Soup Saturday

Since late fall, most Saturdays have been Soup Saturdays around here. I’ve been making all kinds of different hearty and delicious soups. Today’s soup was green pea. Here’s how I made it.

I had a piece of bbq bacon from Starsky’s so I sliced it up and fried it up until it started to crisp, then chopped it into little pieces and set it aside.

I chopped up some leeks (normally I would use an onion for this but I had some nice leeks so I thought I’d use them), some bok choy that I found in the fridge (I thought I ought to use it before it became a science project), a big carrot and a red shepherd’s pepper and started them cooking with a little vegetable oil in a Dutch oven. I added in a little salt and just a little dried cumin as the veggies sauteed. Meanwhile, I soaked some dried mushrooms in a bowl of water (use whatever dried mushrooms you have for this, whatever you like).

After 10 minutes or so, I added some stock and a splash of beer (I was drinking a Steam Whistle at the time). I chopped up the mushrooms and tossed them into the pot. Then I rinsed about a cup and a half of dried green split peas (the yellow ones work just as well….choose your colour) and tossed them in. Oh, and I also added in a couple bay leaves. These can be removed later.

I brought the soup up to a simmer, put the lid on, left the heat on low and went to practice the oil can banjo for an hour. At that point I added in the bacon and as well, I chopped up a piece of kielbassa and tossed that in too. Ten more minutes and the soup was ready. The only thing to do was to adjust the seasoning and add in some fresh ground pepper.

Some people like to puree their pea soup or partially puree it (separate out a portion of the soup, puree it and add it back in to the rest), but I thought the texture was just right and I was enjoying the bits of orange from the carrots and red from the pepper so I kept it as is.

We served the pea soup with fresh bread (also great with skillet corn bread – next time). Delicious.

Is it the ultimate comfort food?

You know it…I’m talking turkey pot pie, and Tuffy P made some tonight. Fantastic!

Chestnut Soup

Tuffy P found a recipe for chestnut soup and suggested we have it tonight for dinner. I’ve never made chestnut soup before, but that didn’t stop me from more or less ignoring the recipe and making it up as I went along (my usual approach). Here’s how I did it.

The recipe suggested that if I cut two slits in an X shape in each chestnut then put them in a pot with cold water, then brought the water to a boil, the shells and skins would peel off no problem. That plan didn’t work very well at all. Maybe if I kept them in the boiling water a little longer it would have been more successful. Alternatively, maybe if I roasted the chestnuts for a while, I would be able to get them prepped easier. Suffice it to say that it was a time consuming task to get the chestnuts cleaned up, but I got the job done.

OK let’s see, what other prep did I do? I had some dried Italian porcini so I dropped a small handful into a bowl of water to reconstitute. Then I chopped a red onion, a big carrot, some garlic, a zucchini and quite a few cremini mushrooms. I poured a little really good olive oil into a heavy bottom pot and heated it up. The rest is easy….

I added the onions to the pot first, added a little salt, and after a minute added the garlic and then the carrots, and after another couple minutes, the chestnuts and the rest of the veggies. I had planned to add some fennel seeds, but I couldn’t find them in the pantry so instead, I used a little dried basil, and also a tiny amount of dried hot chile flakes. I let it all cook together for a few more minutes, then added about 1.5 litres of stock. By this time, the porcinis were soft so I tossed them in too. Then I bound together some sprigs of thyme with kitchen twine and tossed it in, put the lid on and let it simmer.  I cooked it until the carrots were done, then used an immersion blender to puree the whole business.

We served the soup with some fresh chives chopped in and some insanely fresh pumpernickel we bought this afternoon. We added some fresh ground pepper at the table. This soup is astonishingly good.

Soup Time

Roasted Squash Soup. Perfect for a cool fall day.

Start by putting on some tunes. I selected an old fave CD called South Texas Polka Party, but you can feel free to select whatever music makes you happy.

Cut up and add to a roasting pan:

• loads of butternut squash
• a big red onion
• several ripe tomatoes

Add several whole cloves of garlic and a sprig of rosemary. Drizzle some olive oil over the whole business

Roast it for an hour in the oven.

Meanwhile…..dig up that two day old bread you’ve been meaning to toss out. Cut it into little squares. Splash some good olive oil into a cast iron pan (you can use any pan but I like making these in a cast iron pan) and heat the pan to medium. Add the bread along with some spices. Don’t tell anybody but I use my standard bbq rub spice mix for this. Be generous with the spices. Cook the croutons for 3 or 4 minutes, then set them aside in a bowl.

