Creamy carrot and parsnip soup with orange

Parsnip soup is always a good thing, but I really liked the creaminess and orange twang from this recipe.

 

Mmmm, oranges with cream.

 

There are two surprising flavours in here – orange, and ginger.  The soup is otherwise a fairly standard affair – stock and cream and vegetables all blended together – but it does taste quite distinctive and in a good way.  We would have this again.

Method (serves 2)

Melt a knob of butter and fry half a chopped onion with a clove of garlic until lightly browned.  Add 200g chopped carrots and 1 large parsnip and saute until softened.  Add 1/2 tsp ground ginger 1-2 tsp on freshly grated orange rind, and 300ml of vegetable stock.  Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes until all the vegetables are tender.  Blend in a food processor until smooth, then return to the saucepan, reheat and mix in 60ml of double cream.

Serve with a drizzle of cream, and a sprig of coriander.  (OK, that is parsley in the picture… the supermarket was all out…)

Who made it: A joint effort.

Recipe: The Daily Cookbook by Love Food, February 22nd.

Kuku with spinach

Kuku is omelette gone coo-coo.  It looks like nothing else in the world, but works amazingly well and this may become a staple approach to eggs for us.

Kuku?

The recipe book says that kuku comes in many variations over the middle east, and as far as I can tell it is ordinary omelette but a) it is baked, b) it has a little spice in.  The one here, is most definitely not ordinary omelette since it contains the most pure green – which is, in fact, spinach.  Again, I strayed a little from the instructions (overspicing as I like to do) so I’ll give brief details.

 

Ingredients

300g spinach, 3 eggs, 1 1/2 tablespoons chopped mint, 1 tsp ground cumin, 100g feta cheese.

Method

First, cook the spinach by placing it all into a large saucepan, alone, add a lid and put on a gentle heat.  The leaves quickly shrivel up, and with a little stirring the whole thing reduces about 10 fold.  Drain the spinach in a sieve or colander and squeeze out the extra water, then chop it up roughly.

Break the eggs and mix them up, trying not to beat them.  Add the spinach, chopped mint, crumbled feta cheese, cumin, salt and pepper to taste, then pour everything into a greased oven dish.  Bake at 180 degrees celcius for 25-30 minutes until just set.

The recipe book, no doubt following tradition, recommends serving this cold.  We did try that the following day and it wasn’t at all bad, but personally I prefer it hot.  The spinach forms an interesting base for the eggs, gently flavouring due to the long cooking time.  The feta cheese gives it a tang missing from simple omelette, and the mint and cumin make for a very flavoursome and different dish – no doubt you can make up the herbs and spices as takes your fancy.

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: “The complete Vegetarian cookbook” by Sarah Brown, page 181.

Mushroom and Sherry Soup

This soup provided our starter for our monthly three course meal.

A small parsley forest was filled for this meal.

This soup promises an awful lot.  Butter fried onion, garlic provide the base, whilst a whole medley of different mushrooms (ceps, porcini and chestnut) are reduced into a stock, padded out with vegetable stock.  Then it is flavoured with sherry and parsley, a little milk and some soured cream.  All the mushroom flavouring should come out into the sauce and there are a lot of whole pieces for texture.  With all that intense flavouring in there, it came as a surprise that the end result was somewhat bland.  Not dull per se, just not as perky as we’d hoped.

We had a second portion the for lunch the following day and blended it – for me, this was better, because the mushroom flavour was more intense and I’m not too fond of mushroom texture in large doses anyway.  The soured cream really helped, and I think a good dose more of that and something flavoursome (more sherry?  Or perhaps a complimentary herb or spice?) would benefit it a lot.  This was not bad, and we may try it again, but with modifications.

Who made it: A joint effort by Anna and Dan.

Recipe: “The daily cook book” by Love Food, for “September 30th”.

Samosas, Bhajias, potato cakes

Mixed Indian starters today:

(right) samosa, (top) bhaji, (left) potato cakes.

Some fun with Indian cooking: how authentic can we get it?  Turns out, when following a good recipe we can get quite authentic indeed.

All of these are fried in fairly deep oil and are about as unhealthy as it gets.  The samosas were awesome – we added butternut squash instead of potato and it worked amazingly.  The bhajias were exactly as they taste in a restaurant – complete with that strange tangy taste that is unique to them.  (Its the asafoetida, a bitter but very interesting spice).  The potato cakes we were less thrilled by – they were just a bit plain.

The samosas are made with spring roll pastry, which is cheap from eastern supermarkets and really easy to work with.  You just make up whatever you want inside, wrap, and fry – what could be easier?  We were really impressed with how the Bhajias turned out – its just a whole bunch of spices mixed in with enough flour to get them to stick together with some onions, then fried. Quite a messy procedure in practice but very much worth it!

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: “Indian” by Shezhad Husain and Rafi Fernandez.  Bhjajias: page 14, Potato Cakes: page 23, Vegetable Samosas: page 34.

