Mushroom and Cauliflower Soup

I've been meaning to blog about this soup for a while, but I kept forgetting to take pictures in my eagerness to eat it. There's everything going for this soup: easy to make, relatively healthy, needing only a few inexpensive ingredients, and a meal in itself (if you want it to be). It's an improbable sounding combination, but it is also improbably delicious and has become a quick staple in our household.

The soup almost didn't exist except for me strong-arming Mr A&N into trying it out. He had had a sudden hankering for mushroom soup, and set out on a mushroom-fueled shopping trip. He came home with a rash of mushrooms and an itch to get started on the soup immediately. In stepped me, with unloved cauliflower in hand, begging him to add it to the mix since it had been sitting in our vegetable bin for a week and we couldn't think of anything to do with it. Although the man looked like I was asking him to shoot, cook, and serve his puppy to his mother, he dutifully obeyed and threw it into the soup pot.


The soup that emerged was a surprise to us both. There was the worry that the cauliflower would overwhelm the mushrooms and leave its pungent calling card behind with each mouthful. Instead, it helped lift the taste of the ordinary mushrooms and make it seem as if the soup was based around garlicky, rich, specialty mushrooms. The minimal stock and the cream created a heartiness, and the small bits of mushroom and cauliflower that remained after blending helped stopped the soup from being so velvety that it became cloying.

We've also tested the soup with guests who loved the depth of flavor and thought it rescued the ordinary mushroom soup from being too 'mushroomy'. We've just finished the last batch today, and have two more cauliflowers lined up, waiting for a box of mushrooms to come along and create sweet music with it.


Mushroom and Cauliflower Soup
makes 4 hearty bowls of soup

• 2-3 Tbs of olive oil or butter
• 700g / 1 1/2 lbs of button mushrooms
• 1 head of cauliflower
• 1 small handful of thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 3 1/2 C / 825ml of vegetable or chicken stock or water if no stock is handy
• 1 C / 250ml of single cream (or milk if you're watching the fat content)

1. Clean and roughly chop the mushrooms and cauliflower
2. Simmer the olive oil or butter in a large soup pot over a medium heat, and add the mushrooms when the oil is hot
3. Gently cook the mushrooms with the thyme and bay leaves, stirring occasionally, until they have begun to soften and give off some liquid
4. Add the cauliflower and stir well
5. Cover and cook at a low heat for about 20 minutes
6. Uncover and add the stock or water, stirring and waiting until the liquid comes to the boil
7. Turn off the heat and blend together the ingredients using either a hand blender or a full blender. Remove bay leaves and thyme stalks before blending.
   
8. Add the cream or milk, and cook at a low heat for another couple of minutes
9. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve with nice crusty bread

Celery and White Bean Soup with Tomato

It’s cold again. More than once this year, I’ve declared Spring had arrived, only to be rudely shouted down by the weather. Flowers and showers alone don’t change the season, just as one warm day doesn’t mean the snow won’t follow. For example: London doesn’t see much snow, but it has had a few flurries since Easter – i.e., since the arrival of Spring. Luckily I still get a bit of a thrill from each snow-fall, especially since the London kind arrives with large snowflakey clumps and melts within hours. While it’s down, the blanketed quiet is such a peaceful cocoon from the normal background hubbub that you only realize the previous noise by its absence. The snow a couple of weeks back combined with our winter veg box glut of celery, and we found ourselves again facing the idea of celery soup. Unlike the previous celery soup (who knew there could be so many celery soups?), we used celery rather than celeriac this time around, and tempered the flavor with white beans and tomato. Since I’m a sucker for a nice sausage, I also couldn’t resist fry up some fresh chorizo and throwing those chunks on top.

Universal opinion among our guests was that the soup was wonderful for the wintery day, and that the chorizo was (naturally) the favorite part. The celery wasn’t overly strong and the tomato did threaten to take nudge aside the taste of the celery a bit. I thought the soup was pleasant but unspectacular, a good winter warmer and an excellent use of celery, but without the chorizo or extra paprika we threw in that it would have been a bit dull.


