Broccoli almond soup

Broccoli almond soup is interestingly ambiguous. A little push in one direction and it's Chinese, in another and it's Mediterranean. The basic recipe I worked from, from the Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread cookbook, had it both ways. It used both sesame oil and sour cream for a fusiony effect. For me, the Chinese association was too strong. I could bring myself to finish it off with the sour cream and instead piled on garnishes with Chinese flavor elements. Maybe I missed out; I'll try sour cream with some of the leftovers.

Ingredients:
1 large head of broccoli, chopped into florets, thick stems peeled
6 cups chicken stock [I only had two cups of fairly condensed stock left so I just used water for the rest. I figured I'd get a purer broccoli flavor that way so maybe an improvement.]
2 Tablespoons butter
1 large onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 cup toasted almonds
3 Tablespoons sesame seeds
2 teaspoons sesame oil
salt and pepper to taste
sour cream, maybe

1. Bring stock to a boil in a dutch oven. Add the broccoli, turn down the heat to medium low and simmer for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a medium pan over medium heat. Add onion and sauté 5 minutes to soften and lightly brown. Add garlic and cook 1 minute more.

3. Move broccoli and onion mixture to a food processor. Add the almonds and sesame seeds. Process until smooth, adding broth to help the process along as necessary. [Sliced almonds will process better than the whole ones I had, but I liked the little chunks of almond that were left.] Return to the broth.

4. Bring back to a boil and simmer 1 minute to blend the flavors. Adjust texture with extra broth and seasoning with salt and pepper. [My low sodium, low chicken broth meant that I needed a whole lot of salt.] Mix in sesame oil.

As I mentioned up top, the original recipe just topped it with sour cream and called it a day, but I wanted to bring out more of the Asian flavors. You can't see it under there but there's a heap of brown rice in the bowl. On top are slices of Guilin-chili-sauce-and-soy-marinated pork chop and some cilantro.

Sans garnishes, the soup is intensely flavorful, with a bright freshness from the broccoli (despite the long cooking time) and a toasty nuttiness. It's fairly creamy considering the lack of dairy, and the imperfectly blended almonds add a bit of crunch. It's tasty but, personally, I find it hard to eat a whole bowl of soup where every spoonful tastes exactly the same.

The nuttiness of the brown rice blends right in with the other nutty elements in the soup. The combination of broccoli and rice is a cheap Chinese take-out for good reason so no complaints there.

The pork is a little problematic, though. I did an unexpectedly good job of marinating and cooking it to the right level of doneness so I really wanted to eat it on its own. It's still pairs well with the flavors in the soup, but it's a shame not to let it go solo when it's so good. What I should have done was marinate some beef in oyster sauce. That's the classic pairing with broccoli. While I'm making substitutions, some scallions instead of the cilantro would have been a better choice.

Well, I've got two containers of leftovers packed away and two plans of what to do with them. Good.

CSA week 18 - Zucchini caldo de camaron seco

This is a bit of an improvisation. I was shopping for a Javanese dried shrimp and zucchini dish and not finding the Mexican dried shrimp where it was supposed to be at Whole Foods when I started wondering just what Mexican dried shrimp were used for.

If you trust Google, they're used for caldo de camaron seco--dried shrimp broth--mostly. Well, if zucchini works with dried shrimp and coconut milk, it might work with dried shrimp and chilies too. [I gave in and took the trip to Lucky Asian Mart I was hoping to avoid to get the ingredients.] Seemed worth a try anyway. I didn't follow any of the caldo de camaron seco recipes exactly even before adding the zucchini and I didn't really measure anything either; here's an approximation of what I came up with.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound dried hominy
1 medium tomato and 1 handful grape tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
2 not too hot dried peppers
1 chipotle pepper
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 ounces by weight dried shrimp
4 cups water
1/2 large zucchini, diced

0. Soak the hominy 8 hours or overnight. Or quick soak it by boiling it for 5 minutes and then soaking for 3-4 hours.

1. Soak the peppers for 10 minutes to slightly soften. Remove stems and seeds. Cut or tear into small pieces.

2. Process the shrimp into a fine powder.

3.Blend the tomato and garlic. Add peppers and blend until very smooth. Press through a strainer to make sure. Add a little salt and taste. Add chili powder and/or hot sauce if the flavor isn't quite to your liking.

4. In a large saucepan or dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium high heat. When shimmery add the onion and carrot. Cook until the onion becomes translucent, then add the chili tomato mixture. Turn heat down to medium low and fry 10 minutes, scraping up the sauce if it sticks. [This is a typical Mexican technique. Interesting, no? Aren't Thai curry pastes treated similarly?]

