Trying to fix asparagus soup

Tags

asparagus, postaday2016, soup

My husband was in the mood for asparagus soup, I had never made it before, but it was only recently that we had both tasted an excellent asparagus soup at, I forget which restaurant, apparently my husband hadn’t forgotten about the soup though where we ate it didn’t rate staying in the memory banks, lol. I searched for recipes and from what I read, it was very straightforward and simple; a pound of asparagus, onions, chicken stock and cream as an option. We had four bunches of asparagus, I chopped two onions, sautéed them, I peeled the asparagus to get rid of the tough skin, chopped them into one inch pieces and sautéed them with the onions and then simmered it with chicken stock. When the asparagus was tender, I used my stick mixer and puréed the soup, when I tasted the asparagus soup, I was expecting a fresh, spring taste, but it wasn’t there. I asked my husband to taste and asked him what he thought it needed. He immediately came up with an answer, broccoli and spinach,  both were available in our freezer. We have the Ninja blender that can pulverize anything and it rendered the frozen broccoli and spinach liquid in no time, he added the purée to the asparagus soup and though the soup didn’t taste like what we had at that restaurant, it tasted a whole lot better and looked more appetizing to boot.

Cooking as a team can be much more effective at times than cooking solo, I was lagging creatively in that moment and my husband jumped in to the soup’s rescue, lol.

The beauty of butternut squash

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butternut squash, postaday2015, soup

   
 
Making soup makes me very happy, happy in the kitchen, happy with the process and happy with the creativity involved and happy with the control I have over what I eat and what I feed the family. My epiphany with the necessity of soup making came when I read a soup can label, the amount of sodium in one serving is frightening, I don’t have any reason to fear heart disease, but even for someone who has a healthy heart, there is no way 400+ milligrams of sodium can be good for anyone.

When I found this butternut squash soup recipe in the Gardener’s Recipe Cookbook, I never looked back, it introduced me to the idea of roasting the vegetable before making it into soup, there was no going back from that revelation. The butternut squash split in half is the ideal recipient to house garlic cloves in order to roast them at the same time as the butternut squash, ingenius little trick. This recipe is very simple, I am pretty sure I have written about it before, but you can never have too much of a great recipe, one that has few ingredients; diced onions, chicken stock, roasted butternut squash, roasted garlic and sage and thyme, salt and pepper. The squash takes about an hour to roast, so after the onions have been sauteed and are transculent, all you need to do is scoop out the squash from its skin, squeeze out the roasted garlic into the soup and add the herbs and the stock, simmer for a bit and you are done. At this point, I turn off the heat and wait so it’s cool enough to puree, a tasty hearty soup perfect for the weather.

Autumn walk in the park

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pie, postaday2015, soup

   
    
    
    

These are the rest of the pictures from this weekend. The weather was absolutely glorious. If I could freeze time, I would do it right now because the temperatures are perfect, in the mid 60’s, the colors are brilliant and in terms of cooking and baking, there simply isn’t a better season for these two activities.  

I made my first batch of butternut squash soup, not only was it comforting and hearty, it was really tasty as well. I’m looking forward to more soups such as cream of broccoli, cream of watercress and broccoli and cauliflower soups for example.

Autumn is also pie season; apple tarts, pumpkin pies and tarte tatin with pears instead of apples. Pie is nice. I love pie.

Happy pie season everyone!

 

Making soup with my mother

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postaday2015, recipes, soup

   
   
Ever since I was a little girl, end of summer always meant la soupe de pistou, my mother’s signature soup, and it was worth the wait. You might be wondering what we were waiting for; it was the tomatoes, sweet ripe plum tomatoes are key to the soup’s success.

We worked together side by side, shelling cranberry beans, chopping onions, peeling cloves of garlic, rinsing bunches of basil, chopping carrots, zucchini, string beans and potato, peeling and seeding pounds of beautiful, deep red plum tomatoes. 

The second picture is the sauce on top of all of the cubed vegetables and tiny pasta; the sauce is the pistou part, the melange of basil, olive oil, garlic cloves, tomatoes and grated Swiss cheese. The other pictures are of the soup well mixed, incorporating the sauce and the vegetables together, making the soup the sublime mixture of sweet basil, pungent garlic and the nutty mellowness of the Swiss cheese with the hearty flavor of tomato in the background which allows the rest of the vegetables to shine as well.

I love this soup. I have tried in the past to replicate it but I don’t have the golden touch that my mother has, this time I wrote everything down so I will try once again. My mother is still the queen of la soupe de pistou!