Everyone's love of the chorizo got me musing on why the world couldn't be more perfect by there existing there a chorizo tree, in which all of God’s creatures could enjoy fresh sausage and eat to their heart’s content without fear of chorizo shortage or animal welfare. Surely this would be the route to peace love and harmony among all creatures, great and small. With a bit more thinking, I realized that however perfect this chorizo tree sounds on first description, God would never allow it since it would turn the world into a Land of the Lotus eaters, with doped-up chorizo fiends doing nothing productive other than sitting in our gardens and nibbling. But if there’s a Garden of Eden, I now know what mine will be stocked with.

Finally, I will introduce to you one of Ambrosia and Nectar's more recent readers, Murphy Moore, who came around to enjoy the snow and the soup. Son of faithful eating companion Amanda, he's not yet old enough to be fed his own meals here so he'll have to live vicariously through Mama's dining in the mean time. He is of course welcome around whenever he likes.


Celery and White Bean Soup with Tomato, adapted from Moro East by Sam and Sam Clark Serves 4-6

• 250g dried cannellini beans, soaked overnight, or 650g drained tinned beans
• 5 Tbs olive oil
• 1 large head celery with leaves - celery sliced into 1 inch pieces, leaves set aside
• 8 spring onions with green tops, sliced into 1 cm rounds
• 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• 500g good quality tomatoes
• 1 Tbs sweet paprika
• 2-3 fresh chorizo sausages (about 1/2 sausage per person)

1. Make some celery salt by laying out the celery leaves on a baking tray and heating in a medium-low oven. Move them around every so oft to keep them from burning.
2. When leaves are quite dry and crumbly, remove from oven and crumble with equal parts of sea salt. Set aside.
3. Drain the soaked beans and add to a saucepan, and cover with plenty of fresh water.
4. Boil for about an hour, skimming off any scum that arises during the cooking. Add any extra water needed if it boils away too quickly. Season with a bit of salt and set aside.
5. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan, and add in the celery. Cook until softened, about 10 minutes.
6. Add the spring onions, garlic, and a good pinch of salt.
7. Cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. The vegetables should be soft and beginning to caramelize.
8. Add the tomatoes and half the celery salt, and cook for another 5 minutes.
9. Drain the beans, keeping back 250 ml of the cooking liquid, and add both to the pot with the vegetable mixture.
10. Add in the paprika.
11. Bring to a low boil and simmer for another 5 minutes. Taste for seasoning and adjust.
12. Heat a frying pan up with a small amount of olive oil to prevent the sausage from sticking.
13. Slice the fresh chorizo into half-inch thick disks, then quarter them.
14. Fry the chorizo pieces for about 5 minutes or until cooked. They usually give off a good amount of oil - fatty, but tasty.
15. Serve the soup in bowls with the chorizo and some of its oil spooned on top.

Celery and Leek Soup with Truffle Oil

Mr A&N and I found ourselves with a day off together at the end of the Easter break. An extra day off is a prized thing and should be treated differently to your normal weekend day - there should be no cleaning, no grocery shopping, no chores or running about here and there. On my extra days off, I like to behave like I'm a tourist and take my camera and myself out into the city and see what I can find. I've lately been feeling as if I were in a bit of a rut, which isn't uncommon for me at the end of winter (I figure it's better at the end, with spring on its way, than at the beginning). When I'm in this rut, life seems to only move between paid work and house work with no time to do things I enjoy and no sense of taking advantage of the city I live in. Even when I know this isn't actually true, this winter-time fug stays with me. A day out in London, exploring a different area through new eyes, was coming just in time to help me re-charge my dead batteries.

We headed to Notting Hill, a place I've semi-explored a number of times but hadn't been back to in a while. It wasn't until we were there that I remembered a great spice shop in the area, and before I had finished whacking myself in the forehead for being thick and forgetting to copy down its location, we stumbled on the store. Called The Spice Shop (good name, eh?), it's a small but packed space, full of sachets and canisters of all sorts of wonderful things, many of which came home with me.