Take the roasted squash et al out of the oven and add it to a soup pot. Pull the rosemary leaves off the stem and discard the stem. Add some dried thyme and some stock. I didn’t measure any of this but today I used about 1 and a half good sized squash to about about 2 litres of stock.  Cook it all together for a few minutes and using an immersion blender, blend until you achieve a nice smooth consistency.

When you serve the soup, set out a bowl of your super-tasty home-made croutons, a bowl of coarsely grated Gruyère cheese, and a bowl of Arno’s ground habaneros (or, since I have Arno’s habanero powder and you don’t, any hot chiles will do) so your guests can fire up the soup as much or as little as they like it.

 

 

The Comfort Food Diner

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve taken you on a little trip up to the Comfort Food Diner, but I made up a little concoction this week I just have to share. I suggest here that my vegetarian and vegan friends go for a little walk, or perhaps visit some other sites. This post is not for you.

Left-over Pot Roast Pasta

To make this delicacy, you first have to have some left-over pot roast. In this case, along with a generous chunk of roast, I also had the liquid I braised it in, complete with a few chunks of carrots, a few mushrooms and some onions that had pretty much been cooked down into sauce. You need it all.

First, resist the temptation to simply make up a pot roast sandwich. Let’s save that for another day. Instead, prepare the left-over roast by breaking it up into smaller pieces. Next, choose your pasta. I leave this choice entirely to you. Bring a big pot of water up to a boil and toss in your pasta.

While the pasta starts cooking, coarsely chop up lots of garlic. Add some olive oil to a heavy pan, heat it up and gently start cooking the garlic. Add in generous quantities of dried chiles. I dry my own scotch bonnets in my handy mushroom dehydrator because I like them plenty hot but you might find red chile flakes from the market more to your taste. Don’t let the garlic burn. Instead, add two or three cups of pasta water, then when the pasta is a couple minutes away from being ready, add the left-over pot roast to the pan with the garlic and water, along with whatever braising liquid and veggies you have with it.

When the pasta is just this side of being fully cooked, drain it or for long pastas, simply fish it out with tongs, and add it to the sauce and roast bits, tossing it about for a minute or two. Shut the heat off and add in a generous amount of freshly grated Italian cheese (your choice which one) along with a handful of chopped up parsley or basil. Toss it one more time. Finish with some fresh ground pepper, and enjoy with a cold beer.

Soup from dried wild mushrooms

Most of the regular readers of this blog know that over the past few years I’ve become a mushroom hunter. When mushrooms are fruiting well, I’ll often collect quite a number of them and then dry them in a dehydrator to eat later. From time to time I’m asked how I use these dried mushrooms. The other day I made a very tasty soup and here’s how I went about it.

I started by soaking about a cup of assorted dried mushrooms in water for half an hour to reconstitute them. My assortment consisted of lobster mushrooms, saffron milk caps, hedgehogs and two  varieties of boletes.

Then I added some good olive oil to a heavy-bottom pan, heated it up and added a chopped up onion. I let the onion cook for about 10 minutes, adding some salt along the way. Five minutes in, I added a chopped up clove of garlic. Then I removed the mushrooms from the water, chopped them up and added them to the onions and garlic. I found a piece of kielbassa in the fridge so I diced it and tossed it in as well.

If you’ve cleaned your mushrooms well before drying them, carefully removing all dirt and grit, reserve the soaking water and add it to the soup later. I chopped up and added a zucchini, and since I had some swiss chard growing in the garden, I added some chard as well, and a handful of cherry tomatoes cut in half. After a few minutes I added a litre of stock and then let the whole business simmer for another twenty minutes. When it was almost ready, I chopped up plenty of fresh oregano and parsley from the garden and tossed it in. Just before serving, I poured in a good splash of milk and stirred the whole business.

Serve it with toast or some home-made croutons and a cold ale.

The Comfort Food Diner

The Braise

It wouldn’t be a comfort food diner if there wasn’t a braise on the menu at all times. Although you can braise vegetables (braised cabbage for instance is fantastic), braising usually refers to cooking meat, in particular tough cuts of meat. The method involves first searing the meat at a high heat, then adding a cooking liquid and a few veggies such as onions and carrots and parsnips, and slowly simmering the concoction for a long time with the lid on. I recommend All About Braising by Molly Stevens as an excellent book on the subject.