5. Add the dried shrimp, hominy and water. Bring to a boil, turn heat to low and simmer for 50 minutes. Add zucchini and cook for 10 minutes more.

Top with diced white onion, a squeeze of lime and a drizzle of olive oil.


The ground shrimp has hydrated a bit and now has a meaty chew to it but in grainy sludgy form. It reminds of something, but I can't quite pin it down. Maybe somewhere between ground meat in chili and strands of overpicked crab in chowder. It's about as enticing as that sounds, but its not bad once you get used to it.

The broth itself is an earthy blend of the the fruitiness of the chilies and tomato and the salty minerally tang of the shrimp. That's pretty tasty. Kind of weird, but tasty.

The hominy could be softer; I should have cooked it a bit longer. And the zucchini could be firmer; I should have cooked it a bit less. [I adjusted the cooking time for the zucchini in the recipe above, but I'm not sure how to deal with the hominy. Follow the instructions on the package if you've got a package with instructions, I guess.] Still, their flavors come through nicely and do work well with the flavor of the broth.

Like the soup from a couple days ago, I think this one is going to work better tomorrow after the flavors have blended. I'll bet the textures will have improved too. ...

OK, it's tomorrow. The hominy and zucchini haven't changed so no improvement in the texture, but the flavors have melded nicely. Still, it's missing something and I'm pretty sure that something is pork. The flavor would fit in really nicely and the broth is so much like chili that I'm missing chunks of meat. I've got some pork in the freezer; maybe I'll give it a shot. I'll report in later...

Now it's the day after tomorrow. I've added some ground pork and, as long as I was at it, more zucchini and some red bell pepper. Now it tastes like a strangely shrimp-tinged chili. It was a much more interestingly distinctive dish before. Ah well; win some, lose some.

CSA week 16 - Beef (and some pork) barley soup

This isn't much of a recipe, but it's all I've made so it's what I've got to post about. The only thing that's really noteworthy here, if anything, is that I made the stock from scratch first.

This morning, I loaded up my slow cooker with a medium turnip, a couple carrots, a stalk and a half of celery, half an onion and a couple cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped; thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper; a meaty beef shank well browned on both sides and enough water to get everything floating (nine cups which really was too much) and set the slow cooker to low and headed off to work.

When I got home I discovered that the vegetables were still surprisingly firm and the meat wasn't falling apart the way it should have been. Also, the broth was pretty bland. So I turned the cooker up to high and gave it an hour. That seemed to help a lot. I fished out the now cooked-out vegetables and the shank.

The vegetable are for the compost heap (or would be if I had one. Can I just bury them near my plants?) and the beef went into the refrigerator to firm up. Ideally, I'd like to let the soup cool and skim the fat at this point, but dinner time is approaching and I don't feel like starting from scratch at this point. So instead, I chopped up fresh turnips, carrots, celery and onions and fresh stew meat (The chunks of beef in the freezer turned out to be pork, but close enough.) to add to the pot along with some sliced mushrooms and half a cup of barley. I also dumped in some soy and Worchestershire sauce and a Tablespoon or so of Spice House's Milwaukee Avenue spice blend. I figure anything that's supposed to be good on steaks and chops should work here too. And another hour of simmering.



That should do it. I broke up and returned the beef to the pot and dished out a bowl to refrigerate down from tongue-scorching temperatures so I could check the seasoning. Hmm...in desperate need of salt and a bit greasy (although I'd have to add richness some other way if it wasn't), but otherwise quite good. The broth is clearly not just generic beef broth; the vegetables and herbs have added a lot of depth to it. And it's great to have vegetables that are both firm to the bite and actually deliver significant amounts of distinctive flavor.

So, was that useful at all? Even vaguely interesting?

I'll have something moderately better in a day or two and then I'm off to Columbus to visit my sister and I'm not blogging the Seder dinner. I might find my way to Jeni Britton's ice cream shop, but I'm guessing I'm really the only one who'd be interested in that.

I still need someone to take next week's share off my hands. Just post a comment and it's yours.

CSA week 14 - Cream of green bean soup

This is a cross between three cream of green bean soup recipes I found, all from the Hungary/Transylvania area. I liked the use of sour cream in one, the bacon in another and the blending from a third. This is probably the sort of thing that sparks border wars in the old country, but I think I'm sufficiently removed that I can do what I want here.

3 cups water
1/2 pound green beans, cleaned and broken into short lengths
1 clove garlic, smashed
1 slice bacon, finely chopped
1 Tablespoon flour
1/4 onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup sour cream (or yogurt)
sweet or hot paprika
salt and pepper
white vinegar

1. Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the beans, garlic and less salt than you'd use if you were just boiling green beans, but still a fair bit. Cook for a few minutes until beans are al dente.