Across the road from The Spice Shop is another fantastic store, Books for Cooks. Just like the Spice Shop, it's a place that will make anyone cooking-inclined be beside themselves with possibilities. I had wanted some books about the science of baking and cooking, and I was able to scan through a few titles and chat to the staff about what they'd recommend. I also had my eye caught by a cookbook that I've been flipping through without purchase for ages. A Year in My Kitchen by Skye Gyngell was the Cookery Book of the Year winner last year and is another contribution to the seasonal and non-fussy cooking genre. The spirit and place moved me, and into my bag it went.

I pawed through the cookbook over lunch and one of the first recipes to make me go 'Oooh' was a celery and leek soup, topped off with truffle oil (which I had, conveniently, just picked up from the Spice Shop). We already had a large celeriac from the previous week's vegetable box and had more celery arriving that day, so any plan to get rid of it all was a good one. Potatoes and cream helped thicken it out, and it tasted like a deeply flavored, grown-up leek and potato soup, particularly with the touch of truffle oil. I'll be looking through the cookbook more this weekend, since I'm already enticed and want to find out what else is possible.



Celery and Leek Soup with Truffle Oil, from Skye Gyngell
serves 4

• 400 g celery (or celeriac - we used a combination of the two)
• 2 leeks, mostly white parts
• 50 g unsalted butter
• 2 medium or 1 large potato, peeled and chopped
• 2 bay leaves
• 2-3 thyme sprigs
• a couple of flat leaf parsley stems
• salt and pepper
• 1 liter chicken or vegetable stock
• 150 ml double cream
• truffle oil, to drizzle

1. Separate the celery stalks and peel them finely, then chop roughly. If using celeriac, skin and chop into small cubes.
2. Melt the butter in a large pot over a low heat. Add the celery and leeks and cook gently for 15 minutes or so, until the celery is soft but not colored.
3. Add the potato, bay leaves, thyme and parsely and season with a bit of the salt and pepper.
4. Pour in the stock and bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer gently for 20 minutes.
5. remove from the heat and discard herb.
6. Puree the soup in small batches in a blender so it is quite smooth. Pass through a chinois before returning it to the pot so that the soup is very smooth.
7. Pour in the cream and reheat gently.
8. Check the seasoning and serve with a small drizzle of truffle oil.

Caldo Verde

We've recently (finally) signed up for a vegetable box delivery - once a week we have an assortment of organic vegetables delivered to our door. We went with Abel and Cole after they were recommended by several friends, and are very pleased with them so far. Aside from the fruit and vegetables the specialize in, Abel and Cole also act like a small online grocery store, and we're enjoying batches of fruity soy yogurt as well as some incredible fresh fish and meat. What having a veg box also means is that we're landed with plenty of vegetables (a good thing, don't get me wrong) and have to think of ways of using them before they go off. It's helping us increase our vegetable intake while cutting down on the meat a bit, and whenever we're stuck with how to pull of the trick of cooking armfuls of vegetables at once, we revert to soup.

I found this recipe for a Portuguese soup on the BBC website, originating from the Hairy Bikers (for anyone not familiar with their show, they are what they say they are: two large, bearded bikers who ride around different continents and sample and cook local food. Great job if you can get it, I say). I was interested in the soup not just because it used the vegetables we needed to cook with, but because I don't have a huge amount of knowledge of Portuguese cuisine.

What I do know about Portuguese food, in fact, could be written on the back of a matchstick. I know that they love pork, as a lot of continental Europe does. I know that they were a great sea-faring country and so brought touches of their cuisine around the world (for example, firey-hot Indian Vindaloo is a corruption of the Portuguese term 'vinho de alho' or 'vinegar and garlic' which is what the meat is prepared with). I also know of their reliance on cod and salt cod in particular, illustrated by the story a friend told me about how a power outage when she was a child forced her family to get a take out meal since her mother couldn't cook that night's cod, and it lives in her memory as one of the more exciting nights of her childhood.

