Last and first soup

Finally another post with one of the last things I cooked in 2008. With many changes in my life, such as a new family to get to know, and moving into a new place, it's pretty hard to find time to fiddle with photos and to blog.

Here comes the first soup I cooked in my new kitchen, it's Jerusalem artichoke according to my basic soup recipe and we had it with backerbsen, something from long ago, when we went skiing in Germany, and which we really loved as kids.

It was eaten in good company ;-)

Rice and parsley soup

Yesterday I prepared a light soup, ideal for letting your stomach recover after your boss brought buckets of Häagen Dasz to the office, to celebrate that he's going on holiday.
The recipe, minestra di riso e prezzemolo, comes from Emanuela Stucchi's 'Italian vegetarian cooking'.

Serves 4

2 potatoes, peeled and cut in big pieces
2 tbsp olive oil
1l vegetable stock
210 gr rice
2 tbsp fresh parsley leaves, chopped
15 g butter

Add potatoes, olive oil and some salt and pepper to the vegetable stock. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the potatoes simmer until cooked. Remove them from the stock, mash them and add the mash to the stock again.
Bring to the boil, add rice and simmer on low heat until the rice is cooked.
Remove from the heat. Add parsley, butter and more salt and pepper if necessary.

Note: I added first some carrots and then courgettes to the rice and left out the butter this time.
Last year I prepared the soup without vegetables.

Simple broccoli and courgette soup

Sometimes a simple soup turns out really delicious and it's worthy of taking along when invited for gnocchi.


I used my basic soup recipe again, with a sprig of broccoli, 1 courgette and 1 leek, and also 1 onion, 2 garlic cloves, a bay leaf and dried basil. At the last minute I decided not to mix the soup.

One of those Sundays

You start with old books

- the monks made jokes, once in a while, while copying the manuscripts.


Then you have lunch, with a quickly whipped-up soup - pumpkin and parsnip, with a little onion and leek, according to my basic soup recipe - and bubbles, provided by our generous host,

and for dessert: castagnaccio, photographed in a Zen setting.

After a meal like this, we were ready for more culture and went for a walk to discover interbellum architecture in Dilbeek.

And after that, we were ready for a drink

at a favourite spot, where Italian was spoken - appropriately, as Italian travel plans were made, while sipping our negroni's -

and a Chinese meal at Xu Ji, 5 rue des Poissonniers in Brussels, where we got authentic Chinese food (as far as we are able to judge) and terrific wonton soup.


If you ever try this place, here's a tip: go for the 'petits plats' (small dishes) on the menu, hidden a few pages behind the average and more touristy stuff.

Pea soup

Felt like making pea soup. A quick search didn't result in an appealing recipe, so I just improvised.

1 onion
2 leeks
2-3 cups of peas (deep frozen)
3 slices of bacon, cut in big pieces
thyme
bay leaves
pepper & salt
a little butter

Chop onions and leeks and fry them with thyme and bay leaves for a few min in butter on medium heat. Add boiling water, peas, and bacon and season liberally with pepper & salt (depending on how salty the bacon is). Bring to the boil, cover and turn down the heat. Let it simmer for around 10 min. I didn't bother mixing it with the hand mixer.

Today I was offered a piece of home-made castagnaccio, prepared with home-made chestnut flour straight from Tuscany and walnuts instead of pine nuts. The flour is really sweet so this doesn't need any sugar at all (aye labelga ;-)

Chestnuts again

Tonight I prepared my first chestnuts of the season, hooray!
A simple soup to start with, using a previous recipe, with slightly different ingredients.

I used patisson from my mother's garden and also shallot and leek.

Pumpkin and chickpea soup

Yes! Today I prepared my first pumpkin of the season. It comes from my friends' garden.
I'm feeling a bit ill so I made a spicy soup to fight my cold.


1-2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 small onions, peeled and chopped
1 small dried chilli pepper (peperoncino), chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1/2 tsp dried coriander seeds, crushed
6 cm ginger, peeled and cut in 3 big pieces
1 small pumpkin
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
400 g chick peas, cooked and drained (this is the weight of cooked and drained chick peas)
salt


Fry onion and chilli in oil for a few min on low heat, add ginger and coriander seeds and fry for a few more min. Raise the heat a little, add pumpkin, cover the pan and fry for a few more min. Then add potato and chick peas, fry for a few min and add a little water if necessary to avoid burning. Add more boiling water, bring to the boil, add plenty of salt, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30 min. Remove the pieces of ginger and serve, e.g. with fresh coriander leaves.

Notes:
You might add leek.
You can also chop the ginger finely or grate it and leave it in the soup.
The taste of the coriander seeds was a bit weak, so you could probably add a whole teaspoon of them.
On the whole the soup received acclaim, from grumpy old men!

