Heaven: 2022 Soup of the Day
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and impromptu soups.
Some fridge/cupboard clearers are worth remembering, some are awful-ish warnings.
What have you ensouped, and how would you rate it? (out of 10) Would it have been better if...?
We may even come up with the Ultimate SofF winter warmer.
So, today I made Chicken, Parsnip and Baby Corn (with a dash of curry powder). Not bad, but next time lose the corn, substitute a veg that will go nicely soft like the parsnip. 5/10
Some fridge/cupboard clearers are worth remembering, some are awful-ish warnings.
What have you ensouped, and how would you rate it? (out of 10) Would it have been better if...?
We may even come up with the Ultimate SofF winter warmer.
So, today I made Chicken, Parsnip and Baby Corn (with a dash of curry powder). Not bad, but next time lose the corn, substitute a veg that will go nicely soft like the parsnip. 5/10
Comments
Maybe my palate is getting jaded as I get older, but ISTM that a lot of tinned soup is rather lacking in flavour, or something.
Our late Churchwarden (RIPARIG) was once in the catering business, and was famous for his home-made vegetable soup. He sometimes would bring some along for a bread-and-soup lunch after a Saturday morning cleaning-the-church, or whatever. The soup really needed a knife and fork, as well as a spoon, as it was so thick (and delicious!).
Yesterday was Tom Yum Chicken. Stock, diced chicken, baby corn, sugar snaps, fresh chilli, fresh ginger. Leave out the chilli and ginger, sub julienned carrot. Add coconut milk. 6/10
@Bishops Finger we do actually lose taste buds as we age - likewise, children have the most tastebuds which is why they often prefer plainer food. I do find that packet soup is more flavoursome than tinned soup. Tinned and packet soup can often be perked up better by adding something acidic rather than (or as well as) salty - balsamic or red wine vinegar in tomato soup, lemon juice or white wine vinegar in chicken soup, lime juice in Thai curry soup or pumpkin soup etc. Although to be honest, a good balsamic or sherry vinegar goes with pretty much any soup.
(Also as an aside, I had lived here for 18 months or so and walked the same journey many times before I discovered that the 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' poem was inspired by Keats' walk through the water meadows in Winchester from the town centre to the almshouse of St Cross.)
This sounds like tom kha gai.
One of the nicest soups I've ever made I sadly can't replicate now, as the main ingredient - fiddlehead ferns - is AFAIK not available here.
David loved soup, especially my default vegetable broth (which he referred to as "just soup") - potatoes, carrots, onions and soup-mix pulses with a few dried herbs in chicken stock - a very comforting bowlful.
I think I must hie me to Tesco's tomorrow and get some ingredients - I can feel a pot of something coming on ...
It is spring here and foraging is popular after good winter rains: we have waterblommetjie soups from an aqueous pond plant, Oxalis from wild Cape sorrel, wild asparagus or veldkool, wild garlic (Tulbaghia) and dune spinach (Tetragonia). Not commercially available for the most part except for edible seaweeds and semi-wild nettles.
Marmite goes well in a mushroom soup, but don't add too much.
It has to be handled with care as it tends to curdle into lumps, but I've hardly found any tinned or packet soup that isn't improved by adding a dollop of yoghurt.
I must admit I've never heard of eating ferns or bracken. I thought they were either poisonous or carcinogenic but not sure which.
'Ensouped' is a BRILLIANT word, btw
My latest was a big pot of minestrone which has made easy lunches for me. (I would have it for dinner too, but can't eat tomato-y things after 2:00...which is such a bother!!)
A friend gave me her potato-leek recipe recently. I think that will be the next pot on the stove!
And, it really just stays hot here most of the year, so I don't bother waiting for the weather to cool. Soup is a year round meal for me!
It's not bad, but I think I could have been a little bolder with the spices (or possibly added some bacon) - it's not exactly exciting. 6/10
Last week I did something similar but starring a large beetroot - found it didn't liquidise so much as sludgify.
I think the moral is not too many root veg at once.
Roasting the root veg first helps a lot, and adding some kind of acidic and/or spicy component. The beetroot soup sounds almost like a vegetarian borscht, which often has horseradish and some kind of pickled vegetables added.
This recipe, @Dormouse?