2. Meanwhile fry bacon over medium heat in a small pan. When the bacon is crisp, remove it to a bowl retaining the bacon fat in the pan. [For a vegetarian version, substitute butter for the bacon fat and use smoked paprika later.]

3. Add flour and onion to pan and cook, stirring, to create a roux. (That's called a rántás in Hungarian I've just learned. Interesting.) Cook until the flour browns then remove from heat and add a few spoonfuls of the bean-water and stir to dissolve.

4. Mix the roux into the saucepan with the beans. Add the sour cream, paprika and salt and pepper to taste. Don't worry if you can't get the sour cream to fully dissolve. Gently simmer the soup for five more minutes until it thickens up a bit or you start worrying about overcooking the beans.

5. Remove half the green beans to a bowl, making sure to leave the garlic behind, and blend the soup, either in a blender or in the pot using an immersion blender. Return the beans.

Serve at any temperature you'd like, garnished with the bacon bits, a dash of paprika and a slosh of vinegar. And some parsley if you've got it. Oh, garlic chives wouldn't be bad. I should have thought of that.


Careful with the vinegar, particularly if you used yogurt earlier. The tanginess is just supposed to balance the creaminess, not overwhelm the dish. I cooked the beans about right;They're tender but not quite soft and have retained enough flavor that a spoonful with one ends with clean bean flavor after the creaminess, tartness and smoke have faded. It adds a little extra interest to an otherwise nice but not terribly exciting dish.

The roux didn't do a heck of a lot of thickening. I don't really know what I'm doing with rouxs--I can't even pluralize the word correctly--This isn't the first time I've squandered its thickening potential. (I did find the filé powder at Millams by the way.) Point is: blending some of the beans was a pretty good idea and helps a lot in giving the soup body.

More of the vegetable flavor comes out as the soup cools. I haven't tried it cold yet, but the flavors are well balanced at room temperature. On the other hand, I like the mouthfeel a bit better when it's warm, so it's a compromise.

OK, it's tomorrow and I've tried it cold. There are textural issues. Let's call slightly warmer than room temperature the optimum serving temperature.

CSA week 13 - Komatsuna udon

This is actually a cross between two traditional Japanese dish--sansai udon and ohitashi--to create something that isn't quite either but I think takes some good elements from both.

The common element between the two is greens--komatsuna commonly--and a soy-dashi broth. I created a somewhat richer and more complex broth by caramelizing (or at least browning. I haven't got the patience or temperature control on my stove to properly caramelize onions.) half an onion and then sautéing the CSA oyster mushrooms until they'd browned a little and started releasing moisture. Then I added:
4 cups water
2 teaspoons instant dashi crystals
4 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 Tablespoons rice wine
4 teaspoons mirin, and
2 teaspoons sugar.

Once I had brought that to a simmer I added a pack of udon noodles and cooked for the three minutes recommended on the package. Then I fished those out and set them aside.

Then into the broth went the thicker komatsuna stems and six ounces of deep fried tofu. You can buy pre-fried tofu, but the stuff you buy is puffy and I prefer the chewy texture of homemade. The six ounces is half a standard block of tofu. After a minute of simmering I added the komatsuna leaves, waited until they wilted down, and then turned off the heat and let them soak for ten minutes. One of the recipes I drew from instead left the komatsuna whole and had you tie the leaves into a bunch with butcher string and dangle the stem ends in the broth for a minute before dropping the leafy ends in too. I didn't really have room in my pot for that, but it's an interesting idea.

After the ten minutes are up, warm the soup back up and put serving portions of the noodles into individual bowls. Once the soup's at serving temperature, add greens and tofu to each bowl, ladel over the soup and garnish with scallions, garlic chives and shredded nori.


I accidentally deleted my first draft (first time since starting the blog which isn't a bad run) so I don't have a detailed description of my impressions of the dish when I ate it last Thursday. The broth, I recall writing, was rich and complex, having absorbed flavors both from the onion and mushroom but also komatsuna. The noodles, greens and tofu each absorbed some flavor from the broth too, but not so much that they lost their own distinctive flavors. There's a nice variety of textures in the bowl too. I particularly liked how the tofu squishes out stock when you chew it. It's a tasty and pretty hearty dinner considering the lack of meat (beyond a bit of fish in the dashi).

