat down to eat and there was far too much soup. My guest...

Carrot and Orange Soup Yesterday I set out to buy ingredients for spicy spinach soup (from a Roopa Gulati recipe in The Soup Book ) and when I got home I realised that I had already made it about a year ago. So I thought quickly. I knew I had a lot of carrots in the fridge, and on checking the summer vegetables section of The Soup Book , I came across the recipe for carrot and orange soup. The ingredients include leeks, which I had just bought, and orange juice, a carton of which we were slowly working our way through. I also needed ground coriander, cumin, stock, a potato and a bay leaf. The sliced leek and carrots were the first ingredients into the pot, cooking gently until the leek softened. Next in were the potato, the ground spices, orange juice, stock and the bay leaf. About forty-five minutes later the soup was ready to be liquidised. There were just the two of us for lunch - the younger offspring and I. The boy tucked in and was particularly enthusiastic about the soup. W...

Since my last blog entry I have made two soups from The Soup Book : smoked cauliflower cheese and black-eyed bean. The former was a mid-week dinner; the latter our weekend dinner.   Smoked Cauliflower Cheese Soup The spouse was going to make cauliflower cheese (love it) but I proposed Sophie Grigson 's recipe as an alternative. He screwed up his face and declined. Then he changed his mind. I thought mind-changing was my prerogative. Anyway, smoked cauliflower cheese soup calls for cauliflower, onion, a floury potato, garlic, a bouquet garni, butter, stock, smoked Cheddar and garnish. Sophie suggests cayenne pepper, chopped parsley or chives, croutons or soured cream to garnish.  I sweated the vegetables, garlic and bouquet garni with the butter before adding the stock. When the cauliflower and potato were tender, I took out the bouquet garni and gave the mixture a whizz in the blender. Next I reheated the soup, jumping back from the bubbles that flew in all di...