Parmentier

This is the last soup for a while because after this I completely fell off the wagon.
Basically it's one half of some kind of a double ying yang soup from this book,
and it's meant to look like this.
I only made the leek part, so mine was never going to look anything like this. It tastes ok. Really, only ok.
When I went to hear Ms. Marmitelover do a little talk for her book last year, one of the things she said is that she doesn't trust the likes of Nigella for providing recipes because as a columnist and cook book author only she has never had to prove herself by catering on a large scale so the likelihood of her dishes failing is higher. Obviously she was speaking about this in context to her own home restaurant enterprise, but still, I cannot disagree more. Restaurants that produce cookbooks have to adapt the recipes to the home cook to allow for available equipment, ingredients, which alters the result. Which is why restaurant cookbooks are always difficult to cook from. It's a showcase designed to entice you to visit the place, so what do they care if it takes you 2 hours at home to make the soup, you should have booked a table instead! Meh

Cream of Broccoli Soup

Today's recipe is inspired by having to sit next to a junked out homeless girl on the tube today. Most people's experiences of the homeless are very negative, like being stuck in a confined space next to someone who hasn't washed and keeps twitching and threatening to throw up on you. Gross, but there are charities out there to help people like this by raising awareness and providing a safe supporting environment. This book is called More Than A Meal because homeless people need more than a good meal, they need a bath too they also need compassion and understanding. Admittedly the book is a little dated, we have Hockney's 'Fish', Tony Blair, Des Lynam and and Jane Asher staring morosely at you from the cover. Does that make you hungry?
The very first recipe in the book is Jimmy Carter's (yes the president!)Cream of Broccoli soup. How wonderful and random is that? I had to Google him to see if he's still alive, he is, but he's already made his funeral plans!
Anyway, the soup is pretty straighforward and basic, however I still managed to forget to put the potato in. Just before serving you mix in the lemon juice and add in a little creme fraiche.
Choice of bowl here is entirely coincidental! Overall it's really boring, but innoffensive. I may have preferred it without the lemon, but I don't really care that much.

Turkish Lentil Soup

I bought this little spiral bound book in SCP of all places. My old office was on the same street as the Old Street branch and sometimes at lunchtime I would go in there to browse the prices home wares and occasionally make a small purchase, usually gifts for other people (when my goddaugher was born I very briefly flirted with the idea of getting her a 'designer' baby' rattle - no wonder I can only afford to eat soup for dinner now). Anyway, this book was produced by a Primary school in the area, and a few of the shops near by were selling them. I'm not sure exactly what they were raising money for, but they got a lot of support from local restaurants and a couple of celebrities too. The recipe I'm using is by a parent of one of the kids though.
The recipe is painfully scant on the directions, instead of measurements everything is doled out in 'big spoons', and stock is 'meat water'. I'm using some of my precious veal meat water (smuggled from France but I'm sure can find it on the internet). There are no cooking times and no pictures, but what you do is make a roux and fry with onions until everything is a little brown and crispy, mix in the stock and cooked lentils and thicken with milk and egg yolk.
I was really apprehensive about tasting this, hot egg sauces creep me out a little bit and the colour is distinctly 'mental institution beige'. But the taste is amazing. Rich and meaty, sweet from the onions and earthy from the lentils, I would have loved to add a bay leaf though.

Soupe a la Menthe Fraiche

Day 5 of the soup diet.
I'm beginning to feel a lot better about sacrificing my evening meal to mostly vegetarian broths (maybe if that was entirely true I wouldn't refer to it as sacrifice?). When I was younger we used to have soups a lot, we didn't have that much money and my mother certainly struggled to give us anything at all sometimes. When we moved to London and food was everywhere I vowed never to eat soup again, pathetic peasant food that it was, I'd really moved up in the world. Now that I have more perspective I feel extremely guilty for being such a brat, if there is any justice in the world my children will probably do this to me.
I feel like I have to meet the Aline Benayoun more than half way in seriously calling this 'Mint Soup'. It's more of a vegetable stew, with mint. But let me tell you, after a bowl of turnip water this was some kind of a feast. Benayoun could have called this a mint souffle and I would still be happy. This is hearty, and very carb rich, but the lemon and herbs manage to lift any heaviness and make the soup taste fresh and light. The flavours are wonderful; rich, Mediterranean but with a herby African twist.