My single favourite braise involves short ribs of beef and beer. It doesn’t get much simpler. Brown the short ribs with a little oil in your Dutch oven. Add enough beer to almost but not quite cover the short ribs.  Chop up an onion and a couple carrots and one potato and add them. Add a little Worcestershire Sauce, some dried thyme and basil, a pinch of hot chile flakes, and a little salt. Stir it about. Put the lid on, and put the pot in your oven at about 300F. Drink the rest of the beer, and perhaps crack open another for good measure.

In about an hour and a half, take the pot out of the oven and have a look, just to reassure yourself that you’re on the right track. Put it back in and go have another beer.  After about three hours, take the meat and veggies out of the pot and reduce the remaining liquid on the stove (if required) to make a fantastically concentrated sauce. Serve it up with big chunks of fresh crusty bread. To really jazz it up, sautee some wild mushrooms in butter and spoon the mushrooms over the short ribs when you serve.

The Comfort Food Diner

Tuffy P’s Kitchen Sink Salad

Tuffy P has in my mind revolutionized the salad. We call it her kitchen sink salad because she adds everything but the kitchen sink to it.

She starts with romaine hearts, cut up with scissors. Add lots and lots of veggies. Add black crinkly olives (pits included).  Add cherry tomatoes. Add crutons or perhaps jalapeno peanuts or some other crunchy item like that. Add a hard boiled egg, sliced. Don’t forget cheese. Add an insane amount of dried scotch bonnet chiles. Add a small amount of whatever commercial dressing you like. Think of something else? Add that too. Mix it up in a huge bowl and enjoy. Sometimes Tuffy adds kielbasa. I know, I know, she’s a vegetarian. I’ll let the secret out. Because of the high garlic content, kielbasa is now considered a vegetable. Trust me on this. I’ve even seen her cut up and add that close relative of the kielbasa root, the casalingo salami root.

Serious salad.

The Comfort Food Diner

Pizza Many Ways

Sometimes nothing will do but pizza. Of course there is the pizza that magically appears on your doorstep when you call that special number. In my area we have a place that’s so fast I hardly put the phone down and buddy shows up at the door. “How did you do that?” I ask, scratching my head. Buddy just smiles. Their pizza is about as good as we can expect from a local delivery outfit, and that’s pretty good (and lots better than corporate pizza for sure).

Then there is the other pizza, the good stuff we make at home. I make a pretty standard crust. There are a squillion pizza dough recipes out there and they’re very similar so I’m not going to lay that out here. At one time I had a sourdough monster growing in a jar on top of the fridge and weekly I would either bake sourdough bread or pizza. If you have a problem with being underweight and want to chunk on a few pounds, I recommend this idea highly. I don’t remember exactly what happened to the monster. I guess life got complicated for a bit and I forgot to feed him, leaving me with an advanced science experiement. One day I’ll start another one. I always make my own dough. I know you can get pizza dough ready to go in some grocery stores and there are various flatbread options available too, but if I’m going to do that I might as well just pick up the phone and have my pizza delivered.

My mom made a fairly unique pizza when I was a kid. When she made pizza, she would make a bunch of them in pie plates and freeze them so we would have them available in the freezer at any time. My parents were of a generation of freezers. They and everyone they knew had big chest freezers and they watched for sales on meat and they prepared food in advance and froze it. I think living through the depression, they were determined their family would never go hungry. I have to admit that my mom’s frozen pizzas were very very tasty.

After rolling out the dough and placing into the pie plate, she would spoon some melted butter on the dough and then with her fingers spread it around and at the same time stretch the dough in the pan over to the edges. Then came the sauce, which was typically her home-made, preserved pasta sauce. She would add pepperoni and then lots of grated parmasian followed by mozzerella cheese. I think it was the butter that gave the pizza a distinctive flavour and texture, the butter and the parmasian.

I don’t put any butter or oil on my pizza dough. I will confess here and now I use store-bought sauce (red or green…sometimes I use pesto). If we have company, I’ll make two or three pizzas, each one different. I do have favourite ingredients. I like zucchini and I like leeks on my pizza, and I try different kinds of sausage and all kinds of different veggies and cheeses.