Chicken noodle soup is truly global

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Asian, chicken soup, postaday2015, soup

There is something about the process of making chicken stock that makes me feel good abut the universe. I had made two roasted chickens and one of my least favorite things to do in the world is strip carcasses of meat. When I put the carcasses in the pot with onions studded with cloves, crushed cloves of garlic, carrots, celery, a bouquet garnie and covered that with cold water, three hours later I had a rich broth and detached meat, easy to pull apart.

This is what we call a Vietnamese soup, my Tantine Louise introduced us to it in France when she had her Vietnamese themed night, the soup as a starter with Vietnamese spring rolls to follow; that night was a culinary revelation. We were beyond impressed by how delicious everything was and we came back for more, year after year.

The stock that I made was the base for the chicken soup; all that I had to do was julienne carrots and zucchini, chop cilantro and scallions and add them with the shredded chicken to the stock, I beat three eggs and made an omelette which I sliced into thin strips and I opened a can of baby shrimp and these went into the pot as well. The last thing to do was to soften bean threads in hot water and then add them to the bowls after which I ladled the soup with all of the fixings over the noodles.

What makes this Asian is when you add soy sauce and fish sauce, you can also add additional herbs like mint, cilantro, more scallions and water chestnuts if you like; however you dress it up, this is a delicious chicken soup and it hits the spot when it is cold and blizzardly outside.

Snow and slush equals Watercress and potato soup

Tags

cold, postaday2015, soup, Watercress

We were supposed to get rain today and instead we got a tiny snow storm last night, leaving Blandford blanketed in white and covered in fog all day today. The perfect setting for some warm, nourishing soup.

I haven’t had watercress in quite a while, mostly because my Stop-n-Shop in Westfield rarely stocks that particular green. What prompted my purchase of watercress when my husband and I stopped at a WholeFoods on the way home a few days ago is that I read an interesting article regarding Kale and its status as a supposed “superfood”.

I learned that there are 14 other greens that rank higher in overall nutritional value than the ubiquitous Kale. The list included mustard greens, beet greens and swiss chard as examples, but to my utter surprise, watercress topped the list at number one. That prompted my desire to get some to make soup for us, because I always loved my mother’s watercress and potato soup. Watercress is less peppery than arugula and less tart than sorrel, it has its own bite and you can control its bite either by adding more potato or adding more watercress. This soup that I have just made; I toned down the strength of the watercress flavor because I wanted my children to love it, so it has a rich mellow green flavor that goes down very easily.

Next time I will be more adventurous and add more than only two bunches; I’ll probably add four bunches and keep the same amount of potato. It will be nice and bracing, but not too bracing and if it is, I’ll make sure to get some heavy cream so that the children can add some to mellow it out to their palates.

Weekend soup making

Tags

postaday2014, soup, vegetables

When we were at the supermarket yesterday, I noticed the leeks right away, I found them to be larger with a lot more white to cook with than what I have seen lately, which is why I snatched them up. My immediate thought was leek and potato soup. Soup, or I should be more specific most soups, are relatively easy to make; sauté an onion until translucent, add your vegetables, then your stock and herbs and simmer; puree or not, it is up to you. Personally I prefer my soups pureed because I love the thickness. Leeks are one of my favorite vegetables because they are very versatile and I love their subtle, elegant flavor. I think that it is precisely their subtle flavor that makes them so nice to incorporate into soups, stews, quiches and omelettes.

The kitchen smells very warm and inviting, having soup simmering on the stove makes one forget about the cold outside even though today is relatively warm for a day in December. I would not mind it at all if it remained like this until Spring. I would still make soup because soup feels wonderful once the thermostat dips below 50 and we are going to be south of 50 well into April. So I have a lot of soup to make in the coming months.

Experiment in the kitchen with a failsafe in place

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experiments, postaday2014, roast beef, soup

Years ago my husband found a shop called l’Occitan that also housed a Bistro on the second floor. L’Occitan has stores throughout the Northeast, but I have never seen one coupled with a Bistro except for the one my husband found on Prince Street in SoHo. I had the good fortune to have eaten there when it existed (it is closed now) and I had an excellent broccoli, cauliflower and cilantro soup. I decided to try making at home; I diced an onion, minced two cloves of garlic, cut up both the broccoli and cauliflower and sautéed everything in olive oil for several minutes before adding chicken stock and then leaving it to simmer for as long as it took until the broccoli and cauliflower were tender. I pureed it and then I added a half of a bunch of cilantro and pureed it again. I like it, but I am not sure that it is what I was remembering, I wish that I could get a time machine to go back a few years to grab another soup from their Bistro to refresh my culinary memories. I will have to tweak it because though it is good, it isn’t great. Perhaps I need to add more cauliflower or maybe the reverse, more broccoli, I don’t know. I will finish my pot of soup and think about it some more.