Red beetroot soup

When I got home, I decided to start cooking the red beetroots from my friends' vegetable garden, right away. I still had some leftover vegetables so I combined everything in a soup.


3 small onions, peeled and chopped
6 small carrots, peeled and chopped
1 red pepper, washed and chopped
1 courgette, washed and chopped
3 red beetroots, peeled and chopped
a bit of celery, washed and chopped
chopped parsley
olive oil
2 cloves
2-3 bay leaves
vegetable stock

Fry onions and celery stalks for a few min in olive oil on low heat.
Add red beetroots, carrots and pepper, raise the heat a little and fry for some more min.
Add courgette and celery leaves and fry for some more min.
Add boiling water, lots of salt, pepper, cloves, bay leaves and vegetable stock.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30-45 min until the vegetables are cooked.
Serve with chopped parsley.

Note
The original recipe (from the cook of Lukemieke, a vegetarian restaurant which existed in Leuven when I was studying there) uses these vegetables: 300 g red beetroot, 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1/2 white or green cabbage and 2 leeks. It also suggests serving the soup with sourcream. I added a tbsp of extra virgin olive oil.
After tasting the soup I decided that in future I would leave out the red pepper (too tangy) and courgette (got too soft) and add leek and potato in stead.

Pesto

My mother brought me lots of stuff from her garden: apples, pears (a very nice variety called 'Jefke'), grapes, patissons (a type of white pumpkin), ...

and basil plants. So I decided to try to make pesto according to my mother's Italian recipe.

a handful of fresh basil leaves
2-3 tbsp pine nuts
1 garlic clove
salt
olive oil (use a very nice quality)
grated parmesan cheese


Wash basil leaves and dry them with kitchen roll.
Put them together with pine nuts and a little olive oil and use a handmixer or other device to blend this.
I crushed the garlic separately and added it at the end.
Add salt and some more olive oil. Taste the mixture and add more of any ingredient if necessary.
I used more basil leaves and only 1/2 garlic clove.
I didn't mix the grated cheese into the pesto but served it separately.


In stead of pasta I made a soup to go with the pesto. It was a basic vegetable soup with leek, celery, courgette, onion and potato. I made it according to my basic soup recipe, but I didn't blend it.

I added pesto and parmesan to the soup

and mixed it in.

Delicious!

Ricotta and spinach soup - Zuppa di ricotta e spinaci

Yesterday I went to visit my friends who have a holiday home in the countryside. It's a small wooden house, like a cabin, with a fireplace and it's surrounded by ponds and trees and lots of beautiful wildflowers. It's very idyllic, you have the feeling that you're completely away from everything and it's hard to imagine that you can find places like this still in Flanders.

There's a vegetable garden and yesterday we had artichokes from the garden - delicious.

My friends brought ricotta and 'warmoes', an oldfashioned vegetable similar to spinach but not as soft. I offered to make a soup with this.

Serves 6

300 g ricotta
600 g spinach, torn in pieces
1 big onion, peeled and chopped
4 tomatoes, peeled and chopped
vegetable stock
ground pecorino or parmesan
olive oil

Fry the onion on low heat for a few min until golden. Add ricotta and fry it while stirring for 15 min, until it also gets coloured.
Add pepper and salt, tomatoes and spinach. Add 1,5 l boiling water with a bit of vegetable stock.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 15 min.
Serve very hot with extra olive oil and ground cheese.

Note: I tend to add a small dried red pepper (peperoncino) to spice it up a little.
You can use the spinach stalks; I cut them off but I add them with the torn leaves.

This is the soup with the view:

We also had some home made elderflower juice, made from the flowers in the garden. I photographed it in a small herb patch:

and on a seat made from a tree that was cut off.

Truly nice getting away like this for a city gal like me!

Minestrone

I am definitely a big soup fan. I like the simple soups that you prepare in no time but also the ones that simmer for hours and can be served as a main course. My mother used to make a traditional type of minestrone with white beans and tomatoes and bacon, which I might post one day. But some time ago I made a different type, based on a recipe from Emmanuela Stucchi's 'Italian vegetarian cooking'. I changed the ingredients a bit and of course I added Jerusalem artichoke. I hadn't gotten round to posting this yet so here it comes. I didn't note the quantities so just use your own judgment.


white cabbage, washed and sliced thinly
leeks, cleaned and chopped
Jerusalem artichokes, peeled and chopped
potatoes, peeled and chopped
celery, cleaned and chopped
peas (I used frozen organic ones)
red kidney beans, soaked overnight

The recipe is very simple: put the beans in a big pot with a lot of water, bring to the boil and let it boil vigorously for 10 min without covering the pot (to remove poisonous traces from the beans). Add the vegetables and salt, bring to the boil again, then lower the heat, cover the pot and let the soup simmer for 1,5 - 2 hours.
Serve with a toast rubbed with garlic, which you put in the plate before adding the soup, and with olive oil and a little parmezan if you like.

