Duck, Ginger and Orange Soup

 

Oh the joys of moving house - boxes everywhere, days spent packing and unpacking, trying to squeeze everything you own into the smallest space possible and then realising you accidentally packed the cat at the bottom of the box...

Yes I'm moving house, and one task that I have had to do is to empty the freezer in order that it can have it's once a decade defrosting before the move it.  It has turned up all sorts of fun things, like random bags of unidentified frozen herbs, Tupperware full of goodness-knows-what and the remains of a duck.

It was this bird that prompted today's soup.  The rest of the duck was eaten as part of Mrs Soup's birthday celebration - regular readers will remember I roasted it upside down - but as we never knowingly waste food, the rest of it was frozen for later.

Now, as I'm very un-organised, I forgot to defrost the duck in enough time, so to speed up the process, I hacked the frozen carcass into chunks.  When I had thawed them and put them in the pan, I noticed that the knife I had used to cut it up with had broken, and a tiny but pointy shard of steel had come off and was, presumably, in the soup somewhere, just waiting to shred someones insides like a Jagged Metal Krusty-O (Simpsons reference).  I was pretty sure that, having sieved the stock and shredded the meat with my fingers, the knife fragment hadn't had it to the bowls I served, but it still made for an interesting dining experience...

Anyway, on with the soup...

Ingredients
1 Duck
1 Orange
60ml Sherry
6 Large Cabbage leaves
Large Piece Fresh Finger
2 Star Anise
1tbsp Dried Mushrooms
1 Large Carrot
1 Large Onion
10 Pepper Corns
2 Bay Leaves

Method
1.  Roast your duck.  I found that Hugh FW had all the answers when it came to doing this, so I'll leave you in his capable hands (But remember not to roast it upside down)

2.  Let the roast cool down then strip off the meat and save for later.

3.  Place the carcass, and the drippings form the roasting tray in a large pot, with a roughly chopped carrot, onion, the pepper corns and bay leaves, then add 2 litres of water.  Bring the pan to a boil and then simmer for 3 hours.

4.  Let the pan cool and then strain the liquid, removing all the bits of duck carcass and the vegetables.  At this point, you should try to skim off as much of the fat from the top of the stock, or even leave it in the fridge overnight, so the fat sets and can be removed easily (Don't throw it away as duck fat is amazing and can be used to make roast potatoes even more tasty...)

5. Heat up the stock, and add the sherry, dried mushrooms, star anise and the juice and zest of the orange.  Simmer the soup for 45 minutes.

6. Shred the duck meat - how much you want to put in is up to you.  A good sized duck should have enough meat for the soup and something else as well - and the cabbage leaves and stir them in about 5 minutes before serving.  Enjoy!

Haggis, Kidneys and Kievs. A Week of Meals 004

Week four of 2013 - A Stomach Odyssey brought us foods from around the world, exciting new ingredients and a rare food-fail.  How, what and why?  Keep reading as the answers lay within...

Friday - Haggis, Tatties and Neeps

Friday was Burns Night.  Not being Scottish in any way, shape or form, I nonetheless wanted to get in on the action, as I am a big fan of sheeps lungs boiled in their intestines, oh yes!  To go with the haggis, I made its traditional accompaniment, Tatties and Neeps.  There was some discussion on twitter about whether the Neeps in question should be Turnips or Swede.  I war reliably informed by someone what is an actual Scotsman that true Tatties and Neeps should contain swede, so with that rutabaga based question resolved, I whipped up a batch and t'was delicious

Saturday - Mole Poblano de Pollo (Chicken in Chili and Chocolate Sauce)

This was my recipe picked from a cookbook called 'A Mexican Celebration', full of festive foods from Mexico.  Predictably, I picked it because it sounded weird and wonderful, but I was worried that the chocolate that I got (80% cocoa solids) would still be too sweet when put into the sauce.  I shouldn't have worried because it turned out a great recipe - a little like a Mexican Korma.  If you are interested in making it, there's a recipe here that is very similar to the one I followed

Sunday - Chicken Kiev

Mrs Soup had a go at making the old 70's dinner party classic from a cookbook that I got way back when I was a student.  It was a first for me as I've only ever had those nasty ones that are made of mechanically reclaimed chicken.  Having them made fresh was a bit of a revelation, and I was impressed that the garlic butter staying in its meaty pocket during the frying process...