The failsafe is the roast beef and roasted baby potatoes that I made for my men so if nothing else we have meat and potatoes. I am not sure that my husband or my son will enjoy the soup so the meat and potatoes are guaranteed to keep them nourished. I am no longer the meat and potatoes fan that I once was, even if I get tired of eating soup, I would prefer it over eating beef nowadays. Soup is good food.

Autumn means soup, at least for me

Tags

butternut squash, fall, postaday2014, soup

Butternut squash soup is one of our favorites and I found the best recipe in an excellent recipe book dedicated to vegetable lovers called the Gardener’s Community Cookbook. The recipe is very simple and I think that I have written about it before; as you can see, it calls for roasted butternut squash, roasted garlic cloves,,diced onions, thyme, sage, both fresh and dried, with chicken stock of course to make it soupy. That is what makes it so easy, the oven does most of the heavy lifting, once the butternut squash is roasted after an hour at 375 degrees, you scoop it out and add it to the sautéed onions that are translucent and you squeeze the roasted garlic out of their skins and after, I let this simmer for a few minutes, stirring all the while, this is when I add the chicken stock and the dried thyme and sage. After that I leave my soup alone to simmer and after a half hour I add the fresh herbs.

One of the best things about making soup at home is how wonderful the house smells while you wait for the soup to fully develop its flavors. I seriously recommend the Gardener’s Community Cookbook to anyone who likes vegetables and is sometimes at a loss as to how to make them in new ways. I love vegetables, but I need help when it comes to making them sometimes, because I have a habit of falling into ruts and while that doesn’t bother me at all, it does get boring for the rest of my family.

Our son just got back from his band’s tour and the first thing that he asked for is a bowl of whatever smells so delicious. So I am finishing this post so that I can ladle up a nice hot bowl of roasted butternut squash soup for my son.

Daily prompt: Odd Trio

Tags

cats, postaday2014, soup, towel

Today, you can write about whatever you what — but your post must include, in whatever role you see fit, a cat, a bowl of soup, and a beach towel.

This is a true story, a memory if you will, and it involves the odd trio. My mother-in-law, we called her Nonnie, had a cat named Johnny and her mother, Grammy, lived with her. They made a nice trio, slightly eccentric and adorable at the same time. Grammy lived by her stomach and it was a delight to watch her eat, she savored every bite at every meal, no matter what she was eating. One day, I was there, I don’t remember why, they lived five houses down so it wasn’t a special trip or anything like that. It was meal time, it could have been 11:00, 12:00 or 1:00, the time didn’t matter, meal time was determined by Grammy’s stomach. When I walked into the house, Grammy was sitting at the table with her napkin tucked into her blouse and she was spooning her chicken noodle soup into her mouth with one hand, while she was holding a piece of buttered white bread in her other. She looked very content concentrating on her spoon one minute and then her bite of buttered bread the other. In the background, I saw Johnny’s crate open waiting near the door, I assumed that it meant that Johnny had an appointment with Hazel our small town veterinarian right down the road and when I saw Nonnie come out of the bathroom with a beach towel in her hands. The bathroom was on the first floor right near the kitchen and the side door so she kept all of the beach towels in there to make it easier to hand out to the kids when they used to go and play in the little kiddie pool she had for them years back. But this time there weren’t any kids seeking a beach towel, the beach towel was for Johnny. He needed to be put into his crate for the ride down to Hazel’s and Nonnie wasn’t about to risk her skin with his claws. I wasn’t about to become involved in her negotiations with Johnny, for one, I am deeply allergic to Johnny and number two, Johnny and I had an uneasy truce, accidentally some time ago as I was opening Nonnie’s screen door, a heavy one at that, and a gust of wind slammed it and unfortunately Johnny was coming in right at that moment and his tail got broken, he naturally associated his broken tail with me, so there it was, I stayed away from Johnny out of his respect for his sensibilities.

So Nonnie came in from behind Johnny and swooped him up into the beach towel and eased him into the crate. He wasn’t very happy about being in the crate, but there was nothing that he could do about it, he was at this point familiar with the drill. Nonnie didn’t have to worry about getting him back into the crate at the vet’s because the technician’s were very good with Johnny and knew how to get him back into the crate safe and sound.

This memory isn’t just the one, it is actually an accumulation of several similar memories rolled up into one. Nonnie used that beach towel not only on Johnny, but also on her dog Zingo when he would get raw hide bones stuck in his throat and when she would enlist my friend Gale to click our ferret’s nails when she would babysit our ferret Nippy way back when. So this prompt wasn’t so far off the wall; beach towels, cat and a bowl of soup were not a strange occurrence in my life.