CSA week six - Cobb salad soup

I may have exaggerated a bit when I called this idea "clever" on Saturday. Really, once you've come up with the basic idea of creating soup versions of famous salads by mixing the dressings into lettuce soup and garnishing with the other salad components different varieties don't require a lot of imagination.

I'm not sure the original idea is all that clever either as a quick search on-line finds a few other people who independently came up with it. Either way, I made cobb salad soup today and here it is.

Traditionally, cobb salad should be made with iceberg lettuce, watercress, chickory and romaine which makes for a fairly bitter mix. I used the lettuce I've got: pei tsai and, um, assorted.

I kept the soup really simple since it would be getting a big flavor boost from the dressing. I just wilted a pound of lettuce in butter and olive oil, added two cups chicken stock and a cup of water and simmered for ten minutes. Once it had cooled I transferred it to my food processor, discovered that the liquid level was too high when it started pouring out over my work-table, transferred it to my blender, cleaned up the mess, and blended it to a not-too-smooth texture.

When I made the caesar salad soup I mixed in the dressing during the blending but the extra time it took to make sure I had everything well incorporated meant I blended the lettuce smoother than I really wanted. This time I mixed the dressing in by hand afterward.

Wikipedia, and some other references I checked agree that the original cobb salad dressing is:
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon dry English mustard
1 small clove garlic, finely minced
1/4 cup full-flavored olive oil
3/4 cup salad oil
plus up to a 1/4 cup water if the dressing seems too oily. I cut the recipe in half and left out the water since it's going into soup. Half was probably a little too much, but not by a lot.

And then there's the other components:
boiled chicken breast (I don't keep chicken breasts around so I steamed a thigh)
diced tomatoes
bits of bacon
diced avocado
chopped hard-cooked eggs (I prefer the slightly softer mollet)
crumbled Roquefort cheese
chopped chives
and some recipes include baby corn but I decided against it.

It's usually presented with each of the components in its own distinct sector of the plate on top of the lettuce. I tried that with the soup but half of them sank.

But, presentation aside, it's pretty darn good. The soup itself is light, fresh and tangy. And every spoonful has a different mixture of the garnishes with a unique combination of textures and flavors. The mildly tart creaminess of the Roquefort matches very well with the soup. I expected the bacon to be another stand-out, but the cool bite of a cube of tomato and the fattiness of the avocado and egg yolk are surprisingly good and overshadowed it.

Overall, a nice little dish but kind of a pain with all of those ingredients to prepare. I'd recommend it to any of you who have a sous chef to help out.

CSA week two - Braised Chinese lettuce with dried shrimp

This is a recipe from the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook that I've mentioned several times before. Like most of those thousand recipes, it's pretty simple but open to elaboration. And as usual for me, my elaboration got a bit out of control. Still, things turned out fine. Or should I have left some suspense?

The recipe calls for a full pound of Chinese lettuce but my half share didn't include nearly that much. When I added my leftover bok choy I got about half a pound so the recipe was workable.

Ingredients:
4-5 dried shrimp
2 dried black mushrooms (Both my shrimp and mushrooms were pretty small so I doubled these numbers back up to the original 8-10 and 4. You can judge from the pictures of the end result whether I had too much.)
1/4 cup ham (I used some leftover country ham I had lying around)
1/2 pound Chinese lettuce and/or bok choy
1/4 cup sliced bamboo shoots
1 Tablespoon oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup mushroom soaking liquid
1/4 cup picked crab (It doesn't store well so I'm adding it to everything this week until I run out.)
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
sesame oil

0. Separately soak shrimp and mushrooms in hot water. Reserve mushroom soaking liquid. The shrimp soaking liquid is kind of nasty. Toss that.

1. Coarsely chop lettuce. Fill a large pot with water, bring to a boil and add lettuce. Blanch lettuce for 1 to 2 minutes then drain.

2. Dump out water and reheat pot over medium high heat until it's dry. Add oil. Heat until it's shimmery. Add shrimp and ham and stir fry 2 minutes. Add lettuce, stir fry to coat with oil then sprinkle with salt. Add bamboo shoots and stir fry one minute more.

3. Add mushroom liquid. Bring to boil, turn heat down to low, cover and simmer 10 minutes.

4. Add mushrooms, soy sauce, sugar and crab. Turn the heat up a little compensate for heat lost while you were doing that, re-cover, and simmer 10 minutes more.

5. Add cornstarch (mixed into a Tablespoon of cold water). Stir and heat until the sauce thickens up a little.

6. Serve topped with a drizzle of sesame oil or chili oil might be nice too.


Surprisingly, the lettuce hasn't fallen apart after all that cooking. It's soft to the bite, certain, but not mush, and the leaves trap the sauce quite nicely. There's some textural interest from the mushrooms, ham and bamboo shoots so soft lettuce is fine. The sauce has picked up a lot of flavor mainly from the shrimp and soy sauce, but you can taste the lettuce in it too which I didn't expect. I think I overdid the salt a little since it came in from so many sources, but otherwise I'm happy with the results. Next time I'll serve it over noodles which, texturally, would be a better match than rice. As for the lettuce, I think the likes of Romaine would stand up to braising well. I'm not sure how much the different flavor would change the dish though. I'll have to try it and see.