Another interesting idea in one of the source recipes was, instead of udon, cooking rice in the broth. I tried that the following day but was a bit disappointed in the result as a lot of the broth's flavor disappeared, locked away inside the rice. Plus the rice got kind of mushy. That's probably more because of my rice cooker's sensors getting confused than anything inherent in the broth, though. I did like the suggestion in that recipe of adding a beaten egg to the rice when it was just about done cooking, but you'd be better served adding an egg to the noodle variation.

CSA week one - Thai corn, coconut and crab soup

This isn't a real Thai recipe. There's a real Thai corn and crab soup, Kaeng Poo Kab Kao Phod, but the recipes I found for it call for a can of creamed corn. I went a different way.

First up, I needed a base for the soup and this seemed a good time to make a batch of shrimp stock. Every time I cook shrimp, I keep the shells and I had accumulated a quart bag full in the freezer. I knew it was going to make more than what I needed today so I kept the seasonings simple:
1 quart shrimp shells
2 corn cobs
1 half onion, cut in two
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

All that went into a large pot with water to cover--around six cups--and simmered for twenty minutes. Then I strained it, set two cups aside to freeze, and started into the dish proper.

To start building the Thai flavors, I added:
2 lemongrass stalks, trimmed and crushed
1 hot pepper, split
2 cloves garlic
1 piece dried galangal (Galangal is a relative of ginger with a less sharp, more floral flavor)
4 ears of corn kernels

and simmered for a half hour.

Afterwards, I fished out the lemongrass, galangal and a cup of the corn, added:
1 cup coconut milk
1 Tablespoon fish sauce

and blended in batches until the soup was fairly smooth.

Then I returned the reserved corn and added:
6 ounces of picked crab (Lump crab would have been better. Crab claws would have been better still. Dropping in a whole fresh crab might have been interesting.)
and, if I had thought of it, this would have been a good time to add some thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves. But I didn't remember until much later so I only added them to the leftovers.

and simmered for 5 minutes to blend the flavors.

Finally, I garnished with copious cilantro and scallion, a squirt of sriracha and a squeeze of lime. And, after tasting, a bit more fish sauce and, to compensate for few-day-old corn, a bit of sugar.


I think you can see that the texture ended up kind of sludgy. The fresh corn was kind of tough and didn't blend so well instead of the creamy result you'd get from blending canned or frozen corn. You're going to get sludge from the picked crab anyway so that's OK.

The corn flavor, once I had tweaked it with a little sugar, was strong through and harmonized nicely with the crab. The lemongrass and galangal flavors, which were prominent before blending were kind of lost and the coconut was pretty mild so it was up to the herbs and the funkiness of the fish sauce and kaffir lime leaves to add complexity to the soup and make it definitely Thai. A slight shift and this could have easily ended up Chinese or Southwestern or a bisque and been just as good. Lots of room for variation to preferences here.

Chilled pea and avocado soup with shrimp and corn salad

No great story behind this I'm afraid. Given the giganto avocados we get here in Florida and our CSA's insistence on giving us several at a time, I'm always looking for avocado-centric dishes. I stumbled across a recipe for pea and avocado soup, found a handful more (which means that this is a known recipe. I never thought of putting peas and avocado together, much less in a cold soup, but it must be common somewhere or have gone through a fad of popularity at some point. Have any of you heard of this before?), picked through them for ideas and worked out my own, rather more elaborate, version.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup tiny shrimp or crab meat
1/2 cup sweet corn kernels
1/2 medium tomato, seeded and chopped
an equal amount of roasted red pepper as the tomato, chopped
1 small handful cilantro, stems and leaves separated. Leaves chopped.
1/2 lime, juiced
extra-virgin olive oil
salt
vinegar-based hot sauce

olive oil
1/2 of a medium onion (or a few scallions), chopped
1 jalapeño or other meaty, not too hot, pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic
the cilantro stems from above
1/2 teaspoon cumin
2 cups chicken stock (homemade is, as always, much preferred)
2 cups small sweet peas
1 large avocado, chopped or just scooped out if it's as old as the ones I've got
1/3 cup sour cream
salt and pepper

1. Mix the shrimp, corn, tomato, red pepper and cilantro leaves in a small bowl. Salt well, dress with copious amounts of lime juice and olive oil and hot sauce to taste. Make it a little hotter than you'd like, actually. Set aside in the refrigerator.

2. Heat a Tablespoon of olive oil in a small pan over medium heat. When it's hot, add the onion, pepper and garlic with a sizable pinch of salt. Cook for four minutes, turning down the heat if they start to brown, add the cilantro stems and cook for one minute more. Take off the heat and stir in the cumin. If your peas need cooking, use a larger pan and add them after the first minute.

