Spring in a bowl....

A quick & easy soup night hit -- cream of asparagus soup. Which goes to show how much I loooooovvvvveeeee my immersion blender. Simply some home made chicken stock, leftover asparagus chopped up, blended with a touch of cream, and the tips added to heat through. Yum! Although, next time I will strain......

By special request from a 10 year old

I love my kid. He eats his veggies, still calls me Mommy, and cracks me up on a daily basis. Before too long, he will be taller than me - yikes!! For weeks now, he has been requesting French onion soup. Yes, he is 10, but he is an adventurous eater for sure.. So, I pulled out one of my many "bistro-ish" cookbooks just to get the proportions right, and chopped lots of onions, cooked slowly in my Le Creuset to the desired brown-ness, and used up the rest of my store of beef stock & a splash of port. YUM!

There are very few things that make me happier than the smell of sauteeing onions. I had baked a very nice baguette earlier in the day for the croutons, brushed with some minced garlic & olive oil before toasting,

and used Dubliner cheddar insted of the considerably more expensive gruyere (there is a recession on, after all).

This got rave reviews, I knew it would so I served it in huge bowls instead of the cool FireKing soup crocks I have. The pot was literally clean at the end of dinner. We are loving this soup night thing. Carrots were 78 cents for a 2 lb bag this afternoon, so carrot soup is up again on Monday, or Tuesday due to pub quiz night.
On a side note, just finished reading Kathleen Flinn's "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry".. and entertaining read with a good recipe for "ragu" that I made Sunday & we enjoyed thoroughly (though it really tasted more like "stroganoff").

Easy tomato soup

Soup night was pushed back to Tuesday this week, we were working on a baseball-related project for our garage. I have really been down this week what with not having success in a job search, so wasn't highly motivated. I pulled up the old internet to find a simple tomato soup, and found one as easy as it gets. 4 cups chicken stock, 1 can crushed tomatoes, 1 cup cream. Season to taste with salt & pepper, add basil to garnish (which I did not do... basil in January seems so very wrong). I think using home-made chicken/turkey stock was part of what made this soooo tasty. Served it with a foccacia from the stored dough split in half and filled with raw milk cheddar.
I cooked this loaf on the George Foreman grill that my brother & sister in law gave us for Christmas. It has lots more surface area than my panini press. That turned out really great also, since the bread is baked on an olive-oiled sheet & has oil drizzled over the top it gets nice & crusty.
Too bad it was 80 degrees out, we would have enjoyed it even more!

Succotash Soup - say that 3 times fast!

I was browsing soup recipes for Monday night, trying to keep it light after a month of excess and found this one on Epicurious and thought it sounded good. After a quick consult to make sure that Lima beans were not offenders, as white beans are, I picked up the ingredients to make this soup. Most of the ingredients are pantry, though I did need to pick up the frozen (yay! easy!) beans and a can of creamed corn. Luckily those things are really cheap. This made a big pot of soup as well, gave me lunch Tuesday and dinner Wednesday along with the 3 of us all eating 2 huge bowls.
I did pass on the black pepper sourdough croutons, fried in a pan with butter, and instead made croutons with my own freshly baked bread, in the oven with olive oil. Either way though, croutons are awesome with soup.
I thought that the creamed corn, as weird as it sounds, gave the soup some body. The bell pepper, on the other hand, was totally expendable. It didn't really add anything to the soup except that it is a traditional succotash ingredient. I was thinking that next time I might roast the pepper before adding it. I would probably make this soup again (especially since I have half a bag of Lima beans left over). It was a big hit.

Is it a pasta dish or a soup?

I think it is a little of column A and a little of column B as they say. I really love Italian bean soups like minestrone, pasta e fagioli, Tuscan white bean soup, etc...
But unfortunately my significant other is allergic to most white beans. Thankfully, he is not allergic to garbanzo beans/chickpeas. I pulled out a recipe from the Jamie's Italy book, first time using this book but it is very nice to look at. I sometimes like Jamie Oliver, but his show is really like trying to watch MTV with the jumpy editing. Anyhow, I decided to try pasta e ceci from said book.
Along with a fresh loaf of bread that I forgot to slash the top of prior to baking - a very crispy crust and fairly custardy crumb, so not a total disaster.
This was a pretty easy soup to make, especially since canned beans were allowed here. Just a bit of onion, garlic, celery, olive oil, and rosemary from the garden get sweated for a while on low heat. Then the beans are covered with some chicken/turkey stock and cooked a bit. I removed about half of the beans from the pot before blending with my stick blender, then re-added the beans and some salad macaroni (ditalini if you want to be fancy schmancy) & simmered until the pasta was done. This soup needs lots of seasoning, beans love salt. A little drizzle of oil over the top to finish, it was really nice. I think I will be revisiting this one before the "winter" is over.

