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One Potato, Two Potato

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January 8, 2012 By In eat me, soups

In the wake of post-holiday food fussing, iced over (literally) with a business trip to Chicago, my motivation to prepare anything with more than three steps and a can opener has gone into winter hibernation.

Still, even in my sloth-like state, I was willing to put down my book and get out from under my blanket long enough to fire up the oven and roast a few potatoes for this no-brainer soup. Just like a baked potato, it’s a hearty blank slate to which you can to add whatever toppings you like.

Baked Potato Soup

Tom’s Baked Potato Soup
adapted from my dad’s “I don’t think I have ever done it the same way twice” recipe

6 baking potatoes
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup flour
3 cups milk
2 cups vegetable broth
1 cup sweet white onion, chopped
5 cloves of garlic, minced
salt and pepper
topping additions of your choice

Preheat oven to 425°F and line a baking sheet with foil.

Scrub potatoes and pierce each several times with a fork. Coat each spud with olive oil and place on the baking sheet. Roast for one hour and set aside. When cool enough to handle, scoop out flesh into a bowl and mash slightly.

Dad says: “Leave it kind of chunky. Have a cooking apprentice there to do your bidding. You can play the part of Chef Ramsey, but do not say the F-word as much as he does unless you have a bleeper device handy.” Save skins for snacking.

Melt butter in a large soup pot and saute onion and garlic until tender. Add flour a little at a time and stir constantly, cooking off the raw flour taste. Add milk and continue to stir until thickened. Add broth and potato flesh to the pan and continue to stir, breaking up larger potato chunks with the back of the spoon. (I have also found mashing a pastry cutter around the pot very useful in this situation, or sometimes when I want a creamier soup, I run my immersion blender around it a few times. Cook’s choice.)

Dad notes: “You can add more milk or broth if you want, but it’s supposed to be somewhat thick. Salt and pepper if you want to. (White peppercorns if you have them. Do not want specks in the soup, now do we?) Serve hot. Can top with cheese, chives, bacon bits (oops, bits are for carnivores only).”

I usually just add lots and lots of dill, but this weekend I decided to kick in a couple tablespoons of horseradish-tinged mustard. The soup is a blank canvas; go crazy. It stores well, but may need thinned with broth or milk when reheating.

The Things We Ate (Christmas 2011 Edition)

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December 30, 2011 By In breads & breakfast, eat me, soups

The Christmas week here at Wonderland Kitchen annually includes three or more solid days of feeding six adult people. Sure, we get a restaurant meal in one evening and nosh on plenty of cookies along the way, but a little cafeteria strategy keeps us from going hungry without someone spending the entire holiday in front of the stove.

This year, my plan was homemade soups and breads, rounded out with some store-bought meats and cheeses for sandwich-making, so that a variety of meal combinations could be patched together to match the widest variety of tastes and dietary requirements.

To that end, I started researching options that might make a dent in the supplies offered by my (previously!) over-stocked pantry, and we ended up with some real winners. I wasn’t planning to post these dishes, so I didn’t take the usual series of process shots, but some of the recipes I discovered were just too tasty to horde for myself.

The Breads:

I made these both pretty much exactly as outlined in the linked recipes, no real adaptation or tweaks required.

Tomato, Basil, and Garlic Filled Pane Bianco
from Dianna Wara/King Arthur Flour

Tomato, Basil, and Garlic Filled Pane Bianco

Looked like such a challenge, but it really wasn’t (so perfect for entertaining!). I admit I was skeptical about using scissors to cut open my loaf before shaping, so at first I tried using a serrated knife. That was a fail. Just use the scissors. The good people at King Arthur Flour know what they are talking about without my interventions.

New York Deli Rye
from Smitten Kitchen/The Bread Bible

New York Deli Rye

The only switch up I employ here is to form the loaf into a batard shape and slash it deeply across four or five times. I bake it with the ice/steam method suggested.

The Soups:

(Absolutely the Best, Most Awesome) Cream of Tomato Soup (Ever!)
from Smitten Kitchen/The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

Cream of Tomato Soup

I skipped the brandy and the cayenne pepper, because I worried it would scare off my family, and I didn’t think the soup needed any additional salt. I immediately ate two bowls.

Gypsy Soup
from The Yellow House/Mollie Katzen’s The New Moosewood Cookbook

Gypsy Soup

This seemed like a great dish to keep warm on the back burner and feed to arriving family members after their long drives to our house. It made a huge amount, and yet it seems to have disappeared. I’ll be keeping this one in the winter rotation.