3. Scrape pan into a blender, add stock and peas. Blend smooth. Add avocado and sour cream and blend again. Salt and pepper (and cumin) to taste. Also adjust the texture with a bit more stock or avocado if you've got them to hand, water and sour cream if you don't. Some recipes call for straining it, but if it's chunky, blend it some more instead.


Serve soup topped with a sizable spoonful of the salad and a good drizzle of the dressing. Maybe with a chunk of hearty brown bread.



The soup tastes of peas and avocados naturally, sweet and creamy rounded out with touches of savor and spice from the additional ingredients and a slow burn in the background from the pepper. Each component of the salad, which separate out so you get one or two per spoonful, is a bright burst of flavor--salty, acid and spicy on top of its clearly delineated individual character. It's just gorgeous stuff. My expectations were far exceeded, here.

CSA week mainly 18 - Fragrant beetroot and vegetable soup with spiced lamb kubbeh

This is a recipe from the cookbook Sephardic Flavors by Joyce Goldstein. It comes from the Jewish community that used to be in Cochin in south India. Now they're nearly all in Israel or New York City.

While poking through the other cookbooks my sister brought to Passover I found a surprisingly similar (if rather simpler) recipe for a beet soup with meat dumplings from Iraq called Kukkah Adom. A quick search online turns up that at least one family of the Cochin community emigrated from Iraq so this must come from that tradition.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 onion, finely chopped
6 garlic cloves
1 carrot, diced [or two of the small CSA ones]
1 zucchini, diced [the pieces of zucchini I froze defrosted a little mushy, but otherwise intact]
1/2 celery stick, diced
4-5 cardamom pods [I seem to be out of whole cardamom so I used the powder]
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
4 vacuum-packed beet root, finely diced and juice reserved
[I've never seen a vacuum-packed beet so I have no idea how big they are. I used the full 1 1/2 pounds of CSA beets which, in retrospect, was way too much. I presume the packed beets are pre-cooked, given how they're used in this recipe, so I simmered my raw beets for 20 minutes. The picture in the cookbook had rather large pieces of beet so I went with that. If you go for the fine dice, 10 minutes will probably do. Also, I substituted 1 cup of the boiling water for the packed beet juices.]
4 cups vegetable stock
[or 2 cups beet boiling water and 2 cups chicken stock]
14 oz can chopped tomatoes
3-4 Tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 bay leaves
1 Tablespoon sugar
salt and pepper
1-2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar, to serve

for kubbeh:
2 large pinches of saffron threads
1 Tablespoon hot water
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
9 oz lean minced or ground lamb
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/2 bunch fresh mint, chopped

1 cup plain flour (semolina better)
1-3 pinches salt
1/2 - 1 teaspoon turmeric
4-8 Tablespoons cold water

for ginger and cilantro paste:
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1-1 1/2 Tablespoons chopped fresh ginger
1/2 - 4 fresh mild chillies
1/2 large bunch fresh cilantro [stems included since you're going to puree everything]
2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
salt
extra virgin olive oil

1. To make paste, put garlic, ginger and chillies in food processor and process. Add rest, process to puree. Start with a little olive oil and add more with processing until you get a nice smooth texture. Set aside.


2. To make kubbeh filling, place saffron in hot water and leave to infuse. Heat oil in pan and fry onion until soft. Put onion and and saffron water in food processor. Blend. Add lamb, season and blend. Add vinegar and mint. Chill.




3. To make kubbeh dough, mix flour, salt and turmeric. Add water until it forms a slightly sticky but still workable dough. Let rest 20 minutes Knead for 5 minutes, wrap in plastic and let stand 30 minutes.




4. Divide dough into 10 - 15 pieces. Roll each into ball then roll into thin rounds. Place a spoonful of filling in each, dampen the edges, fold over or bundle up to seal. [I started by bundling up, but as I kept going along, I found myself doing more of an envelope fold and making flat square packets.] Set aside on a floured surface. [I made 12 pieces and found I had a third of the filling leftover. I'm not sure what went wrong there. Maybe my onion was too big? I made a dozen meatballs with the extra.]

5. To make soup, heat oil in pan, add onion and fry for 10 minutes until soft but not brown. Add half the garlic, the carrot, zucchini, celery, cardamom and curry. Cook 2-3 minutes.

6. Add three quarters of the diced beetroot, the stock, tomatoes, cilantro, bay leaves and sugar. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

7. Add remaining beetroot, juice and garlic. Season to taste and set aside.

8. To serve, reheat soup and poach dumplings in salted water for 4 minutes. For each bowl, add a dash of vinegar, two or three dumplings [or a dumplings and three meatballs] and a small spoonful of the paste.