Cream of Turnip Soup

I'm getting quite a collection of artist inspired cookery books (this is the Holy Grail that I am seriously saving up for), some make the tenuous links between a painting and a dish, some are charity compilations of recipes with the off one by a painter, and a very few are recipes of dishes they actually ate.
Monet's Cookery Notebooks was complied using Monet's own diary notes recipes, somewhat of a contrast to the starving artist cliche. The first half of the book is an account of his life in the French countryside with photos of his house (if you want to see pictures of the kitchen they can be found on Ms Marmitelover's blog), and the second half contains the recipes.
Look at this assembly of ingredients. The most vital component, the water, is not pictured. A more appropriate title for this dish might be Hot Turnip Water, that's how thin the ultimate soup is. I deliberately, somewhat unfairly, took an unflattering photo of my bowl because I was so angry at having only this for dinner.
You boil the turnips in a lot of water with some butter and blend. Add salt and pepper, more butter, or cream which I didn't have, and presumably enjoy. 'Evening meals at Monet's house always started with a soup' the book tells us, and as a first course this would be lovely. Look at this, I'm not even going to pretend with some clever styling trick that this is anything but a bland soup. As it is, there is too much butter in this for me to seriously consider it a diet food, but not enough flavour for it to be in any degree indulgent. Turnips are actually a guilty pleasure of mine, part of the cabbage family they have that nice tangy crispness, but once cooked their muddy flavour comes through which is why it's a risk to put them at the forefront of a dish like this. It's not bad, but I probably wouldn't make it again.

Pumpkin Soup with Spicy Seeds

I'm on the fence about non native authors of books of recipes of foreign foods. On one hand I appreciate that they edit their material with the best intentions to provide me with something that is going to suit my palate and be possible to make up with the available ingredients. On the other hand I want authenticity. However, I'm realistic enough to accept that the flavour of food you've eaten on holiday is affected by the the sun, the sea breeze, the personality of the seasoned old man in the kitchen, and a million other things. It's impossible to recreate.

David Leite is a second generation Portuguese immigrant from America who spent a few months travelling across the old country collecting the recipes for this book. It's mainly restaurant dishes, which may somewhat justify the myriad of processes required to produce a simple pumpkin soup. Don't do what I did and try to make this for dinner after work, it takes about 2 hours from start to finish.

You put the pumpkin, sage and onion in the oven and while they roast you make the spicy seeds to garnish the end product. I didn't have the energy to mess about with the seeds from the actual squash I was using so used sunflower seeds for this step. When the vegetables are cooked you combine with the stock and blend. Deadbeat me would start eating at this point, but the recipe insists that you absolutely must put the mixture through a fine sieve so I felt compelled to. The whole 20 minutes that this took I was thinking that this is something I would do for a baby, grownups with proper teeth shouldn't have their food pureed to this extent. And don't even get me started on how much washing up this generates.

You return the soup to the pan, dilute a little with water and serve. By this point you will be so hungry that you might not want to take the time to savour the delicate interplay of flavours, but take my word for it, this is a very good soup. It's velvety and tastes creamy despite having no dairy. There is a slight hint of sage, the nicest use of that herb I've experienced in the last month, no dusty, heavy Christmassy overkill here. And the cayenne heavy seeds are amazeballs.

Spinach Noodle Soup

Harumi Kuriahara is a superstar in Japan, similar to Delia Smith here. Like Delia, her recipes are not very complicated and surprisingly mostly made up of ingredients it would be easy to find anywhere (but I am in London).
I've wanted this book for a while and when I saw it in Oxfam at the quarter of the price I finally got to bring it home. This is how I get most of my books, just go to a charity shop in a fancy neighbourhood and you'll get all the good recipe books by famous chefs.
Day two of the soup diet:
It's actually fairly difficult to find nice, seasonal, vegetarian soup recipes in books because most authors want to do something different and delicious to distinguish their recipe and that usually means the addition of chicken or bacon. But Harumi has one, so here we go (chicken stock can be substituted for veg, obviously)
Unlike a Western method for making soup all of the components are cooked separately and then combined in the stock at the last minute. I would never usually do this, firstly because it's a pain to blanch, drain and rinse things separately and also because I would have assumed that cooking things together would enrich the flavour. But this actually makes a lot of sense, the noodles don't make the soup murky with their starch and the spinach doesn't make broth green. What you get is a relatively clear soup with pretty circles of sesame oil on the surface, the taste is very clean and fresh. Its also worth getting a dining room chair to stand on to get the white pepper off the high shelf instead of using every day black, you can taste the difference.