Monday - Kidneys in Sherry

A recipe from my Offal Cookbook "The Fifth Quarter".  Apart from Steak and Kidney Pie, I've never cooked kidney before.  Even after soaking in water and lemon juice to cleanse them, the kidney had an odour that could only be described as 'urine' or, as Mrs Soup put it "Like an old people's home" - an evil old people's home run by bad people , I should add.  There was at least one plate that wasn't cleared at the end of the meal, which is a rare occurrence, and I suspect that it will be a while before I try kidney on it's own again...

Tuesday - Thai Noodle Soup with Fish Balls

See the blogpost here

Wednesday - Chicken and Celeriac Stew with Harissa

This was a random, thrown together stew, using some veg from the veg box and the harissa paste that we recieved as part of a foodie pen pals box a while ago.  No dumplings with this stew, you may notice, and the Harissa was unexpectedly spicy, which almost overpowered the dish.

Pumpkin Soup with Sage and Bacon

On a trip to the supermarket the other day,  I had to wade through aisle after aisle of skeleton themed sweets, plastic vampire fangs and bottles of bleach in the shape of Frankenstein's Monster (although I may be making one of these up...) which led me with the swiftness of Sherlock Holmes, to deduce that Halloween is almost upon us.

Me, with terrible wounds...

Much like Chrismas, birthdays and that day when they roll cheeses down a hill somewhere and people chase after them, Halloween seems to be a decisive event.  From people moaning about it being an American holiday, being over-commercialised to people objecting on religious grounds and so on and so forth.  Me, I love it - always have done, back from when I was a nipper and we used to make turnip lanterns as pumpkins were such stuff as dreams were made of back in the 70's in Leeds. 

On to student days when we dressed as zombies, lobster creatures and, erm, werewolves with jaundice (yes, we still remember that Kris!) and now in more sedate times re-watching old Hammer Horror films like Frankenstein and The Monster From Hell and Taste the Blood of Dracula (man those films had way better names that modern horror films do...)

And yes, it goes without saying that the one vegetable that symbolises Halloween is the pumpkin (which are everywhere now...) so here is a pumpkin soup to warm your bones as you prepare to chill your soul this Halloween.

Of course, you could leave out the bacon and use vegetable stock if you wanted, but scientists have discovered that the addition of bacon improves any dish by 1027%, and who am I to argue with science?

Ingredients
40g Butter
2 Onions
1kg Pumpkin
2 cloves Garlic
1.2l Chicken Stock
60ml Sherry
50g Smoked Bacon
Pumpkin Seeds
1tbsp Chopped Fresh Sage
Grated Nutmeg

Method
1. Finely chop the onions and garlic.  Heat the butter in your soup pan and then gently fry the onion and garlic until it starts to colour.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

2.  Peel the pumpkin, de-seed it and then cut the flesh into cubes.  Add these to the pan and cook for a further 10 minutes, until the pumpkin flesh is soft.

3. Add the stock, sherry, sage,and some salt and pepper, bring the pan to the boil and then reduce to a simmer.  Cover and cook for 30 minutes, until the pumpkin is very soft.

4.  Remove the pan from the heat and then blend until smooth, pass the soup through a sieve to remove lumps and make it extra smooth at this point if you like, then return to the pan.

5.  Re-heat and serve.  Garnish with grated nutmeg, toasted pumpkin seeds, basil leaves fried in a little butter until crisp and some cubes of fried smoked bacon.  Enjoy!

Roasted Garlic Soup

I  love garlic - can't get enough of it!  Possibly because I was scared of vampires and brought up watching old Hammer Horror films.  Anyway, I was also feeling like I was coming down with a cold, and somebody told me that garlic soup was a good cure.  So here, without further ado, is the Garlic Soup recipe that I cooked up.

And it did cure the cold (possibly with the aid of paracetamol and plenty of sleep)  Oh, and the wild garlic really adds something to it, either as a garnish, or just thrown into the soup as it cooks.  Wild garlic grows all over the place from about March to June and its' leaves can be used raw in salads (and potato salad too) or as an ingredient in a lot of cooking.  It has a much more mild flavour than cloves of garlic, so shouldn't be overwhelmed by other ingredients.