Back to soup. A couple of weeks ago I made leek and potato soup with some giant leeks from the market, and it was delectable as usual (leeks lightly fried in olive oil, potatoes, garlic, a little ginger, pinch of red pepper flakes). The next week I tried the same thing, and it was foul. The only thing that may have been different was that I got distracted and fried the leeks a little longer than intended, and they started to brown. It's usually a foolproof recipe.
Surprised that it made a 6. Was it Elizabeth David who said that you can't expect to make a good soup with the contents of a storage cupboard clean-out?
It may have been, but if so, she was wrong. Some of my best soups have been serendipitous combinations of what is to hand. It is thus that we expand the frontiers of soupdom.
Also, I suspect she didn't have t'internet to take her beyond a western Eurocentric cuisine.
This recipe, @Dormouse?
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Yes that's it.
You would be surprised - well-heeled women of Elizabeth David's time had often been raised or spent a lot of time in the colonies in Africa or Asia. Elizabeth David worked for the British government in Cairo.
@Pomona although Elizabeth David moved in aristocratic and affluent circles, she was something of a renegade and prone to running off with unsuitable men, ending up broke and having to write her way back to solvency. A fascinating life.
I don't remember liking mulligatawny until I made it myself. And it still isn't a soup I'll make often.
Elizabeth David’s take on the “ chuck in everything” pre-WW2 English stock pot is a joy to read; not to mention her description of “ fried eel nauseatingly served with sage” ( German style) and other horrors.
A great read indeed. Her description of the bourgeoise family with whom she lodged in 1930s Paris is hilarious and descriptions of the food they ate had me salivating.
I still have her French cookery book and enjoy reading it 40 years later. A good many recipes are burned into the memory.
The jury's out here too on mulligatawny soup. Another fan of Maddhur Jaffrey, beginning with her World Vegetarian. Right now, I'm working my way through some Nik Sharma vegetarian recipes.
It was by such texts that she and I moved beyond the food we'd been brought up - basic post-war meat+potato+(usually heavily boiled)veg and, since this was Ireland, a lot of soda bread.
I think the fact that all the veg came from my recent veg box delivery (and therefore mostly from local farms) helped.
Recipe was very much ‘make it up as you go along’. Onions and garlic, butter, diced potato, sweat it for 15 min. Then added salt and pepper, stock (I was out of veg stock cubes so used a chicken one, which might also have helped the flavour) and then milk. Simmered another 15 min, then pureed.
I think the fact that I just came back into the kitchen slightly too late at the ‘sweating’ stage may have helped. Nothing was burnt but there were a few golden edges to some of the potatoes. Caramelisation = yum.
It’s my Dad’s favourite, and he has such a hard life now looking after my Mum. I had planned to make it just for him, but after tasting it, we are definitely having some too!
The menu now includes home made soup. I have had a lovely tomato soup, a carrot and coriander soup which was more like porridge to look at (perhaps it needed to be liquidised as it was so thick) but tasted lovely, and a very green leek and potato soup. I think the proportion of potatoes to leeks was definitely wrong!
Apart from the soda bread that pretty much describes my upbringing in the 1970s - spag bol was exotic and a treat, and had to be served with spuds in some shape or form because Dad wouldn't have a meal without them! Mrs B tended to be the go-to, with her portion sizes based on miners back from a 12-hour shift down t'pit.
My mother, thank god, has never stayed with us, but the only thing she'd recognise in our kitchen would be the "in case of war" level of stocking - she certainly wouldn't appreciate the number of things we whang the odd chilli into and I don't even want to imagine what she'd make of Madhur... Maybe it's a reaction to the Days of Stodge but I love to try new things.
Hastily bringing us back on track, we usually keep a few tubs of soup in the freezer, usually made with the home-made stock it shares space with, as can't-be-arsed-to-cook reserves. Unlikely to be much parsnip soup this year as I only have the five in pipes, sowed the buggers three times and got zero plants bar those.
Like Sandemaniac, I've reacted by being an adventurous cook who enjoys cooking - and I've taught my sons to cook (as a teenager I was expected to cook for my 4 older brothers if my parents were away).
Meanwhile there is a bowl of chicken stock in the fridge needs to be done something with. I fancy something mild but with loads of umami, but not sure if I want Asian (chilli, ginger, spring onion, julienned veg) or Italian (tomato, orzo, spinach).