soup – Ali Does It Herself

Wingin’ It Wednesday: Chicken Soup with Rice

This is a “quick” soup in that I didn’t spend all day simmering it on the stove, but it still took a little bit of time, as all good soups do. I was cleaning out the freezer when I found a bag of 5 chicken drumsticks that needed something done to them, so I dragged them out, defrosted them, and dusted them with salt and pepper in a baking dish.

I roasted them at 350°F for about 40 minutes.

Make sure that the juices are running clear and the flesh is cooked all the way through. Soup that gives you salmonella is not good soup.

I let them cool, then pulled all the meat off the bones and set the meat aside in a bowl for a while.

I took all the skin and bones and chucked them into a large pot with some concentrated chicken broth and about 8 cups water and I let that simmer for about an hour.

Then I used a slotted spoon to remove the skin and bones from the pot.

I grabbed myself some vegetables. You always need vegetables in soup.

I also had about 2 cups cooked brown rice leftover from a canine digestive issue that needed getting rid of.

Chicken Soup with Rice 8 — Flickr would not let me upload this picture until I cropped it and added contrast and vignetting. Apparently an unedited picture of leftover rice does not count as a valid photo to the Flickr Uploadr people.

All the goodness in your carrots is in the skin, so if you’re putting them in a soup, consider just giving them a good scrubbing instead of peeling them, then slice them up. Three carrots went under the knife for this recipe.

Green onions, on the other hand, are cleanest if you remove all the outer layers and wash them thoroughly. I used 2 green onions here.

I only used half an onion in this recipe, because I wasn’t making that much soup. Did you know that an onion is less likely to make you cry if it’s come out of the fridge? The cold slows down the chemical reaction that releases the eye irritant into the air.

I chucked all the vegetables and rice into the steamy broth and then diced up the chicken meat before chucking it in as well.

My compost bin earned some new additions.

Let the soup simmer for about 20 minutes, until the vegetables are softened, and then serve it hot. Possibly with biscuits. It’s up to you.

Aw Yiss. Some Motha. Flippin’. Tomato Soup.

I don’t know why I felt the need to use that title. I just DID. Also, in case you didn’t recognize the meme, Canadian comic artist Kate Beaton is awesome and you should read her stuff.

What do you do when you are moving and you have too many cans of tomatoes in your pantry, and your husband has left an open can of tomato paste in your refrigerator?

I think we all know the answer to this. It’s in the title after all. Besides, nothing says summer in Newfoundland like a big bowl of hot soup. And I’m not even kidding. I haven’t seen the sun in a while and as I write this it is raining and 7°C. Now you can use fresh tomatoes in this soup, and I’m sure there’s a good argument for doing so, because the taste is so much better and whatever. Personally, if I have a nice fresh tomato in my hands, I’m going to want to eat it as is, not simmer it in a soup. But to each his own.

If you do decide to use fresh tomatoes, I recommend blanching them first to get the skins off. Put a put of water on the boil and when it’s a-rollin’, submerge your tomatoes in the water for about a minute and a half, until the skins start to split.

Remove the tomatoes from the pot and plunge them into a bowl of cold water (to stop the tomatoes from cooking and going mushy).

Then you can just peel them easy as you please.

Take a few carrots, peel them, and chop them up.

Do the same with a large sweet onion.

You know when you are reading real estate listings and you have to sort of translate them to understand what the sellers are trying to tell you? Like, “cozy” means “small”, “quaint” means that none of the doors are level and won’t shut properly, and “rustic” means “broken”. I think you can apply almost the same principle to food. At least in terms of soups. When I read that a soup is “hearty” that tells me that there’s more stuff in it than liquid. And when I read “rustic” I understand that the creators were just too lazy to cut everything up extra small. So by that logic pretty much everything I ever make is “rustic.”

Sauté the onions in a large saucepan with a gob of vegetable oil until they are soft and transparent.

Now you can huck in your spices. I used some minced garlic, smoked paprika, and then some powdered chicken stock. Give that a good stir.

Now you can add in your tomatoes (I used 2 cans plus the 2 fresh ones I blanched) and your carrots. I didn’t drain my canned tomatoes because I wanted the liquid. If you’re using fresh tomatoes you may want to add in a bit of water. Plop in a can of tomato paste as well, to thicken it up.