So the Portuguese soup? It was very tasty but I felt it could have been better with a slight tweak of both the recipe and my behavior. The recipe only calls for 1 chorizo sausage but I would be inclined to add 2-3 (Mr A&N pouted that I was making him eat peasant food when, the last time he checked, he hadn't been a peasant for at least 2 generations). I also always suffer from adding too much liquid to my soup stock since I make the stock in my large pot and always feel the chicken looks so lonely without more water around it. I would next time follow what's said and only add the amount called for. It was still a very good and hearty soup, and nicely livened up by the swirl of spicy oil added on the top. I'm intrigued to find out what else Portuguese food has to offer me.



Caldo Verde, from the Hairy Bikers
makes 1 large pot

• 2 nice fat onions, finely chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 60ml/2¼fl oz olive oil
• 1 chorizo sausage
• 6 large potatoes
• 1.5 litres/2 pints 13fl oz good vegetable or chicken stock
• salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 2 bay leaves
• large bunch of greens or cabbage
• smoked paprika and olive oil, for dressing

1. In a frying pan, sweat the onions and garlic in the olive oil until translucent.
2. Chop the sausage into small chunks and add to the onion.
3. Sweat the onions and sausage for a few more minutes and then add the diced potatoes. They will absorb all the flavour from the sausage.
4. Transfer the mixture to a large pan, add the stock, seasoning and bay leaves, and cook until the potatoes are soft.
5. Meanwhile, very finely chop the cabbage.
6. When the potatoes are ready, mash them into the broth to make a thick base.
   
7. Blanch the greens in boiling water for one minute to take off any bitterness, drain, then add to the simmering broth.
8. Add as much cabbage as the broth will support - if you want heavy soup add loads of greens, if lighter, add less, and simmer for a few minutes.
9. Mix the smoked paprika with some olive oil to make a dressing, and drizzle this on top of the individual bowls of soup.
   

Celeriac, Chickpea, and Cabbage Soup

After reading (yet) another soup recipe from me, Kate from Applemint recently threatened to dub me The Soup Queen. Well, I'm afraid The Soup Queen is at it again so hang on to your seats everyone.

I think I make so many soups because I have access to good seasonable vegetables through Walthamstow's two markets, one a traditional fruit and veg market and the other a farmer's market. These two markets sell both quality and quantity of food, and I find it easy to get tangled up in over-zealous vegetable buying. I then often wind up with more vegetables than a vegetarian family of 7 would be able to tackle in a week. As it seems to be the case, the road to soups is paved with good vegetable intentions.

So what to do when you find yourself with extra celeriac, curly kale, and savoy cabbage on your hands? That's right, you make soup. A quick look around the cookbooks showed me that my wonderful River Cafe Cookbook Green had the perfect soup for me in it. It was one of the earlier cookbooks to organize recipes by season and month, and I still find it an excellent resource for helping me to do the most with the ingredients that are abundant at the moment.


The celeriac soup isn't a tremendous departure from many soup recipes, but the addition of fennel seeds once again takes the flavor to a deeper and warmer place (my polenta shortcake earlier in the week showed off fennel seed's versitility with sweet things). The scent that came from frying the fennel was an intoxicating tempter that made you reconsider whether or not you actually need to finish the recipe before dipping your spoon into it.

I added kale to my soup and it fit in to the original recipe easily. I also used dried chickpeas despite my dislike of them, and my dislike was confirmed since those darn things didn't soften up even after 5 hours of boiling. I'm repeating the recipe as is, though, so you can make your own decisions. Do make sure you are generous with the parmesan cheese on top, though, which makes the eating of the soup that much more worthwhile.



For my abundance of vegetables and the wonderful fennel seeds, this is being submitted to Rinku at Cooking in Westchester for Weekend Herb Blogging.

