Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Büsumer Fish Soup Büsumer (or Büsumer Deichhausen ) is situated on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and is apparently the source of today's soup. I haven't made very many of the fish soups in The Soup Book , mainly because I haven't felt sure that I would be able to get the necessary ingredients. There are thirty-two fish soup recipes and so far I have made just five; Büsumer fish soup is my sixth. The listed ingredients include carrots, potato, onions, vegetable stock, a bay leaf, haddock or pollock, lemon juice, prawns, chestnut or button mushrooms, and fresh dill. I bought the fish in a recently opened fish shop. I was agreeably surprised that the fish monger had both haddock and pollock on display. I asked him what the difference was between the two. He said that pollock was "meatier," more like cod. When I told him I was following a soup recipe, he immediately urged me to buy the pollock. He also shelled the prawns for me. I used some v...

Portuguese Haddock Soup   Today finds me in the middle of a cooking blitz and it's not all going to plan.  Last week I thought I'd make oxtail soup. The spouse and I had the tails freezing in preparation for two recipes ( The Soup Book's oxtail soup and oxtail braise from Nigel Slater's Appetite ) but as I was browsing through The Soup Book I noticed that I haven't made too many fish soups; in fact, I've made only three out of the thirty-two in the Fish and Shellfish section. So I decided to make a fish soup and the Portuguese haddock caught my eye. Its ingredients include cavolo nero/kale/Savoy cabbage, onion, garlic, potato, milk and smoked haddock fillet. The spouse duly did the shopping, coming home with a Savoy cabbage and haddock fillet, the latter bought at Feeney's Fish (see blog of 14th August). Because there was plenty of cabbage and twice the weight of haddock needed, I decided to make double the quantity. The plan was to freeze the soup that ...