Simmer that for a while until the carrots are soft. Now you can leave this in its hearty, rustic state, or you can give it a whaz with your handy immersion blender and mix it up.

I chose the latter, obviously.

Then I took a can of evaporated milk that Mrs. Nice had purchased for undisclosed reasons and poured that in. Uh, don’t, you know, confuse evaporated milk with condensed milk. I don’t think that would end well.

Season with salt and pepper to taste.

I would have loved to serve it with fresh basil but dried had to do. Yum!

Pumpkin Soup

Right. So. In my effort to effectively use all the pumpkin purée left over from our Pumpkin-Off, all 14 cups of it, we are starting to get sick of pumpkin (though the amount of fibre that has been added to our diet is extraordinary).

The solution? SOUP. Most pumpkin soup recipes call for a single can (a little less than 2 cups) of the stuff, but I’m just gonna giv’er and dump in the rest of what I got. BLAM. It came out to about 2 1/2 cups.

I don’t really feel like blending this soup, because the pumpkin is pre-puréed, so I’m just going to cut everything else up really small. It’s a really quick recipe, too, no need to simmer for a long time, so you can make it, say, just before lunch, and then eat it right away.

First I got my spices ready: minced garlic, a little bit of cumin, some curry, and a bit of chipotle.

And the incidentals: lemon juice (don’t mock my plastic lemon, it’s the best I can do in Newfoundland), chicken broth, and coconut milk.

Then my vegetables: three carrots, an onion, and a red pepper.

The carrots I scrubbed and grated with the skins still on. That’s good vitamins for ya.

The red pepper and onion I diced up.

In a large saucepan, then, heat up a bit of olive oil on medium-high and toss in your onions. Cook those until they’re softened.

Then add in your cup o’spices, and stir that around for a minute or so.

Chuck in your grated carrot and diced pepper and stir that around as well, spritz it with lemon juice, then add in your coconut milk and stir until fully incorporated.

Add in the pumpkin finally (it was already cooked, so I didn’t want to overcook it), and pour in the chicken broth until you’ve reached a consistency that you like. Let that simmer for about 20 minutes and that’s it, you’re all done.

Season with salt and pepper, and a little more lemon if you like. At the eleventh hour I added a teaspoon ground cloves to boost the pumpkin.

This one came out a bit spicy, because I guess my curry was hotter than I had previously thought. I would recommend serving with a bit of yogurt or sour cream.

Roasted Tomato and Eggplant Soup

Here is yet another Martha Stewart soup and I think I like this the best of the three I’ve made recently. I made all three over one weekend, so I got a chance to taste them all at the same time. In this soup, the vegetables are roasted beforehand to bring out the flavour, and man oh man is it some flavour!

Preheat your oven to 425°F and position your oven racks so one is at the very top and one is at the very bottom.

On the bottom tray you’re going to have your eggplant and your chickpeas.

On the top tray will be your tomatoes, carrots, and garlic.

Peel about 12 cloves garlic and peel and chop up about 1/2lb carrots. This equaled 2 large carrots, for me.

Then you need to halve and core about 3lbs plum (Roma) tomatoes. The recipe says that this is about 12 tomatoes, but I ended up with 18 to make that weight. I found the tomato huller tool worked great for this. It took out the top stem bit, and then after I halved them it was great at scooping out the innards.

Toss the tomatoes with the garlic and tomatoes and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Garnish liberally with fresh ground pepper and pinches of sea salt. Spread them in a single layer (if you can) on a rimmed baking sheet with the cut sides of the tomatoes facing downwards.

Chop up 1 large eggplant (about 1 1/2lb) into 3/4″ pieces. Of course our grocery store never has the same kind of eggplant two days in a row, so I got 4 baby eggplants instead.

Rinse and drain 1 can of chickpeas. Toss those in with the eggplant, together with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 2 teaspoons curry powder.

Spread that out on a rimmed baking sheet as well.

Roast your vegetables, tomatoes on the top rack, eggplant on the bottom, for 45 minutes. Toss your vegetables halfway through.

Now your tomato skins will be all lovely and wrinkly.

You can just pick them off with a set of tongs. Be careful not to burn yourself.

Once your tomatoes are peeled, dump the contents of the tomato tray (carrots, garlic, skinless tomatoes and juices) into a large saucepan.