Note: the original recipe was with potatoes, peas, cabbage, runner beans, courgettes, cannellini beans and some pasta. It said to serve the soup with pesto.

Parsnip and sweet potato soup and other soups

I love soup and I was inspired by this combination of vegetables in labelga's post on March 6.
My basic method for soup is: fry chopped vegetables for a few min in oil or butter, add boiling water, bring to the boil. Then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for about 10 min. Not longer, unless the vegetables are not cooked yet. Then mix it with a hand mixer.
This is the method of my mother's housekeeper. She used butter. I usually use olive oil - or sunflower oil when I use Asian spices - but butter tastes nice once in a while. I remember her endives (witloof) soup, delicious! The trick in this recipe is not to boil the soup for very long, so the vegetables keep their flavour.
When my vegetables are about to go off, I often throw them into a soup.

Sweet potato and parsnip soup



1 small onion
2 medium parsnips, peeled and diced
1 big sweet potato, peeled and diced
some leftover lettuce
1 dried small chilli pepper, chopped finely
1/2 tsp ground cumin
vegetable stock
1 tsp butter

Heat the butter and fry the onion and chilli pepper in it on low to medium heat. After 1-2 min add parsnips and sweet potato and cumin. After a few more min add the lettuce and let this shrink a bit. Then add boiling water, stock and salt. Bring to the boil then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for about 10 min. Mix it with a hand mixer.

I served the soup with sour cream and chopped parsley.

Pumpkin, endives and red pepper soup

This was a combination I once made at a friend's with her leftover vegetables. It turned out really well.
I used these ingredients:

1 small pumpkin, peeled and chopped
2 endives, washed and chopped
1/2 red pepper, chopped
2 onions, peeled and chopped
2 small potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 tsp sugar
2 bay leaves
"herbes de Provence"
olive oil
vegetable stock
pepper & salt

Broccoli and fennel soup

This was another successful combination.

1 onion
1 sprig of broccoli
1 fennel
olive oil
fennel seeds

Chestnut soup and Danish apple dessert

Today I had lots of time to cook, hooray! So I invented a soup with the last of my chestnuts.


Chestnut soup

Serves 2-3

150 g chestnuts
1 leek, chopped
1 sprig of white celery, chopped
1 small potato, chopped
1 shallot, chopped
1/2 tsp. vegetable stock
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 bay leaf
thyme

Peel the chestnuts (see Chestnut and pumpkin pie) and cut them in 4.
Fry the shallot in olive oil for a few min. Add leek, celery, bay leaf and thyme, and fry for a few more min. Then add potato and chestnuts and fry for a few more min.
Add boiling water, vegetable stock, salt and a lot of pepper.
Let the soup boil, then let it simmer on low heat for 15-45 min. until the chestnuts are soft.
The taste is just divine!

For dessert I finished off the apples from my mother's garden with a recipe from Claudia Roden's 'The book of Jewish food'.


Danish apple dessert

4 apples
175 g sugar
3 tbsp. flour
3 eggs
150g ground almonds
1 tsp. cinnamon

Peel the apples and cut them in pieces. Cook them with a few tbsp. water until they are soft. Mash them with a wooden spoon.
Add 75 g sugar and flour and 2 eggs and cinnamon. Mix this well.
Grease a tin and pour in the apple mixture.
Mix almonds, 100g sugar and 1 egg into a paste.
Rub a little oil (e.g. sunflower) on your hands to avoid that the paste will stick.
Take pieces of the paste and press them flat between your hands.
Cover the apples with these pieces.
Bake in the oven at 180° C for 25 min. until the paste is brown.
You can eat this hot or cold.

Jerusalem artichoke soup

In Süd-Tirol I had lots of Jerusalem artichoke, once as a soup and then as puree. Today I saw them at the grocer's and they were fairly cheap, so maybe it's the season now.
In French they are called topinambour, in Flemish aardpeer (= earth-pear).
The taste is delicious, a bit like artichoke. I improvised this soup.


1 kg Jerusalem artichoke, peeled and chopped
1 leek, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 turnip, peeled and chopped
olive oil
2 garlic cloves, chopped
thyme & bay leaves
1 tsp sugar
a little veg. stock (in cubes or paste)

Fry the onion in olive oil for a few min. Add garlic and fry until it gives off its scent. Add leek and fry for a few more min. Add turnip and Jer. artichoke, thyme & bay leaves and fry for a few more min.
Add boiling water and bring to the boil.
Add pepper, salt, stock and sugar.
Let it simmer on low heat for 10 min.
Mix the soup with a hand mixer.
The soup has a really nice creamy texture.