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...

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...

Chinese Egg Drop Soup Yesterday I made my one hundred and first soup from The Soup Book and my first in 2012. I had originally intended to make one of the three clam soup recipes but the spouse and I were unable to find any clams. The spouse's favourite fishmonger told him that clams aren't usually available after Christmas. Another fishmonger that I tried said there wasn't much call for them in his locality, but he could order them. You never know - I might get to make another soup during the week. Anyway, back to the Chinese egg drop soup. The recipe is by Carolyn Humphreys, who suggests that the soup could be a simple chicken broth, but is made tasty and filling with the addition of vegetables and Chinese seasonings. The ingredients include chicken stock, garlic, fresh ginger root, spring onions, soy sauce, Chinese five-spice powder, corn on the cob or canned sweetcorn, baby leaf spinach, cornflour and eggs. The first stage involved cooking the crushed garlic, gin...