OK, this is a strange combination of flavors and they're not immediately gelling into a whole.

The broth is sweet from all that beet water, but not cloying. There's a lot of savory and acid in there too. And heat floating in from the cilantro paste. You can taste the beets and tomatoes in it, both mellowed. The herbs and spices do make it fragrant so the name is accurate enough.

The twenty minutes of cooking wasn't enough to cook the character out of the vegetables. All of them, even the canned tomatoes, keep their individual flavors and textures. Well actually, the beets that cooked for the twenty minutes taste just like the broth now so putting some more in at the end makes sense.

I've tried different combinations of the ingredients and I've decided I like everything but the mint. Maybe if there was just a lot less of it. Mint's supposed to go with lamb and beets, but it's just jumping to the fore and clashing with everything. Or at least with the tomatoes. That definitely doesn't work at all. If you get a piece of kubbeh without much mint, it's not bad at all. It's actually not far off from Ashkenazi kreplach so maybe heavy meat dumplings are a universal of Jewish cooking. The soup itself, when you get used to it, is not a bad chunky vegetable soup with some interestingly unusual flavors, particularly with the cilantro paste added. Not something I'd seek out, to tell the truth, but if you're a vegetable soup fan, worth a try. Maybe it'll be better after a night in the refrigerator for the flavors to meld.

OK, it's tomorrow and I'm trying a bowl without the kubbeh. Just plain, without the cilantro paste, it's extra-sweet vegetable soup. No big deal. With the paste it's a lot more interesting with an odd, but not bad combination of flavors. Oh, I forgot to add the vinegar. ... Now that makes more sense. The tart balances out the sweetness into a more unified whole. It's actually good now.
Hold on again, I'm going to boil up a kubbeh. ... I'm still not sold on the mint, but the acid tones it down a bit so it kind of works. I'm still tempted to open up the kubbeh and extract the mint with tweezers, though.

I strongly considered switching out the mint for something I liked more, but I wanted to make such an unusual recipe as written. But having done that, I have no idea if it tastes anything close to what it's supposed to. And how many people on the planet could answer that? A few thousand? Maybe I should just please myself.

CSA week 14 - Cold avocado, arugula and spring onion soup

I've adapted this from this recipe for cold avocado, spinach and scallion soup, but the only ingredient I didn't change was the lime so I'm comfortable calling this recipe mine.

Ingredients:
1 Monroe avocado (or 2 Hass), roughly chopped
1 lime, juiced
the middle bit of a spring onion (or 4 scallions), sliced
3 ounces (by weight) arugula leaves without a whole lot of stems (or one pack of baby spinach)
2 1/2 cups shrimp stock or broth
4 sea scallops, brined and dried
1 slice bacon, chopped
several grape tomatoes, chopped
a few drops of hot sauce
salt and pepper

1. Fry bacon over medium-low heat until crisp. Remove from pan, turn up heat and sear scallops in the bacon fat. Let both cool.

2. Chill all the ingredients.

3. When everything is good and cold, put avocado, lime juice, spring onion and arugula into food processor, holding a little bit back for garnish if you'd like. Add a little broth and process out the big chunks. Slowly add more broth while processing until the soup is to the texture you'd like. I aimed at smooth and creamy myself, but I could see that you might like it with a little texture or a little thinner. This will take a couple minutes so there's plenty of time to check and adjust seasoning as you go along.

4. Top soup with scallops, bacon, tomatoes and any of the green stuff you saved. Serve with toast spread with cream cheese. Makes two large servings or four soup courses.


Hmm, that's surprisingly good stuff. It's not quite creamy enough that you think there's actual cream in there, but it's impressively close. The avocado is quite mild so the flavor is mostly spring onion and arugula. I was afraid the processing would bring out the bitterness of both, but it's just nicely peppery with a little oniony burn. You could make this with baby spinach and sweet onion, but it wouldn't have any character.

It needs a good bit of salt, pepper and acid to bring the flavors out. It would be easy to overdo it and have the hot sauce and lime be primary flavors, which wouldn't be bad if you wanted to take the recipe in a Southwestern direction I suppose. I'd use chicken broth, leave out the scallops, and add a little cilantro, cumin and top with grated montery jack cheese if I were going to do that.

The tomatoes, bacon and scallops all match well, but the scallops stand out as particularly good. I'll have to remember to pair scallops with arugula in the future.

Overall, pretty nice and really easy, especially since you could prepare everything beforehand and just blend it at the last minute. And you can impress guests since it seems pretty sophisticated if you don't make smiley-faces in the bowls.