Celeriac, chickpea, and cabbage soup
from River Cafe Cookbook Green

• 800 g celeriac, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 200 g dried chickpeas, cooked, or 800 g tinned chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 500 g savoy cabbage, thick stalks discarded, and finely shredded
• 1 large red onion, chopped
• 4 Tbs olive oil
• 150 g pancetta, cut into fine matchsticks
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
• 1.25 liters chicken stock
• sea salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 ciabatta loaf, cut on the diagonal to make crostini
• 1 garlic clove, peeled
• extra virgin olive oil
• parmesan cheese, freshly grated
• 2 Tbs chopped flat-leaf parsley

1. Heat the 4 Tbs of oil in a heavy, large pot and add the pancetta, bay leaves, and fennel seeds. Cook for a few minutes to allow the flavors to combine.
2. Add the onion and celeriac, stirring, and allow to cook for 8 - 10 minutes until the onion has softened and the celeriac has colored.
3. Add the cabbage and chickpeas, again stirring and allowing to cook for another few minutes.
4. Add enough stock to cover the contents. Season with salt and pepper and simmer gently for 30 minutes, until the celeriac is soft and the chickpeas have begun to break.
5. Toast the crostini on both sides and lightly rub with the garlic clove.
6. Place a slice of toast in each bowl, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, and grate some parmesan cheese on top.
7. Ladle in the soup, and top with parsley and some more extra virgin olive oil.

Chicken, Leek, and Barley Soup

Winter is still a handful of days away, technically, but I've quite settled into my darkened-day hibernation mode without the need of calendars to confirm how I feel. To whit:

• It's cold outside, it's cold inside: our famed kitchen extension - which might or might not be done in time for Christmas dinner - is also a few days short of the important moment when we can turn the heating on in it. Making everything in the house c-o-l-d as this large, open room sucks in all the other heating into it.
• Climbing into bed results in too-close communication with icy sheets. My alluring orange fleece vest, woolen socks, and extra-thick pajamas don't help stave off the cold. Last night I called for the season's first use of the hot water bottle, fondly known as 'The Warmth Pig' for the way the heated rubber gives off a sausagey smell (I was tired when the name came out, but it's sensibly stuck).
• It's too dark to ride my bicycle home at night, I'm nibbling all the time, and my extra winter coat (of fat) is piling on. Oh yes it is.
• My lovely new Mac laptop is truly dead. It would cost about as much to fix it as it would be to get a new one. I've spent 2 days this week feeling utterly crushed about it and having on some dark days/nights of the soul over the waste of money and my careless stupidity. At least, in this case, the cold, dark, shortened days are an appropriate mirror of my mood.

This all adds up to me craving warm, hearty, comfort food. Large bowls of spaghetti bolognese. Great big mugs of hot cocoa with oatmeal cookies to dunk into it. Or a hearty chicken soup. I'm sure I'll tackle them all before the month is over, but the soup won out this time.

The leek and barley was a nice twist from a traditional leek and potato soup. I like using barley to thicken soups in place of cream or potatoes. After an hour or so of cooking, all the starch that the barley gives off helps create a soup that has the umami of something cooked with cup-fulls of cream, but which has been made in a healthier fashion.

I also quite luxuriously used a whole chicken to make the stock, which I then shredded the meat from and put back into the stock. With generous amounts of pepper, it all worked together to be a creamy, warming, filling and hearty dish which will definitely feature heavily on this winter's soup menu. I might be tempted to experiment in the future with some gentle curry spices to take the soup in a mulligatawny direction, but that's only if I can be tempted away from my new Winter 2007/2008 Comfort Food.

In the meantime, don't forget the Menu For Hope campaign going on at Chez Pim - there are many tempting prizes, including a paella starter kit from yours truly.