Purée the tomato mixture and then add 3-4 cups water.

Stir in the eggplant mixture and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

Serve garnished with fresh cilantro and crusty bread. You can also freeze this soup for later on down the road.

Vegetable Chowder

I’ve got another Martha Stewart soup for you, and this one is another crowd-pleaser that also goes in the freezer. How’s that for a hip rhyme? This chowder is so hearty that you might not even realize it’s vegetarian. It’s very similar to hodge podge, so feel free to accompany it with Nova Scotia beer bread while you’re at it.

Start with your chopping. Dice 2 red bell peppers and 1 large onion and grab 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme.

Chuck that into a large saucepan with 3 tablespoons butter and cook on medium-high until the vegetables are softened, about five minutes.

Vegetable Chowder — This picture is blurry because I was too excited about chowder to stay still.

While that’s on the go, peel and chop up about 4 medium baking potatoes. Those go in the pot, too, as well as 3 cups milk and 4-5 cups water.

Bring that all to a boil and then reduce it to a simmer for about 8 minutes, until the potatoes are almost tender.

Then you will want to chuck in 4 cups corn. I used the frozen stuff, but feel free to use fresh if it’s available. Simmer that for another 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon (to drain off excess liquid), remove 3 cups’ worth of soup solids.

Purée those. Pause to remove bits of puréed vegetables from your face and spectacles.

Chuck that goo back in the pot and add 6 cups green beans (again, I used frozen ones, but if you’re using fresh, cut them into 1″ pieces).

Simmer again until the beans are tender, about 5 minutes, and serve.

When you’re freezing stuff like this, it helps if you portion it out into the containers you’re using one ladleful at a time, distributed equally among the containers. This means that your containers will get equal amounts of veggies and broth, and you won’t be left with one container holding mostly vegetables and your last container holding mostly broth.

Butternut Bisque

I’m not the biggest soup fan (I prefer to drink my hot liquids), but I’m starting to acquire a taste for them. I’m especially fond of blended soups (because then it’s like a savoury pudding and I’m less likely to burn my tongue on the hot broth). This one comes from Martha Stewart and is a good match for a nice late-summer lunch or a good accompaniment to a fall comfort meal. It’s quick and easy, which I like in a soup. You can also freeze it and enjoy it at any time.

First, do your chopping. In this case, chop up 1 medium onion, 2 cloves garlic, and 1 large butternut squash. Peel the squash, cut it open and remove the seeds, and then hack it into smallish cubes.

Then, get your spices ready to go. You’ll need 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme, 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper. Also, not shown, is a pinch or two of coarse sea salt. Feel free to add more or less, according to your own taste. It’s only soup, after all.

Melt about 3 tablespoons butter into the bottom of a large saucepan. Add in the onion, garlic, and the spices and cook until the onion is tender and translucent, about 7 minutes.

Dump in the squash cubes, as well as about 15oz chicken broth and 1 cup half-and-half (you could use plain milk if you wanted to be healthier, but do you really want to do that?), and then about 3 cups water. Bring that whole thing to a boil and reduce it to a simmer for about 20 minutes. Your squash should be squishy at this point. You should be able to squish your squash with the back of a spoon.

Remove the pot from the heat and use your immersion blender to squish — er, purée — your squash and onions and all that stuff.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of cayenne, if desired.

Wingin’ it Wednesday: Comfort Ramen

The week before we left for Vancouver, the Pie, poor thing, got tonsillitis. After the fever went down and he’d rested a bit (read: slept all day and all night for two days), he still had a raging sore throat and came home from the doctor’s with an enormous jar of amoxycillin pills (sorry folks, when you’re grown up, they don’t give you the banana-flavoured liquid anymore).

To tempt his appetite (hard to be hungry when every swallow is like eating razors), I made him all sorts of his favourite soft foods, and this was one of them. Ramen is the sort of thing we eat when one of us is out for the evening and the other doesn’t want to be bothered with really cooking.

Of course, the ramen as it comes in packages with salty broth and dried noodles cooked in coconut or palm kernel oil is an unhealthy choice, and I haven’t yet learned to make it from scratch. So we try to add a few things to it in the hopes that it will be nutritionally redeemed — somewhat.

