Next moot, try this soup
Category: soup
Carrot and Ginger Soup & Mediterranean Lemon Chicken
I made two tasty things this weekend, and I don’t think I have posted these recipes before. Both were inspired by fairly different dishes at restaurants.
Carrot and Ginger Soup
based on the Carrot and Ginger Soup at the Hershey Hotel buffet lunch… their soup was smooth and creamy and the sort of thing where the directions tell you after cooking to put everything through a processor and strain it. I so don’t understand why people think it is such a good idea to transfer boiling hot soup through several different containers and processes, so this one all went into a Cuisinart (because the kitchen I was using had one!) before being added to the soup.
Step 1: Soak a cube of Knorr’s vegetable bouillon in 2 cups of hot water. (Or have real stock available, but we didn’t at the time.)
Step 2: Melt butter in stockpot (minimum of 2oz, but feel free to add a lot more). Chop 2 medium onions in Cuisinart and 1 clove of garlic (only 1 because I don’t think the original soup had any, but I found myself unable to make savoury food without any garlic). Dump onions into pot and rinse the Cuisinart.
Step 3: Peel carrots (7? A bagful? A bunch o’carrots) and put them in the processor (ETA: in retrospect, it would be better to precess the carrots after. There were tiny grainy bits (that weren’t a bit deal but could be improved) in the final product). Peel ginger (1.5-2 inches), slice it against the grain to break up the fibers, and put that in the processor. Dump into the pot. Stir around to just fry it all in fat a bit and then add the stock/bouillon.
Step 4: peel half a normal-sized sweet potato (or one small one), put it in the processor, and then add it to the soup for smoothness. Peel, process, and add one apple, too.
Step 5: Let cook covered until there is no resistance on your tongue.
Step 6: Reduce heat, and finish off with whole milk and/or cream until it looks sexy to you.
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Mediterranean Lemon Chicken
inspired by those Moroccan nine-course dinner places with belly dancers… usually one course is really sexy chicken, and this is the closest I can get to the flavour.
Ingredients
Garlic – as much as will – a minimum of 3 pods, but one of those large jars of peeled garlic cloves will be very useful here
3-5 lemons
chicken parts
white wine
(olive oil)
8-10 olives (not in vinegar, not in cans, and not in jars either – go somewhere with a fancy olive bar and look for wrinkly black olives in oil that smell dark and musky – they should add a nice flavour to the chicken without making it olivey)
optional fresh herbs (rosemary works well, and you only get to pick one herb and stick with it for the dish)
Directions
Choose a casserole dish that will fit your chicken pieces laid out flat – and deep enough to hold juices.
Cover the bottom of the casserole dish with peeled garlic cloves. No, that’s not enough, I said *cover* the bottom – 1 solid layer.
Put chicken in dish. If you are using both dark and white meat, but the white meat to the center and the dark meat around the outside (and, I have a theory that if you are doing both, the dark meat should be pulled from the fridge and the breasts from the freezer, but I haven’t tested that theory yet).
Scatter olives evenly among the meat.
Slice the lemons into slices of any thickness, leaving the ends chunky. cover the surface with lemon slices and put the ends around the edges of the dish.
If you want, take some herbs, still on the stems, and just lay them over the chicken and tuck them under some of the lemon slices.
Add a little white wine to give it some juice as it starts cooking, but no more than will cover the layer of garlic.
If your meat is predominantly white meat, then drizzle some olive oil over the top as well.
Cover with aluminum foil and bake until it is cooked. If you have all thighs, then you might need to check it halfway through and see how the level of liquid is doing… you might need to drain some. After it is cooked though, uncover it, and let it go a few more minutes to get some color.
Furthermore, these dishes have been given the AprilKat seal of approval.
pondering pumpkin bread (plus bonus soup)
I am feeling adventurous – I like cooking, but am kinda amateur at the baking.
So
Pumpkin Bread…
from real pumpkins or canned ones?
discuss.
ETA: I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home to research recipes. Neither allrecipes.com or epicurious.com have an old fashioned pumpkin bread recipe that includes both real butter and brown sugar. Everything is trying to be different – less fat, more fiber, less spice, less pumpkin flavour (!! Why you makin pumpkin bread, then?). Probably my red checked cookbook will have the right recipe.
Why, no, I don’t get to eat lunch for another 40 minutes 10 minutes
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For actual food porn content – I made a lovely soup this week.
I thawed out my remaining cubes of chicken stock (so I can make more soon! because I’ve started to think that an autumn without making stock is wasted).
Added an acorn squash. By which I mean that I washed the outside, cut of the top and tip, split it in half, and stuck it open side down into the stock and let it cook until mushy… and then scooped out the inside with a spoon.
I threw in a frozen pork chop because I figured there should be some meat. After it cooked, I trimmed and diced it.
At this point I realised that 1 squash would not be enough, so I turned off the pot and let it sit overnight.
The next day, I bought a second squash and two sweet potatoes. Rinse. Repeat. First the squash, and then I decided the soup could still be thicker, so I cooked the potatoes in the microwave and then mushed them into the soup.
Meanwhile, I melted some butter and sauteed some onion, cumin, and a winesap apple…. when golden and mushy, I added that to the soup.
In went a bay leaf, a dash of worcestershire sauce, and tiny bit of nutmeg.
Cooking. cooking. cooking. (more like 20 minutes worth)
Then I drained a can of black beans… because apparently I live in a crazy land where I can’t find dried black beans (ghetto mart would have had some before they closed, but it hasn’t reopened yet – harrumph). Beans get dumped in. And the soup cooks for the length of an episode of Spooks.
Then eating… and the realisation that I forgot to add salt and pepper… and that it’d be good with a dollop of sour cream in the middle.