Chicken, Leek, and Barley Soup

• 1 medium sized chicken (1 1/2 kilos / 3 lbs)
• 2 liters of water
• 1 large onion, peeled and cut into quarters
• 2 bay leaves
• 200 g barley, rinsed
• 1/2 liter water
• 4 medium leeks, washed
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Place the chicken in a large pot with the 2 liters of water and the onion, and bring to a boil. If the chicken doesn't look like it will be submerged under the water, you may need to quarter it.
2. Gently boil this stock for about an hour.
3. At the same time in another pot, bring the barley and 1/2 liter of water to a gentle boil. Also boil this for about an hour, checking in on it every 20 minutes or so to make sure the water hasn't boiled away.
4. Chop the leeks into approximately 1 cm / 1.2 inch disks. Set aside until ready to use.
5. After the hour, remove all the chicken and onion pieces from the stock pot. Set the chicken aside to cool down enough until you can handle it.
6. Also after the hour and once the stock pot contains only liquid, add the barley and the leeks to the stock pot. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for around 30-40 minutes.
7. Shred the chicken - remove the skin and throw it out, and pull the meat apart so that it's in bite-sized chunks.
8. After 30 minutes, check the soup mixture for consistency. It should be nicely thick rather than watery. If it needs to thicken up, turn up the heat to boil away some of the water.
9. Add salt to taste, and enough pepper to make the entire soup warmingly peppery.
10. Add the chicken back into the soup when it is otherwise ready, and cook for a further 3 minutes to warm through.

Many Bean Soup

I've been making this soup for years; it's one of the first things as an adult I figured out how to make after tasting it and falling in love with the flavors. It's hearty, it's filling, it's very easy to pull together, and it's wonderfully delicious in a very homey way.

This is an Italian-style soup, discovered when I did a term abroad in Florence during my undergraduate degree. I lived with an Italian woman who was a wonderful cook and who opened my eyes to a whole new way of cooking (and eating - I gained about 6 pounds from living with her for 3 months. Pretty impressive). This soup began making an appearance in my Italian home during the autumn, as the weather grew colder and the daylight shorter, and it's very much linked in my mind to staving off any outdoor chill with a warming bowl of goodness.

It is more than halfway to a stew, it's so thick; adding in some spinach, kale, or chard at the end of the cooking, quickly fried in a bit of garlic, would help tip the balance away from a simple soup. Even without the extra vegetables, though, it's a full meal in one bowl. The beans are nicely soft and should be caught just before they go mushy, and the minimal amount of liquid that remains after all the cooking helps tie the ingredients together and adds to the warming comforting squishiness of eating the dish.

The simple flavors of beans, beef stock, rosemary and garlic are fairly straight-forward, but generous lashings of parmesan cheese at the end really make the difference. The recipe is more of a guide than anything strict to follow; as long as you get the basics correct (the right amount of beans and stock, pasta cooked for the right time, plenty of cheese) you're onto a winner.



Many Bean Soup
Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a starter

• 500 g of mixed dried beans (chickpeas, white beans, and roman beans/borlotti beans are usually my preferred combination)
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely sliced
• 2 litres of beef stock or 2 litres of water and 3 beef stock cubes
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 sprigs of rosemary
• salt (about 1 tsp, depending) and pepper
• 250 g ditalini pasta
• (optional: about 300-500 g of spinach or chard and 1 further clove of garlic, well chopped)
  
• plenty of parmesan

1. Soak the beans overnight / during the day to start to soften. Keep the chickpeas separate if using them.
2. When ready to cook, bring the stock / water and stock cubes to a gentle boil, adding in the onion, garlic, bay leaf and rosemary.
3. If using chickpeas, add them to the boiling stock first and cook for about 20 minutes, covered.
4. Add the other beans to the soup, and gently boil, covered, for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
5. The beans will be ready when they start to shed their shells. Keep in mind that the chickpeas will take the longest to cook, so make sure you check those when testing for doneness.
6. When the beans are just about done, add the salt to taste - depending on what type of stock you used, you might need 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt. Take care not to over-salt since the paremesan in the bowl will also help keep this salted.
7. (optional: quickly fry up the chopped glove of garlic and the vegetable in a bit of olive oil, turning off the heat before the leafy greens are wilted. Add the contents to the soup just before you put the pasta in, and stir through)
   
8. When the beans are ready, add in the pasta and turn off the heat after 1 further minute of gentle boiling.
9. Remove bay leaf and rosemary twigs, and spoon into bowls. Add generous amounts of parmesan into each bowl, stirring through.