This means that there’s a bit of prep work involved in making what is normally an almost instant meal, but it’s totally worth it. Just remember that any vegetable or meat or anything you put in the ramen must be fully cooked or sliced super dooper thin, because it will only be in the boiling water for a very short time.

Accordingly, tonight I thinly sliced up a small onion, an Italian sausage, and about six mushrooms.

I’m trying to get more protein in small packages into the Pie’s stomach (when you’re a large man and you’re barely eating, you tend to get very tired), so I’m also adding two eggs to this mix. Beat those up and let them wait in a bowl until you’re ready. Other things that work well in ramen are things like thinly sliced roast beef, green onions, pre-cooked baby shrimp, chopped hard-boiled eggs, red peppers, alfalfa sprouts, spinach … anything small, pretty much, will work.

So the first thing I do when cooking packaged ramen is I measure the water into a pot and I add the powdered broth. I like to give it a chance to simmer a bit. I also add a healthy dollop of minced garlic.

When the water is boiling, I slide in the blocks of noodles and cook them for about a minute.

Then I pour in the vegetables and sausage and give them a stir (cooking chopsticks are very handy here, but a regular pasta spoon will work as well), and let that cook for another minute.

Then carefully pour your egg in, in a thin stream, so it cooks and forms strings on the surface of the soup. Give that a stir as well, and then you’re ready to serve.

Garnish with fresh herbs if you like, or chili flakes or whatever floats your boat. Smooth and simple!

Wingin’ It Wednesday: Red Soup, Green Soup

It’s been so busy here since Victoria Day that we haven’t had a chance to really do a lot of cooking for cooking’s sake. As a result, when I cleaned out our refrigerator this weekend in preparation for my parents’ arrival tomorrow (!), I found a sizable amount of very sad-looking produce. When I bought it, it looked sad, as most Newfoundland produce does, and two weeks in my crisper made it sadder still. Sad vegetables are just begging to be chucked in sauces, roasted, layered in a casserole, or made into soup. So I made soup.

I had red vegetables and green vegetables, and so I decided to make two different soups.

Each one started with onions and garlic, obviously.

The red soup was carrots, red peppers, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes.

And I scooped out the seeds of the tomatoes. Well, some of them. I got bored quickly.

Chop that up, chuck it in a pot with some broth, some chipotle seasoning, and chinese five spice, then blend it up and you’ve got a savoury soup with a bit of kick.

The green soup had fennel, celery, cucumbers, broccoli, leeks, and cabbage.

To even out the flavours I added dill, mustard powder, salt, and a dash of cumin. Blended up, it’s cool as the cucumbers inside it.

Then I stored them all in plastic containers and froze them for future enjoyment!

Spicy Spring Carrot Soup

Happy Easter!

It’s spring. Well, I shouldn’t say that. It’s spring in some parts of Canada. Here in Newfoundland we are still clearing up snow from our blizzard last week. In most parts of the country the markets are full to bursting with new spring vegetables: tender carrots, tiny potatoes, fresh peas. Here in St. John’s it’s time to clean out the dregs of our winter supply, and most produce around here is either flaccid or unripe. So we make soup.

This soup will be served as a starter at our Easter dinner on Sunday. If a soup could be considered to be light and fluffy, it would be this one. In fact (and I may have texted this to the Pie when I made it), I bet if you put the Easter Bunny in a blender and heated him up he would taste a lot like this soup: sweet, a little bit spicy, a hint of ginger, and chock-full of carrots.

This recipe is simple, and takes very little time.

I have here 2 bunches of “new” carrots (which in reality were bendy and dried-out), 4 Bosc pears (which I unsuccessfully tried to ripen for three days), a handful of mildly hot peppers, and 2 onions.

Chop those puppies up and toss them in a pot. Add a whole carton of chicken broth (about 4 cups, or a litre), and top the rest up with water.

Chuck in as well a few teaspoons of minced ginger (two will probably do it, as the minced stuff is wicked strong) and a healthy dollop of dijon mustard.

Add in a few tablespoons of sweet chili sauce as well.

Simmer that like crazy until all the vegetables are tender.

Remove it from the heat and use an immersion blender (or a regular blender) to turn it all into an orange pulp.