Tuffy and I have developed a taste for monsterously hot foods. I buy quantities of ripe scotch bonnet chiles, slice them up and dry them in the same dehydrator I use for mushrooms. So if the pizza is just for us, I’ll jazz it up by sprinkling some of these babies on – under the cheese is best in my opinion.

How do you like your pizza? Do you make any unusual or special ones? Now I’m thinking maybe tonight is a pizza night. Har!

The Comfort Food Diner

Pierogi Two Ways

This is the first in a series of posts I have planned called The Comfort Food Diner. Come on in. There’s a table waiting for you. I’ll get you a beer.

Today we’re serving up pierogi, two ways. I say two ways because in my family we have different pierogi traditions. Perhaps this is because my family is of Polish ancestry and Tuffy P’s is Ukranian (on her mom’s side…Irish on her dad’s). I’m not up on my pierogi history.

Both sides of the family go about the dough more or less the same way: flour, salt, an egg, sour cream and butter. You need to be able to roll the dough out to an eighth of an inch thick. If you make your pierogi too thick, they become heavy like bricks. We use drinking glasses to cut the dough to shape. The size of the drinking glass obviously determines the size of the pierogi, and size matters. I’ve seen some people make giant dumplings and call them pierogi, but I know you would never do such a thing. I typically use a beer glass. It’s important to not flour the dough too much, or you won’t be able to seal your perogi, and that my friends would be disaster.

I like a potato/cheese filling and there are all kinds of good variations. I boil my potatoes and then mash them up with sauteed onions and mix in ricotta cheese. Curiously, I like the Italian ricotta rather than the cottage cheese. I’m not sure why. Feel free to grate in cheddar or other cheese you like. Fresh herbs and salt and pepper finish off the filling. When Tuffy was growing up, her family also enjoyed a filling they called kapustranica. This is pierogi filled with kapusta – or saurkraut. I had never tried them this way until just a few years ago and I have to say, they’re delicious. Some people make fruit pierogi too, but that just seems wrong to me so I don’t go there.

When my mom made pierogi, she would always make a lot and freeze them in one dozen bags. I still do that today. I’ll make a dozen, lay them out on a floured plate and put the plate in the freezer. By the time I’m ready with the next dozen, the first group is frozen enough that you can put them in a plastic bag for freezing without them sealing together into one giant pierogi mass. I don’t make them so often, so when I do, I’ll make 10 or 12 dozen and give away bags of them to friends.

Construction is the same wherever you’re from. You learn quickly how much filling to use. It should be enough to make a plump dumpling, but not so much that they burst during boiling. I used the tines of a fork to close them up. I recall my mom and my aunti making them together when I was a tot, and I think they used their fingernails to seal the pierogi. I seem to recall that my aunt Stella was the fastest pierogi-maker I had ever seen. I think she made them all the time, while we only had them around high holidays.

However you serve them, pierogi have to be boiled. I know there are people who deep fry their pierogi, but that’s just ugly, isn’t it? The water should be at a roiling boil and it should be salted. I drop the pierogi in a few at a time, adding a few more maybe 20 seconds later. They float when they’re ready and I take them out with a slotted spoon and drop them into a colander to drain. It’s what you do after this which separates the camps.

My mom would take ordinary salted butter in a pan and cook it until it was what we called “burnt”. That meant it had little flecks of brown floaties in it. She would then put a dozen or so pierogi on a plate, and drizzle them with the burnt butter. Add a dollup of sour cream and serve.

On Tuffy’s side of the family, they sauteed the boiled dumplings in a pan with onions. There are variations of this. Some people like sauteeing them in bacon fat and serve them with little bacon bits. Of course just about anything is tasty fried in bacon fat, isn’t it? At Anchovy World Headquarters, we like to sautee them with onions and mushrooms in a mixture of extra virgin olive oil and butter. They’re ready when the pierogi brown up a bit on each side.

There’s only one way to tell which way you like your pierogi best, and that’s to try them both ways. Curiously, I didn’t have a taste for pierogi when I was a little anchovy. I remember my brother and sister getting very excited when mom made up a batch, and I remember clearly the smell of the butter in the pan as it started to brown. Much later, I came to love them. Today we normally make them the way Tuffy’s family did, boiled then sauteed. Of course, pierogi both ways are on the menu at The Comfort Food Diner.