White Bean and Chestnut Soup

One of the few things on which Mr A&N and I disagree is the notion of long walks. I can only presume his parents subjected him to some torturously long walks in horrible weather, over rugged terrain, and with no shoes to protect his delicate, child-sized feet, because the way he reacts to the question "Would you like to go for a walk?" tells me that there are some deep scars that are nowhere near healed. We've recently come to the agreement that if I'm to be successful in getting him to join me for a walk, there needs to be a reward involved in it: a pint of beer at the end, a slice of cake, a bacon sandwich thrust into his hand.


I'm willing to make the compromise because I love going for walks, and using it as time to enjoy the seasons. In autumn, I love finding piles of leaves and kicking and crunching my way through them, or finding shocks of color thrown against the normal landscape, nature's last dramatic gesture before the bareness of winter. Autumnal walks also provide the chance of gathering pocketfuls of edible goodies, which only adds to my joy in being out during this season.


It turns out, rather happily, that Mr A&N will accept as his walking-reward time spent hunting for food. I know, reader, I know - I'm as shocked by this turn of events as you are, but I'll confess that I couldn't be more pleased. So during our recent walk around Hampstead Heath, with our pockets full of chestnuts (and our hands cut and scratched from handling their casings), we both returned home content and thinking of how we could put our bounty to good use.


White Bean and Chestnut Soup (an approximate recipe)
Serves 2 for a main course, 4-6 for a starter

• 300 g white beans
• 1 onion, chopped finely
• 1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
• 250 g (approx) of unsmoked bacon
• 200 g / 20 chestnuts, peeled and roughly chopped
• 1 1/2 litres stock
• 1 bay leaf
• (optional: milk or cream)
• (optional: truffle oil)

1. First, soak the beans over night to soften them. After soaking, drain and rinse the beans.
2. Heat some olive oil in a stock pot, and add the onions, garlic, and half of the bacon (roughly chopped). Stir occasionally and allow the onions to soften and the bacon to mostly cook.
3. Add the chestnuts and beans, and stir.
4. Add in the stock and the bay leaf, and bring to a gentle boil.
5. Allow to simmer away gently until the beans are well softened, about 45 - 1 hour.
6. When the beans are near to finished, grill the remaining strips of bacon until crispy and chop up - these will go on top of the soup.
7. Turn off the heat, remove the bay leaf from the soup, and blend about 3/4 of it.
8. Return the blended soup to the pot with the rest of the soup, and stir together.
9. Turn the heat back on to low, and add salt and pepper to taste.
10. At this point, you may want to add a touch of milk or cream to the mixture if you want to making the consistency creamier; I prefer to leave it as it is since it is naturally quite creamy.
11. Spoon into bowls and garnish with a handful of the grilled bacon.
12. If you have truffle oil, you might want to drizzle a bit in each bowl in order to deepen the autumnal flavor of it.

Carrot and Corainder Seed Soup

This is one of my favorite soups. That's a big claim - during the non-summer months, we tend to have home-made soups at least once a week. Adding to my pleasure in eating soup is the fact that my stomach has an ability to take in liquid in volumes unseen in most humans. And camels. It's a unique gustatory talent to have, and I try to use it well.

Carrot and coriander seed soup is a wonderful soup for the autumn; I found it in a Delia Smith cookbook and she recommends it as a spring dish, but I couldn't disagree more. The coriander seeds, which are toasted and then ground into powder, create a fragrant warming vein lacing through the carrots, and help to bring on a suffuse warmth. This balances beautifully with the delicate sweetness of the carrots. Since I have the soup as my main meal, I like to eat it with a thick wholemeal bread slathered in butter, like an Irish soda bread.