Gingerbread House

Gale force winds accross the UK are causing devastation accross communities.

Sopa de Aguacate - Avocado Soup

So this is my diet, mine and the boyfriend's diet - every day I go to work, fend for myself for breakfast and lunch, the boyfriend studies at home, does whatever mystery things that men do when they're on their own (PS3? I know it's PS3), and then in the evening we come together and have soup for dinner. Austerity soup.
Day one:
The first one is probably the simplest 'recipe' I've ever seen. These are the ingredients.
Before I get any haters hating, I fully agree that stock cubes are inferior to stock, I don't care. I came home at 22:00 today, and at 22:05 this soup was ready. I'm not exaggerating, and I don't want to 'give the secret away' or anything but all you do is blend the avocadoes with stock and heat.
I'm servicng these with some home made tortilla chips (deep fry cut up tortilla wraps). This soup is very virtuous but rich at the same time. The avocado is creamy and fresh and the soup is surprisingly filling and much better than the sum of it's parts (obviously it tastes like whatever your stock tastes like, I'm going to try a few different powdered ones to find the most pleasant). Hot avocado is a new one on me though.

Bigoli All'Anatra

This book was another gift. I swear I must be the easiest person to buy for, I'd make the perfect wife for some curmudgeonly old misogynist. My dad once gave my mum a cheese grater for Christmas, where are all the real men?
Anyway, The Geometry of Pasta appeals to me as a cook and as a comic book fan. The graphic cross sections of pasta shapes are beautiful and fascinating, pasta is such a ubiquitous food that it's easy to overlook it's functionality. Incidentally, another recent pasta book, Pasta by Design reduces pasta to three basic origins of shape, cylinder, sphere and ribbon, each one is intended for a different kind of sauce. It's written by an architect and he maps the shapes using imaging software to produce the equation for the form, there is an interview with he author in New Scientist which can be read here, or I should say must be read, and then do this quiz!!!! (the maths nerd is the painfully unbearable subset of loser foodie nerd, I can't even...).
Anyway, the author is a big pasta fan and says he would like to see a book that deals with the seasoning as rigorously as he deals with shape, The Geometry of Pasta might be it.
I have a big crush on this book, Jacob Kenedy's tone is so warm and welcoming that I would probably read it for fun, he goes beyond the recipe and history and you can tell he loves his subject.
The recipe gives instructions for extruding the bigoli using a meat grinder, I loved that idea and just had to try it. I used sifted wholemeal flour for the dough - the grainy rough texture is meant to be especially good for picking up the rich duck sauce we're making.
For the sauce you boil an entire duck (I used 4 legs instead), skim the resultant stock, use the fat to cook off the vegetables for the sauce, shred the meat, use half of the stock in the sauce and the other half to cook the pasta in (you're also supposed to add the liver, heart and kidneys to the sauce but I didn't have them). I love the economy and self sufficiency of that, don't you?
Well all that self sufficiency results in the richest meal I've had in a while. Even in the depths of winter this seems like a bit too much. Kenedy makes a point of mentioning that this is a rough peasant meal. It's absolutely delicious, and after a long day in the fields it would be amazing, but I don't think I would ever be able to justify this again. Save me, diet!
If you love pasta but don't love the calories, put it near your face instead of in your face.

Elopitta - Olive Bread

This is another bit of my Christmas haul. A lot of vegetarian books have come out lately, and I'd really like to expand my repertoire. I know that you don't make friends with salad, but I don't need any more friends, I have the perfect amount.
Another thing I got for Christmas is a Panasonic bread maker. I've made a couple of successful loaves in the past but making bread is a really stressful experience for me. Working out how dry yeast works is like some kind of voodoo magic trick. The smartest thing for me to do might be to embrace technology.
You mix up the dough, let it rise, mix in the olives and herbs, rise again, shape, rise one more time and bake.
The result is an absolutely amazing, chewy, soft bread.
I was really down in the dumps after my Nordic Bakery semi failures, so this really cheered me up. Yes, bread makes me feel good now apparently, no wonder I need to go on a diet.