Celeriac and emmental soup

This tasty soup brings out the best of the flavour in celeriac.

As usual, soup looks like soup. Believe me, it was tasty.

Celeriac is a funny vegetable.  Literally, you laugh just looking at it.  It’s all knobbly and oddly coloured, clearly related to swedes and turnips.  However, as a root veg it has a very pleasant taste and smell – shockingly, it is something like celery – that is delicate and probably easy to boil out.  Soup brings this out very well.  I’d say the flavour is more pleasant than celery, perhaps because the parsnip like starchy texture is more reassuring.  This blends to a lovely thick soup that feels very satisfying to eat.

The emmental didn’t really add anything here and could be replaced by most cheeses – vegetable stock is the main secondary flavour.  I’d consider gentle spices but you’d have to be careful not to crowd out the celeriac.

Very tasty, we’d try this again.

Who made it: Anna and Dan jointly.

Recipe: “the complete vegetarian cookbook” by Sarah Brown, page 154.

Leek and Fennel Frittata

This is basically baked omelette, which tastes very similar to the real thing and is much easier, at the price of slightly longer cooking time.

Omelette, but baked.

So for this we fry some onion, leeks and garlic, then add some fennel.  Add some dill when the vegetables have browned off then remove from the heat.  Then eggs and goats cheese are mixed in and the whole lot is baked in the oven for 30 minutes.

The taste is very pleasant, not complex but good and hearty, and the goat’s cheese gives it a pleasant tang.  Dill works quite well by giving an earthy gentle taste, although the smell will not please everyone! I’d recommend it and will be trying it again.

However, the key thing about the recipe is that you can basically do anything that works as an omelette hear, with the advantage that it cooks reliably in the oven instead of falling apart in a frying pan.  So when cooking for a lot of people this approach would be much better than the traditional one.

Who made it: Dan and Anna together.

Recipe: “the complete vegetarian cookbook” by Sarah Brown, page 180.

Carrot and parsnip soup with coconut and tamarind

Warning: this soup is not safe for work…

The best part of this tasty soup is the making.  Its an olfactory orgasm.

Perhaps I should explain.  To make this, you take cumin and coriander seeds and dry roast them in a frying pan.  This smells great.. but then you crush them with a pestle and mortar… and I’ve never smelt anything so good.  The house filled with it, a smell that knocks you back, makes you stop and say, “Wow.” I now want to roast every seed I can, crush it, and try to distil its essence.

And the taste doesn’t let you down.

Real butter on the bread is great too. Mmm.

OK, so it doesn’t look too exciting – soup never does.  But its what’s inside it that counts.  Start by roasting the seeds, then frying onion and garlic, then adding carrot and parsnip and sauté for 10 minutes, then simmer in stock for an hour.  Then add tamarind and coconut milk and purée.

The cumin seeds add a deep roasted flavour, and the tamarind adds a spicy, lemony zest.  The coconut milk gives finishes with a smooth creamy texture.  This is a great soup and I suspect will lead to other many tasty soups with a little variation.  Its definitely a recipe to remember for a substantial starter or a standalone lunch.

Who made it: Dan and Anna jointly.

Recipe: “The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook”, by Sarah Brown, page 151.

Broccoli and Stilton roulade

This weekend we treated ourselves to a three course meal.  Starting with:

Broccoli and Stilton Roulade

What do you get when you combine broccoli and stilton soup, scrambled eggs and meringue?

So, this is our first ever roulade.  Described by the recipe book as “an impressive light lunch, supper dish or starter for a special meal, a roulade is not that difficult to make”.  This is true – relative to rocket science, brain surgery, or fudge making (the three pinnacles of human endeavour).  Compared to a soup, its still quite tricky.  Still, it really was worth it – until you’ve tasted roulade, you’ve never tasted anything quite like it.

There are two parts to this: a broccoli base with a Stilton sauce which are rolled to produce the rolls shown.  The sauce is really quite simple: its just a thick cheese sauce.  The roulade itself is just egg and broccoli – easy, right?  However, to get the unique fluffy melting taste, you have to separate the eggs and whisk the egg whites until they go stiff.  The yolks go in with the steamed broccoli, then the whites folded in.  Then you bake it until it goes yummy and brown, paste it with sauce and roll it up.

Taste wise, it is extremely similar to a broccoli and stilton soup – not too surprisingly!  But the texture is what makes it interesting.  Soft and melting, fluffy and bubbly, roulade is great fun to eat!  Of course, there are a million and one recipes for it, including sweet roulade, and I’m now quite inclined to work my way through them.

Who made it: A joint effort between Anna and Dan.

Recipe: “The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook” by Sarah Brown, page 183. Note: the instructions are not very good.  Start with steaming the broccoli, though boiling is also OK – don’t leave it till step 3.  Don’t faff around chopping the broccoli – a light blending does the same job with much less work!