I swapped potatoes/sweet potatoes for the squash (that’s what I had), used swiss chard for the greens (my preference in most cooking cases), and mixed a spice combination of 1 tsp. hot curry, 2 tsps. garam masala, and 3 tsps. sweet Hungarian paprika (in place of the turmeric, paprika, bay leaf, and cayenne indicated in the recipe).

Epic Feast: Giving Thanks in Advance

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November 21, 2011 By In breads & breakfast, eat me, mains, sides, soups

I’d like to slip in an early “I’m thankful for…” acknowledgement to say that I’m thankful for cozy weekends at home with family and friends. It probably seems like a ridiculously simple thing, but a concentrated stretch of “closed laptop/turned off work life” and some steady human interaction provides powerful recalibration in life. My own priorities realigned, I was back at my desk this morning with fresh focus and a smile on my face.

That in our house the embrace of these warm and comforting times usually centered around the kitchen is probably not a shocker, and Brian and I decided to throw a little pre-Thanksgiving feast on Sunday evening to cap it all off. There was food and food and more food, plus three wines to pair it up with. We may just have to make a habit of this: Sunday Suppers in Wonderland, anyone? I think I smell a 2012 project coming on…

So anyway, a plan was hatched.

The Menu

The food:

Spinach Salad with Bosch Pears, Cranberries, Red Onion, and Toasted Pecans w/goat cheese rounds rolled in pepitas (a riff off of this)

Kaddo Bowrani (Baked Pumpkin) from The Helmand Restaurant (secret recipe revealed to the world thanks to this)

Roasted Parsnip and Pear Soup (a decadent, non-vegan variation on this)

Cheddar and Dill Biscuits (pretty much these, but sans bacon)

Roast Chicken Provençal (Brian made this as outlined, while I subscribed to the blog that provided the recipe, because it’s amazingly lovely.)

Simmered Root Vegetables with Swiss Chard (more or less this, though we only used kale, carrots, and potatoes. It was fairly plain, so next time I think I’ll do a version of the the pot pie gravy and filling instead)

The wines:

2011 Georges Deboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau
2009 Perrin & Fils Cotes de Rhone Villages
2008 Domaine de Ferrand Chateauneuf-du-Pape

Not a dud in the bunch. We enjoyed them all and they complimented the food (right down to the Lake Champlain truffles we ended the night on) perfectly.

 

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And now, a sampling of the recipes. The rest were so close to the linked originals above that they don’t seem to bear repeating.

Roasted Parsnip and Pear Soup
adapted from Vegan Workshop

3 large parsnips, peeled and cubed
2 medium pears, cored and cubed
1 small onion or a few shallots, peeled and quartered
2 T hazelnut oil
1/2 cup whole milk
2 T maple syrup
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Place parsnip, pear, and onion chunks on a large baking sheet (I line mine with foil first for easy clean up). Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss to evenly coat.

Roast the fruit and vegetables for about 40 minutes, stirring halfway through for even browning.

About 15 minutes before roasting is complete, bring 5 cups of vegetable broth and 1 bay leaf to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Add roasted fruit and vegetables and leave to simmer 10 minutes more. Remove bay leaf and puree the soup. Stir in milk and maple syrup. Add additional vegetable broth or milk to thin to desired consistency, and adjust seasoning to taste.

Kaddo Bowrani (Baked Pumpkin)
from The Helmand Restaurant in Baltimore (via the Baltimore Sun)

1 small pumpkin
3/4 cup sugar (Overwhelmed by this amount, I used a lot less sugar–a 1/4 cup, if that–but then found the dish lacking. Still, that’s a lot of sugar, so more experiments will be needed. I think I’ll give brown sugar a try next.)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
cinnamon
1 cup plain yogurt
1 teaspoon garlic, minced
Dash salt

Remove seeds and peel pumpkin. Slice remaining flesh top to bottom into 2-inch crescents. In a large, oven-safe sautée pan with a lid, heat oil and add pumpkin. Cook on medium covered for 10 minutes, flipping slices over with tongs halfway through. Remove from heat and sprinkle the pumpkin with the sugar and cinnamon. Replace lid and bake at 350°F for 20 minutes or until soft.

Stir yogurt, garlic, and salt together until smooth. Plate warm pumpkin, drizzle with yogurt sauce, and serve immediately.