CSA week 14 - Barley soup with mushrooms and kale

Last week was kale week in the New York Times. No particular reason that I saw; they just had a few different recipes over a few days. I was ready for an alternative to the Portuguese kale soup I had planned since I had made a Spanish carrot soup last week so it was easy for this recipe to catch my interest.

I've always thought of mushroom barley soup as Northern European, quite possibly due to poor geography skills. Italian barley soup--and this is just one of several recipes for such a thing you'll find on the web--is rather a surprise to me. Live and learn.

I had a lot of ideas to tinker with the recipe--add tomatoes and/or sausage, leave out most of the broth to make a barley risotto, switch out the barley for millet, change up the seasonings--but I'm tired and I don't feel like screwing around today so I just made it by the numbers. A few small changes, though: I used half butter for the fat, used a spring onion and since, like last week's collards, the kale seemed particularly tender, I didn't remove the stems.

---
March 6, 2009
Recipes for Health
Barley Soup With Mushrooms and Kale
By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

This is a comforting winter meal in a bowl based on a classic Central European mushroom and barley soup.

1/2 ounce dried porcini mushrooms
2 cups boiling water
1 to 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, as needed
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 pound cremini mushrooms, cleaned, trimmed and sliced thick
2 large garlic cloves, minced
Salt, preferably kosher salt, to taste
3/4 cup whole or pearl barley
1 1/2 quarts chicken stock or water
A bouquet garni made with a few sprigs each thyme and parsley, and a bay leaf and a Parmesan rind [I'd usually add a little soy sauce to a mushroom soup, but a Parmesan rind is just as good an umami infusion device.]
8 to 10 ounces kale (regular or cavolo nero), stemmed and washed thoroughly
Freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Place the dried porcini mushrooms in a bowl or a Pyrex measuring cup, and pour on two cups boiling water. Let sit for 30 minutes. Set a strainer over a bowl, and line it with cheesecloth. Lift the mushrooms from the water and squeeze over the strainer, then rinse in several changes of water. Squeeze out the water and set aside. Strain the soaking water through the cheesecloth-lined strainer. Add water as necessary to make two cups. Set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, and add the onion. Cook, stirring often, until just about tender, about five minutes, and add the sliced fresh mushrooms. Cook, stirring, until the mushrooms are beginning to soften, about three minutes, and add the garlic and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Continue to cook for about five minutes, until the mixture is juicy and fragrant. Add the reconstituted dried mushrooms, the barley, the mushroom soaking liquid, and the stock or water. Salt to taste. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes. Meanwhile, stack the kale leaves in bunches and cut crosswise into slivers. Simmer the bouquet garni during the 45 minute simmering, then pull it out when the soup is done.

3. Add the kale to the simmering soup, and continue to simmer for another 15 to 20 minutes. [That's a whole lot of kale. I had to add it in batches and then wait for each to wilt to make room in the pot for the next.] The barley should be tender and the broth aromatic. The kale should be very tender. Remove the bouquet garni, taste and adjust salt, add a generous amount of freshly ground pepper and serve.

Yield: Serves six to eight

Advance preparation: The soup will keep for about three days in the refrigerator, but the barley will swell and absorb liquid, so you will have to add more to the pot when you reheat.
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I did give in to the temptation to meddle and fried up some sweet Italian sausage to added with the kale. But it was a small sausage and a big pot of soup so it didn't make much of a difference, the soup was still just kind of blah. What did make a difference was a bit more salt, a bit more pepper, a whole lot more Parmesan, just a small shot of balsamic vinegar and an extra ten minutes on the stove to get the last of the al dente out of the barley and kale. Then the flavors started to pop. A little acid brings out the best in hearty greens so the vinegar turned it from mushroom barley soup with some kale floating in it to kale soup with barley and mushrooms. I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing as I do like barley mushroom soup. Eh, the flavors will balance in the refrigerator overnight. That's what soups do.

CSA week 13 - Sort-of-Spanish carrot top soup

I started with this recipe for Tuscan carrot top and rice soup, but made one change that led to another and another and eventually ended up over in Spain.

Ingredients
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
2 small carrots, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1/2 cup diced ham
1/2 cup diced Spanish chorizo
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
salt and pepper to taste

3 new potatoes, diced
1 can chickpeas, drained
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

6 cups chicken broth
1½ cups carrot tops, chopped

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-gauge soup pot. Saute the onion, carrots, celery, garlic, ham, chorizo bay leaf and thyme for 5 minutes over low medium until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the salt and pepper, potatoes, chickpeas and the thicker bits of the carrot stems. Cook for another 2 minutes. Pour in the broth, and bring to a boil.