This time making the soup, I experimented by cutting the kernels off a couple of ears of corn, and toasting half while including the other half in the soup. I liked the toasted corn sprinkled on top of the soup, but found the extra corn pureed within it upset the balance of the other flavors and added to much sweetness overall.


Carrot and Coriander Seed Soup, from Delia Smith
Seres 6 as a starter, 3-4 as a main

• 2 lb of carrots
• 1 Tbs coriander seeds (I normally tend to double this, but you might want to start as suggested)
• 1 oz / 25 g butter
• 1 small clove garlic
• 2 pints / 1.2 litres chicken or vegetable stock
• 3 Tbs chopped coriander (I sometimes leave this out to no ill effect)
• 3 Tbs creme fraiche
• salt and pepper

1. Peel and chop the carrots
2. Dry-roast the coriander seeds in a pan, shaking gently throughout; roast for 1-2 minutes until the seeds start browning and jumping around the pan. Transfer the seeds to a mortar and pestle and crush
3. Melt the butter in a large pot, then add the carrots, garlic, and 3/4 of the coriander seeds
4. Stir, and let sweat for about 10 minutes until the carrots begin to soften
5. Add the stock and salt and pepper, and bring to the boil
6. Reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, for 15-20 minutes or until the carrots are tender
7. Liquidize the soup in batches, then return to the pot and add the chopped fresh coriander and the creme fraiche
8. Re-heat the soup gently, tasting for flavor, and sprinkle each bowlful with the remaining toasted coriander seeds

Pea and Mint Soup

Somewhat outrageously, this has been the second day in a row of bright, warm weather. I don't know what this British weather thinks it's playing at, but I'm re-assured to hear that tomorrow is a return to heavy rains, hail, and lower temperatures and that it will stay that way through the weekend. Phew - this can hardly be the most miserable summer ever if it didn't turn horrible again.

In the mean time, a summery version of the classic pea soup seemed the appropriate companion to what nature was offering up. It's not only a tasty, filling soup but it takes wonderfully little effort - perfect for summer evenings when you don't want to be standing in a hot kitchen for long. There are many similar versions of this soup out there, but I like to make mine with fresh mint for that lovely minty pea taste. I tried putting cucumber in this version, which neither added to nor detracted from the result and which I'll probably leave out in the future. The other thing to note is that I used soya milk in my recipe simply because I don't drink milk; most other recipes would call for cream which I'm sure would round out the natural sweetness of the peas and add a touch of richness as well.

Pea and Mint Soup
Serves 4 as a main course or 6-8 for a starter

• 2 red onion or 6 shallots, chopped
  
• 4 spring onions, chopped
  
• 1/2 head romaine lettuce, roughly chopped
  
• 1 generous handful of mint, roughly chopped
• 1 litre of stock (chicken or vegetable)
• 2 lbs of peas (frozen is fine)
• 1 C of cream/milk/soya milk
• 6 pieces of bacon (optional garnish)
  
• 2 Tbs butter
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Over a medium heat, melt the butter and sautee together the onions/shallots and spring onions, until softened.
2. Add the lettuce and mint, cooking until each has wilted a bit.
3. Pour in the stock, cooking until the stock just comes to a boil.
4. When the stock is warm enough, add the peas and cook those for a few minutes.
5. When the peas have just cooked through, turn off the heat and add the soup into a blender in batches. Blend until the soup is smooth.
6. Transfer the blended soup back to the pot, and heat over a low heat. Add the cream/soya milk, as well as salt and pepper to taste. Also depending on whether you're using cream, milk, or soya milk, add more of any of the above or add more butter in order to thicken and enrich the soup to the level you like.
7. Meanwhile, grill the bacon until very crispy. Once cooked, roughly chop the pieces.
8. Serve the soup in bowls with a sprinkle of bacon to garnish. Another optional garnish is to top it off with some roughly chopped mint.