Cheddar and Dill Biscuits
adapted from Bon Appétit

3 3/4 cups bread flour
1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup chilled unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups coarsely grated sharp cheddar cheese (about 12 ounces)
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1 3/4 cups chilled buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt to the bowl of a food processor and pulse several times to mix. Cube up the butter and add to the flour mixture, pulsing again until butter is reduced to small bits. Place this mixture in a large bowl, along with cheese and dill. Toss with fork to evenly incorporate. Pour in buttermilk while stirring and mix just enough to wet all ingredients and produce a sticky dough.

Pull off small handfuls (approx. 1/4 cup) of the shaggy dough with your fingers and drop onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake biscuits until golden, about 18 to 20 minutes.

A feast shared and well enjoyed.

A feast shared and well enjoyed.

Falling Back Into Soup

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September 18, 2011 By In breads & breakfast, csa & vegetables, eat me, soups

Crisp temperatures required that I actually dig proper shoes out of the closet before hitting the farmer’s market this weekend. Suddenly sweet potatoes and squash sounded appetizing. Weird how nature works like that. Summer, it seems, is saying her farewells.

When I got my weekly produce haul home and out on the counter, I spent fifteen minutes dreaming up multiple, complex culinary projects that would suit a blog post here before I stumbled on Yotam Ottlenghi’s recipe for Broiled Vegetable Soup and realized I had the exact combination of veggies needed for this single, elegantly simple dish. It was irresistible. Some people play sudoku; I get a little jolt of dopamine when I read through an ingredient list and realize I have just enough of this and that and that other thing to make it work out perfectly.

Aside: the eggplant is a vegetable that I want to love unreservedly, but that I frequently despise because I have cooked it poorly. No more! When prepping it for soups and spreads, the “hour under the broiler” method Ottlenghi suggests will be my new go-to. Doing so chars the outside to a crisp so that you then literally crack it open to scoop out the beautifully cooked meat inside.

Okay, back to the soup. While I said I had just enough of everything, my available ratio of nightshades definitely favored the tomato, so unsurprisingly my soup led with that on the palate. Still, the rich and smokey eggplant on the base and the fresh basil on the top notes make this soup a stand out. My real coup here, however, was that I had scored a bag of fresh lima beans, so no canned mush in my ladle. The resulting bowl was a perfect match to the season.

You cannot (or at least I certainly will not) have soup without bread, however, and I had just seen a recipe I wanted to try out that used left over dill pickle juice as part of the liquid. You might have noticed that I’ve been making a few pickles here and there this summer, so I have spare dill-spiked brine all over the place. It seemed a similar-enough thing when I started, but I began to change my mind as I worked. I think the sweet, less vinegar-y commercial dill pickle juice that was suggested in the recipe would have suited this project fantastically, but my homemade pickling leftovers were a little too pungent. Still, it got me out of my rye bread rut, so all was not lost. And it makes great toast!

Broiled Vegetable Soup

From Plenty by Yotam Ottlenghi

3 medium eggplants
2 red bell peppers, stems and seeds removed (I used 2 roasted red peppers out of jar on hand)
3 medium tomatoes
2 red onions, diced
2 T olive oil
3/4 basil leaves, torn
2 oregano springs, leaves only
10 garlic cloves
1 qt vegetable stock (I had less eggplant and only ended up needing 3 cups to get a good consistency soup)
salt and pepper
4 cups cooked lima beans (fresh, if you have them)
yogurt or lemon to garnish

The best part of this recipe is the taste that the broiling of the vegetables gets out of them (or at least that’s what Ottlenghi writes and, after sampling, I would have to agree). Set the broiler on high. Prick the eggplant a few times with a fork and place in a foil-lined pan. Broil for 30 minutes.

At the 30 minute mark, turn the eggplant over with tongs and add the 2 peppers to the pan. Broil for 15 more minutes, turning the peppers half way through.

Place the tomatoes in a second foil-lined pan and at the 45 minute mark, add them to the oven on a rack beneath the already broiling vegetables. Broil for an additional 15 minutes, and then remove all vegetables from the oven, wrapping the peppers in foil. Once the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel them and roughly chop. Scoop out the flesh of the eggplant, leaving the charred skin behind.

In a stock pot , saute the onion in the olive oil on low for 20 minutes, until soft and golden (I started this when I put my tomatoes in the oven and the timing worked out well). To this pot then add the scooped eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, stock, oregano, half the basil, salt and peppers and simmer for 15 minutes. Blend until smooth and add cooked lima beans, reheating as needed. Adjust seasoning to taste and serve topped with yogurt or lemon and the remaining basil leaves. A slice of freshly baked bread on the side won’t do you wrong, either.