CSA week 13 - Caesar salad soup

There are some fake recipes for Caesar salad soup out there using things like fennel and celery that have no business in a Caesar salad. I wanted to make a proper version: a lettuce soup with a classic Caesar dressing, croutons and Parmesan.

This is a recipe in three parts. Let's start with the garnishes.

Garlic Croutons

2 large cloves garlic
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 slices of white, French or Italian bread

1. Crush garlic and add, with a large pinch of salt, to olive oil. Let rest at room temperature for at least five minutes.
2. Cut bread into large chunks and lightly toast
3. Strain oil into frying pan. Heat over medium high heat until sizzling. Put the garlic back in the bowl. You're going to add it to the soup later.
4. Add bread to pan and fry, tossing frequently, until the oil is all soaked up and the bread is crispy, golden brown and delicious. Sprinkle with a bit more salt.

Parmesan Crisps

1 1/2 Tablespoon of Parmesan per crisp (Use a young cheese as an aged Parmesan doesn't have enough moisture to melt. It will just toast and after twice as long in the oven as the recipe says you'll get frustrated, mix it into the leftover grated Ementhal you have in the fridge, and finish it off in a frying pan. You'll get a nice texture, but the end result won't have the right flavor to go with the Caesar salad soup.)

1. Finely grate cheese into little piles onto a cookie, preferably lined with parchment paper or a silpat.
2. Bake at 325 degrees F for ten to twelve minutes. Alternatively, you can fry the grated cheese in a non-stick pan over medium low heat for several minutes, flipping when the bottom is browned. The crisps in the oven don't need to be flipped, but it wouldn't hurt to turn the pan around halfway through.
3. The crisps will harden up quickly, but just out of the oven you can roll them around a rolling pin or drape them over the bottom of a glass or, if you're really good, make an origami swan.


Caesar Salad Soup

1 pound (about 8 cups) romaine lettuce
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup water
1 egg
2 1/2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
3 drops Worcestershire sauce
2 anchovy fillets, minced
coarse ground black pepper to taste

1. Tear up, wash and dry lettuce.
2. Boil the broth and the one cup water, add lettuce and a sprinkle of salt, turn down heat, cover and simmer 10 minutes.
3. Heat a small pot of water to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cook egg for one minute. (I overcooked the egg a little, but it's all getting blended so no big deal.)
4. Mix the garlic from the croutons with olive oil, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, anchovy and pepper.
5. I let everything sit for a half hour to cool so I didn't have to worry about the egg getting cooked. If you intend to serve the soup hot you'll need to temper the dressing before adding it to the soup by mixing in spoonfuls of the hot soup.
6. Mix egg into dressing.
7. Blend soup until smooth. Drizzle in dressing while blending.
8. Serve with garlic croutons and grated Parmesan optionally in crisp form.


The soup was light, smooth and velvety. Possibly a bit too light; I think the egg white was holding on to a bit of incorporated air. I liked the somewhat less smooth texture of the plain lettuce soup a bit better, but I blended that less, too. As I didn't have to worry about adding any extras. I think next time I might blend the soup to the texture I want and then mix in the dressing by hand.

The primary flavors were the lettuce and lemon with accents of anchovies and olive oil. Nicely complex and balanced, but it was mild and a bit overpowered by the intensity of the croutons and the cheese crisp. Grating Parmesan on top instead will help with the balance. The croutons really were the best bit so I can't in good conscience tell you not to use them, but maybe smaller croutons would work better. I'll have to experiment with the leftovers.

CSA week ten - lettuce soup

I decided I really wasn't up for a cream soup this evening so of the two recipes I mentioned on Saturday I decided to go with this one with some modifications.

First off, I lightened it up a little by substituting in a tablespoon of olive oil for some of the butter. Of the three onion-esque choices it offered I, of course, went for scallions as I have plenty on hand. In retrospect, a tear-wateringly pungent onion would have added some welcome punch to the recipe. I also boosted the garlic and added a third cup or so of red pepper. Some of the lettuce soup recipes mentioned that red lettuce gives a nice dark green color to the soup and, as I was going to stick mainly to romaine, I thought the peppers might substitute as well as adding an extra note of flavor. The eight cups of lettuce called for was about one full head; I used my leftover romaine and greenleaf from the last couple weeks.

Most of the recipes used broth instead of the water this one calls for. I was unsure how much flavor the lettuce really was going to offer, so I used two cups of chicken broth as insurance.

I found the ten minutes of cooking time this recipe called for was plenty. You can see that that looks plenty cooked. I really can't imagine what the forty minutes called for in the newsletter recipe would do the a not-terribly hearty green like lettuce. If you try it, do let me know.

When I was blending it, I decided not to try to get it perfectly smooth as a little texture adds interest.

Finally, I made some croutons. Nothing fancy since I wanted the soup to stand up on its own if it could.

So how did it taste? Pretty much like spinach soup. Unlike spinach soup, however, I found that the greens flavor intensified as it cooled. Hot, it was disappointingly thin and weak, but at room temperature the lettuce really started pulling its weight amongst the other ingredients making the taste come together into a pleasing whole. Using the chicken broth was a good idea; I don't think the lettuce could have made it on its own.

Now that I've got a basic idea of how the recipe works I'm curious if I could make a presentable caesar or cobb salad soup. I'll bet caesar salad soup would work. I found one recipe for it on line but it takes major liberties with the concept. Watch this space.