Minnie's Soup Kitchen

Curried Honey Sweet Potato Soup This weekend I was back into the Collins Beekeeper's Bible and made three recipes from it: one starter, one main course and one pudding. Yesterday (Saturday 12th October) I made curried honey sweet potato soup, the ingredients for which included sweet potatoes, curry powder, honey, garlic, ginger root, a red chilli, a red onion and vegetable stock. Having prepared the vegetables, I roasted the sweet potatoes which I had tossed in oil, curry powder, honey, garlic, ginger and chilli. The smell was gorgeous. While the potatoes were roasting, I gently fried the onion. When both were ready, they were processed together with the stock and some coconut milk. Then I reheated the mixture and soon it was time to dish up. A very tasty soup, improved by the addition of some thick yoghurt. Moroccan Honey-Chicken Tagine with Prunes Still dripping with honey, today I made this chicken tagine. First I had to marinate the chicken pieces in a combinat...

"Penny" Soup Today I made my first The Soup Book soup in 2014 - it's also the 169th soup from that book that I've made. Ingredients: a leek, potatoes, carrots, small sweet potatoes, vegetable stock and parsley (from the garden, even though it's January). Preparation: basically, slice the vegetables into thin rounds. Cooking: sweat the vegetables, pour in the stock, simmer until all the vegetables tender; liquidise some of the vegetables with a little of the liquid. To serve: stir in the parsley, pour the soup into the bowls and make a little stack of sliced vegetables in the centre. The bliss of a day off on a weekday! I woke up thinking it was my usual wake-up time: "Oh no! I'm awake! I'll never get back to sleep." Then I discovered it was 8 o'clock, not 6 o'clock. I began the day in a good mood. My friend Bella was coming for lunch and I was pleased to have a new soup taster. I had the soup ready in good time for ...

Roast Tomato Soup There are seven tomato soup recipes in the summer vegetable section of The Soup Book   - classic tomato soup, cream of tomato, tomato borscht, gazpacho, sopa de tortilla and smoked tomato. I chose roast tomato by Sofia Larrinua-Craxton  because it looked simple and reasonably straightforward and today I had a lot to do.  As you might expect the ingredients include tomatoes (plum are specified but I couldn't find any in my supermarket), a red onion, garlic, vegetable stock (not home made, I'm afraid) and sun-dried tomato paste. The recipe involves roasting the tomatoes, onions and garlic, then liquidising them with the stock and and paste. Very simple. The complete mix tastes good and it'll be re-heated for lunch tomorrow. Earlier today I was down at the Dublin Food Co-op where I chatted to one of the co-founders. I can remember going to it years ago when it was located on Pearse Street, but before that it was in Temple Bar. Anyway, I bought a nice ...

African Sweet Potato Soup   This soup is another one from the winter vegetables section of The Soup Book , the second recipe by Angela Nilsen that I have used (see blog of 2nd January 2011) and the second soup I have cooked using sweet potatoes (see blog of 27th February 2010). There are just three recipes that call for sweet potatoes: the two I have already mentioned and one called "penny" soup, so called because the some of the vegetables used are sliced in rounds and stacked in a mound in the middle of the soup bowl when serving. Back to the African sweet potato soup. The ingredients include onion, garlic, root ginger, dried crushed chillies, sweet potatoes, red pepper, a can of tomatoes, cumin and coriander seeds (dry roasted and crushed), vegetable stock (I had to use commercial bouillon today), peanut butter and Tabasco sauce. Yes, I was surprised too when I saw peanut butter on the list (smooth or crunchy), but it "lends a rich, satisfying earthiness", ac...

Parsnip and Apple Soup I was determined to have completed fifty recipes from The Soup Book by the end of this month. In making today's choice I noticed I hadn't made a soup from the winter vegetable section of the book for some time, so thought I had better re-visit that section.  The recipe for parsnip and apple soup is on page 170 and coincidentally I made the recipe on the opposite page, Moroccan Roasted Sweet Potato Soup, exactly a year ago. Written by Marie-Pierre Moine , the recipe lists the following ingredients: onion, garlic, mild curry powder (I don't keep such a thing in the house so made up my own concoction), parsnips, a Bramley apple, vegetable or chicken stock, cream and lemon juice. I am not a fan of parsnips (see my blog of 4th September 2010), but the spouse loves them and the offspring are not immune to their charms. It took me longer than expected to cook the soup (Moine's times are twenty minutes for the preparation work and thirty for cooking)....

Well, I'm back making soup from The Soup Book . Today's recipe was for Moroccan roasted sweet potato soup. The ingredients include sweet potatoes, shallots, garlic, carrot, honey and harissa. Later on I'll be adding yoghurt and lemon juice and serving it with pitta bread. I started it off just after 11 o'clock this morning while my cleaner was here. She hadn't seen sweet potatoes before so I told her what little I thought I knew about them, that they were also called yams and originated in Central America. On checking with Wikipedia just now (yes, I know it's not a totally reliable source) I find I was wrong, that there is a difference between yams (Dioscorea batatas ) and sweet potatoes ( Ipomoea batatas ), the former originating in Africa and Asia, the latter orange-fleshed variety in South America. Apparently they're not even related. Back to the soup. I had to prepare the vegetable, mix the harissa with olive oil, then having coated the vegetables with...