If you’ve picked a really hot pepper for your soup, you might want to serve it with a dollop of sour cream, or maybe some green onions for garnish. It’s also lovely just as it is. You can freeze it easily and bring it out whenever you need a taste of spring.

O Canada: Quebec Three Bean Soup with Bannock

When you type in searches for French-Canadian soups on the internet you get a plethora of results. “Plethora” is one of my favourite words. That and the Spanish “desafortunadamente,” which gets me every time.

Jess sent me this beauty, passed down from the Iroquois nation. I decided, however, that the ingredients were slightly too close to the hodgepodge I made earlier, and I want to give you guys some variety.

There are also a ton of recipes out there for a yellow split pea soup that is quintessentially French-Canadian. Turn the peas green and you get pea soup from the Maritimes. Thicken it up a little and steam it in a wee bag and you get pease pudding from the Atlantic.

I dislike all pea soups. Sorry. You won’t see one here.

If you happen to Google “French-Canadian bean soup” you get further interesting results. Apparently, Arthur Flegenheimer (who went by the name of Dutch Schultz), was a rum-runner and all-out nasty mobster during Prohibition in the US in the early part of the 20th century (as a bit of Canadiana for you, pretty much all the contraband booze smuggled onto American soil during that time came from Canada, which wasn’t really into teetotalling). Anyway, while using the men’s room at a New Jersey hotel, Schultz was repeatedly shot. It took him about two and a half hours to die of his wounds, and when the police arrived to arrest the dying man, one of the officers recorded his words. One sentence involved “French-Canadian bean soup.” Who knew? These words have been turned into all sorts of literature, most notably that of Hunter S. Thompson. Weird stuff.

But we’re making soup here, not discussing books.

I cobbled together a recipe from here, here, and also from Jess’s suggestion above.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

First, I got myself some local fall vegetables, some sweet potatoes and an acorn squash. Use whatever squash you like. Or none at all. Soups are pretty fluid, both conceptually and literally. Ha. Ha.

Slice up your squash and remove the seeds.

Slice up some sweet potato too.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil.

Roast them until they’re browning at the edges and fragrant, about 45 minutes. Remember to flip them every once in a while.

Meanwhile, drain and rinse 3 cans of beans. I used romano, white kidney, and chickpea. Chickpeas (garbanzo beans) seem to be consistent throughout these recipes, so I would make sure to use that one. But other people use cannelini beans and lima beans and whatever else they have on hand.

Dice up an onion. I have two halves of a red and a white so I’m going with that one.

Chuck the onion in a large saucepan with some minced garlic and some dried herbs, such as basil, and sauté until tender.

Dice up some carrots and celery and add those to the mix.

Plop in the beans as well.

Add 1 can diced tomatoes.

When your roasted vegetables are ready, peel off their skins, cube them up, and chuck them into the pot. Don’t fret too much about cutting up the squash super small — it will fall apart and smush itself as it simmers in the pot.

Cover with vegetable or chicken stock and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and allow to simmer for 30-40 minutes.

Now for the bannock. As a child, on every field trip we went that involved learning some aspect of Canadian history (the Goldrush, the Fur Trade, the Potlatch, the Salmon Fishery …) we ended up making bannock on green peeled sticks over a campfire. Every. Time.

As a result, bannock in my mind will forever taste of ashes and stick.

But you can make it in a skillet too. To avoid the taste of raw stick and ash.

Apparently, bannock is a Scottish flatbread, stolen from the Romans so very long ago. If you squint your eyes you can kind of see how the Latin panecium can be bastardized into the Gaelic bannock. Sure. But remember that so many different cultures make a form of flatbread. It’s some form of grain or bean flour plus water and heat and boom – flatbread. The First Nations people of Canada, in the course of their various interactions with European settlers (good or bad), adopted and adapted bannock such that it is also recognized by many to be part of a bunch of First Nation food traditions. Because it’s bread. Everyone eats bread.

Some recipes for bannock use dried milk powder and shortening to fluff up the bread, but I firmly believe that this should be a flatbread, made with the barest minimum of ingredients.

So. Dry ingredients. Mix together 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1 tablespoon sugar, and a pinch of salt.

Add enough water to form a dough and mix thoroughly. This will be dependent on the moisture content of the air and your flour. I added probably half a cup to this one. You want the dough to be slightly tacky.