Parsnip and Sesame Flatbreads and Classic Cinnamon Buns

I'm going on a totally-serious-this-time-not-even-allowed-to-have-gin diet this year, as in, the most boring New Year's resolution ever. So really want to get some of the more delicious looking projects out of the way.
One of the books I got for Christmas was The Nordic Bakery. I don't remember why I put this on my Amazon wishlist, I actually went to this place once, but all we had was coffee. I was shopping with a girl from work and she wasn't hungry so I didn't try any of the cakes. Here's a study that proves that what a woman eats is influenced by what other women around her are eating (men don't have as much impact). I always wanted to come back but I forgot what street it was on.
Anyway, we had some parsnips left over from Christmas so I made parsnip and sesame flatbreads. Not the most indulgent thing, but we had all the ingredients. You grate and boil the parsnip, mix into a dough and bake.
I baked these for about 20 minutes longer than the book said but the still had a raw taste and texture. The moisture in the parsnip makes them cook slowly and the final product is just not my thing. Parsnip and sesame is actually a nice combination, but I wouldn't make these again.
The next day I tried the classic cinnamon bins from the cover. The image is actually a little deceptive, it's so beautifully layered that I initially assumed this was like a puff pastry Danish kind of thing, but it's more like a bread roll with some veins of sugar cinnamon. I was a little underwhelmed, but I think these are best the next day, slices in half, toasted, with a little brie. The most interesting thing about these is the cardamon mixed into the dough, but overall I'm not sure they're worth the calories.

Christmas 2011

Happy New Year!
Christmas was stressful this year. In the last week before the break I got some kind of super flu so on the morning of the 25th I woke up with a fever and hallucinated my way through 8 hours of cooking. This (I assume everyone knows Bidstrup)
The run up to the big day almost killed me, going to work, running around buying presents and getting up at 5am to go to Billingsgate Fish Market was tough, but I don't have kids or any real responsibilities so this was all self inflicted.
Since we had to have seafood because of my family's dietary restrictions, I chose lobsters. It was kind of big deal as it's the boyfriend's and mine first year in our new house and it all of our immediate family would be joining us, so what's fancier than that? I got up early like a good girl on Christmas Eve and made the grueling journey to Canary Wharf to pick up 4, which were are very economical £10 each and ended up feeding all 7 of us.
I'd never actually had lobster before, let alone killed one! Far from the docile, obliging creatures I assumed them to be they were actually pretty feisty. I thought the fish guy would have a box or something for me to transport them in, but instead he put all four in a single plastic bag and told me they would be fine. It was a bit too much fun for me at 7am to return home on the tube with a smelly, writhing bag in my hands, but more on that later.
Because I hate myself (or because everyone else had to fast before going to church on Christmas morning), I decided to make some canapes for people to munch on while I made dinner.
Left to right these are:
-Octopus on butter bean puree, the recipe was from the Marie Claire Food and Drink book, easily my favorite party book
-Salmon roe on Borodinky bread, this is a very Russian thing. The recipe for the bread is here, I can't stop making it, I'll write it up in the next few weeks
-Smoked eel on this wholemeal sourdough, with some horseradish my dad made
-Little choux buns with prawns (Marie Claire)
-Artichoke pate (Marie Claire again)

It's a little difficult to recall exactly what was going though my mind when it was time to dispatch the lobsters but here is my version of events.
I used a recipe from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for steaming the lobsters, she suggests slicing them open before cooking as humane, or alternatively freezing for an hour. I did neither and opted to just put them in the pots as quickly as possible, close the lid and ask God for forgiveness. This was predictably disastrous. Instead of gamely tucking in his legs and making an effort to fit into the simmering liquid the first one I picked up actually struggled for his life. I was holding him with one hand and the heavy iron lid with the other, the battle was not evenly matched. 'SKREEEEEE!!!!' went the lobster as I finally managed to stuff him into his watery grave and collapsed on the floor. My brother had to do the other 3. Next year, Tofurky. That's a joke, it's difficult to argue with how delicious they were.
I also made Brussels Sprout with Chesnuts (a Nigella recipe, way too sweet), sauerkraut, carrot salad and road potatoes (Jamie Oliver's method, very good). An lots of mulled wine. Did you know that the alcohol in mulled wine doesn't burn off? I sure as shit didn't!
Oh and we had pudding, the boyfriend's mum photographed.