2. Cook for 10 minutes or until the potatoes are almost tender. Add the carrot tops, mix well, and cook for 10 minutes more. I also added an egg to poach, but that's my thing so you should just roll your eyes and move on. You might want to include tomatoes, but I find the combination of them with the smoked paprika tastes muddy. A good idea with a different sort of paprika, though.

3. If you're not going to add an egg (and if you don't want to poach, a chopped hard-cooked egg would be nice) finish off with a bit more olive oil instead. And if you left out the meat earlier, you could blend some of the solids to thicken the broth, but I figure the pork products would gum up the works so I skipped that.

The result is a respectable if not extraordinarily distinguished bowl of soup. There are no jarring discordancies of flavor, but it's not one of those refined perfect combinations either. I found that as the carrot tops cooked to a pleasant texture, their distinctive flavor faded. It seeped out to give the broth a distinct carroty note, but there's enough else contributing that you won't call it carrot soup in a blind taste test. You would probably call it tasty, though, so good enough.

That's two in a row where I've buried the CSA ingredient under a bunch of other flavors. It'll be three when I do the kale-wrapped sticky rice. I'd best put that off until later in the week then and do the Mexican whatever or the tatsoi stir-fry next.

CSA week nine - corn shrimp and sausage chowder

I looked at a few corn and shrimp soup recipes trying to decide just what I wanted to make, but I ended up mainly just winging it.

The first step was to get the corn off the cobs since I need the cobs to make the stock in step two. I used the Bobby Flay method I picked up watching Iron Chef: hold the cob vertically in a medium bowl and slice the kernels off downward without slicing too close to the cob to avoid getting too many nasty bits into the corn. Once the cob is bare, scrape it down with the back of the knife to get the corn-bits that stuck and the corn milk. I found I had to scrape both directions to get everything.

Next up, that shrimp stock. The two cobs, broken in half, go into a pot with half an onion, a couple of smashed garlic cloves, a couple celery ribs, a couple pieces of carrot and the 12 ounces of shrimp shells I've been accumulating in the freezer. That seems like enough for four cups of water, but it took five cups to cover so I'm hoping for the best here. That all comes up to a boil for thirty minutes of covered simmering before straining. I didn't add any salt so I can more easily control the salt in the dishes I use it in. That, I read recently, is how you're supposed to do it. OK.

Meanwhile, I brined my shrimp with both salt and sugar. I only have a quarter pound so I also defrosted a couple links of southern-style sausage and sliced them into quarter-inch coins. Oh, hey, I bought some potatoes earlier today. (I don't usually keep them around. I understand they're not actually very good for you. Unlike southern-style sausage.) I finely diced one of those too. When I got tired of waiting I pulled the shrimp from the brine, shelled them and cut them into quarters.

I only got a cup and a third of corn out of my two ears so I'm setting that aside to be the chunky part of the soup. Another cup of corn from the freezer I blended with a cup of my shrimp broth to thicken the soup.





Next up are my aromatics: a quarter cup each of red bell pepper (I guess I'm not stuffing it after-all), green bell pepper (from last week), celery and onion. Also, I chopped a handful of cilantro and the rest of the onion.



Now, I think I'm ready to start cooking.

I started by browning the sausage in a Tablespoon of butter, a minute or two on each side over medium-high heat.

Then I removed them and browned the potatoes.

I removed the potatoes, turned down the heat to medium low and added my aromatics including the extra onion I decided to chop, but not the cilantro. The potato absorbed a bit more fat than I had hoped for so I added a bit more butter.

After five minutes I returned the sausage and potato and added the blended corn mixture along with another cup and a half of stock, the fresh corn, most of the cilantro and some salt and pepper. I brought that back up to a boil and then simmered for ten minutes on medium-low heat until the corn and potatoes were tender. (The potatoes more than the corn. I may hold off returning the potatoes until later next time.)

Then I added the shrimp and a half cup of cream and simmered for five minutes more. And it's done.

The broth has lots of flavor, not just from the corn, but from all those additions, too none of which have had time to complete dissolve so there's lots of texture here. The shrimp and sausage aren't washed out so they retain their individual flavor and texture in the mix and their flavors haven't had time to leach out into the soup so each spoonful is a bit different. The fresh corn is a touch undercooked but has a lot of sweet fresh flavor even after being boiled for fifteen minutes. I think that shows a very real difference between CSA corn and supermarket corn. The soup needs a shot of hot sauce at the end, but that's traditional so I deliberately avoided adding any heat earlier on. So, overall, not too bad for a first try.

And now I'm tired. I'll post about the stone crab picnic tomorrow.