Soup with a side of snark....

This week's installment of Soup Night comes courtesy of our favorite snark-master, Anthony Bourdain. Here's the recipe posted on Serious Eats, but I can highly recommend the Les Halles cookbook for many many things.
I didn't find a problem with the cooking time, and it is really simple as it gets - sweat a sliced onion. Add some mushrooms (12 oz). Don't brown the onions, but cook a bit more. Then add 4 cups of chicken stock and a sprig of parsley. Then just simmer this for an hour, then blend. Thank you, immersion blender for giving me 1 less thing to clean every time I make soup!! I must admit that after blending I did add a swirl of cream, and probably added less sherry than called for, but the result was still spectacular.


I baked a quick loaf of bread early in the day, which I sliced up and slathered with garlic and olive oil. I grated some real-deal Parmesan on top - normally I buy Grana Padano but WF didn't have any so I splurged. At least it lasts a long time.

What a great Monday night meal, especially after the carb fest that was the holiday weekend.

A big winner for Soup Night 2.0

In the 2nd weekly "Soup Night", it was suggested that I try a carrot soup. I picked this one from Serious Eats, used homemade chicken stock, whipped it up with an immersion blender.
Wow - it was really spectacular. While cooking, the little bit of turmeric turns the stock a beautiful yellow color, looks pretty with the orange carrots peeking through. Did I take a photo? Of course not... my battery was dead after our weekend of baseball. It smelled a bit like Indian food cooking. It turned out great, served with just a little green salad, some freshly baked bread, and a chicken liver pate crostini. I know, it didn't really match flavor-wise but I was experimenting with a recipe for New Year's.
One for the rotation for sure. Next up for Monday, cream of mushroom with extra snark.
Happy Turkey Day!

Soup Night

Even though the days are still hot and dry here in So Cal (and smoky, thanks to the flammability factor of our hillsides), I instituted Monday Night Soup Night this week. With all of the excesses of the weekend (junk food, mixed drinks, pizza, wine), I figure that Monday is a good day to step back and simplify. A nice soup, with homemade bread is a good way to start of the week. This week was a simple split pea soup. I adapted from Bittman, which has become my "go to" for recipes and methods for easy meals. I really just needed the ratio of stock (home made chicken this time) to dried peas. I started off by browning some already cubed pancetta (thanks Trader Joe's!) and removing for later. Then I sweated a small diced onion, and added the stock and the peas. I let this cook for about an hour (maybe a bit more as I was multitasking), then used the handy immersion blender on it. I used the pancetta as garnish, along with some easy salt & pepper croutons made from leftover bread. It got a huge thumbs up from the family, as did my plan for a weekly soup night.

Plus, my ulterior motive... it is more often than not healthy and, especially in this economy, cheap! I also threw in an extra soup night (found some ground beef in the freezer) this week and made Cincy style chili. This time with just cheese and cornbread, no spaghetti or raw onion..... Next up will be one of my dad's other soups, besides the best soup ever described here.

Brocolli & Rice Soup

This is the Best…. Soup….. Ever. This is my dad's recipe. It is the perfect wintertime meal, I make this at least every other month from September to March.

1 onion chopped

2 crowns of broccoli chopped (or I use one bag of broccoli florets & chop them up a bit)
4 cups chicken stock
2 cups water
1/2 cup rice
Parmesan cheese freshly grated - for garnish

Sautee the onion in a pot in some olive oil. Add the broccoli, stock & water. Sometimes you may need to add more or less water - taste it, make sure the broccoli is well covered. Bring to a simmer, add rice. Simmer uncovered until broccoli is tender & rice is done. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve in shallow bowls, garnish with parmesan cheese.

My variation: before the parmesan, drizzle a dab of truffle oil or nut oil. I know it is over the top but who cares!