Second (third?) day. Soup! With salt and pepper. And sour cream seasoned with more cumin and a smidgeon of horseradish. Very tasty!
The soup was a bit gloppy and would have benefited from a run through a food processor or blender, but I don’t believe in doing that to the poor soups. And it was quite tasty.
Really. I’ve had two other people eat this soup, and both liked it. Or said they did. But there were second helpings involved. And I’m perfectly willing to eat soup again tonight for dinner. Yum!
Mother’s Southern Recipes: Chicken Raft, Chicken Creole, Gumbo
My mother gave me a package of chicken breasts to use up – anyone want to come over and let me cook for you? Not only will this use up the meat, but also it will force me to get off my ass and clean my apartment (which I have been neglecting for a couple months).
Dinner would probably be chicken raft. I know – you’ve never heard of it. It’s one of my family’s recipes… and, since I promised Biz, I’m including a few of my family recipes in the post (note: measurements are almost always approximations)
Chicken Raft (Sometimes this is called Chicken & Dumplings, but this is not the vegetables, yellow gravy, and distinct floating blobs of dough – but it’s not really a Chicken Pie, either)
Boil together:
- 2lbs cubed chicken breast
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- water to cover, plus some
dried celery flakes (or 1 whole stalk celery to be removed later)
Add salt & pepper when done (if using celery stalk, remove it now).
Pour chicken and onion into a large casserole dish, and then pour the water left in the pot until it almost covers the chicken.
Mix up the BisQuick biscuit recipe only slightly drier… basing the amount on 2 cups of BisQuick, more if using more chicken. (Biz – substitute any biscuit recipe that works for you)
Roll out the dough to at least the length of the casserole dish. Slice the dough into 1/4″ strips. Any excess can be wadded up and plopped into the chicken… corners first to support the raft. Then lay strips 1″ or less apart lengthwise and then widthwise (I start at the edges, then middle, and then evenly divide the space until the grid is filled).
Bake at 350F for 40-50 minutes.
Open oven, but don’t remove the raft – add 1 whole stick of butter, sliced into pats and laid atop of the intersections of the raft… and add as muck milk as the dish will accommodate (pouring evenly over the crust to soften it)
Bake another 10 minutes.
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Chicken Creole
Ingredients:
bunch of chicken breasts (3-4?) (you can substitute shrimp in this recipe)
1/4 lb butter
1 onion, chopped
8-10 fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced (or 2 15oz cans of diced tomatoes)
10-12 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 green bell pepper, diced
fresh marjoram (optional… or can be substituted by thyme)
***
IN one saucepan, lightly brown bite-sized chunks of chicken breast in lots and lots of butter. Add onions and keep cooking until creamy golden. Add tomatoes, garlic, and green pepper. Cook until saucy but not watery. Salt and pepper to taste. If you have fresh marjoram, it is nice if added right at the end of cooking.
Serve over plump, white rice.
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Gumbo Now, there are worlds of debate over how to make gumbo, even within the family, but this is how my mother likes it
Ingredients:
3 medium onions
3/4 or 1 cup flour
2 1/2 to 3 lbs chicken, cut up (white or dark)
smallish stalk of celery
2 bay leaves
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 1/2 lbs shrimp, cooked and cleaned (with tails still attached)
1 1/2 lbs crab meat (or 6-8 soft shelled crabs)
butter
water (stock can be substituted for some of the water)
salt
pepper
worcestershire sauce
seafood seasoning (Old Bay, or your preferred brand)
***
Chop up onions. Grill onions in butter until translucent.
Brown flour. Make into a roux. Add enough water to make a thick gravy.
Pour gravy into a stock pot and add onions. Add chicken. Add more water until gravy is medium thin.
Add salt, pepper, worcestershire sauce, and a dash or two of seafood seasoning to taste. Add celery, bay leaves, and garlic.
Add shrimp and crab meat.
Let it cook until perfect.
You could also add scallops or lobster, but no fish or sausage or any of that crap (really – my momma says so).
Here is the story of the lamb stock
So my mother and I both bought small lamb roasts, and I stole her leftovers. After I made my roast, I cut the leftover meat off both of them to use for curry… but I was fairly careless as I am only one person and there was still plenty meat.
So I had fairly meaty bone pieces, yay.
First into the pot —
*one yellow onion and one purple onion, slightly trimmed and quartered… but with skins intact
*about 10 or so cloves of garlic. I have them pre-peeled and just tipped the jar, but if I were going from a pod, I would not peel the cloves and just cut them in half to expose the goody.
*bunch o black peppercorns (maybe 10-15… maybe more) again, I just tipped the container
*two stalks of celery
Then I put in to bones. YAY!
Then —
*three parsnips cleaned and trimmed, but not peeled
*6-8 baby carrots
*handful of parsley
*handful of thyme (finished off what was left in my herb pot because it froze that night)
*one bay leaf
*some shreds of ginger peel
And enough water to fill the pot.
Boil.
The next day, the meat on the bones had softened enough that it just fell into the water… I boiled the bare bones for just a bit longer before pulling them out and replacing them with two turkey necks.
More boiling.
Maybe by the end of today, or maybe tomorrow, I will strain it — but — damn — it smells lovely.
As of now, I think the addition of turkey was a good idea…
because The Joy of Cooking suggests making beef stock with some chicken parts to make it richer. When I have made beef stock in the past (w/o adding chicken), it was indeed a bit thin. Right now I have lamb stock going from bones pulled out of finished roasts of meat… it should be thin… but it smells amazing already. Do I:
And then when it was originally posted there was a poll here –
Leave it alone. It’s supposed to be lamb. Why would you but chicken in lamb stock?
4 (40.0%)
Add the chicken… It can only make things tastier. Purity is for silly people.
6 (60.0%)