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.

Carrot and Coriander Soup

Ahhhhhh!  That was the sound of panic when the doorbell rang this morning at 7.15.  Not because I was still in bed and there was someone at the door, but because the person at the door was our lovely veg box man.  Don't mis-understand me - there was nothing actually wrong with the veg box, nor the hour of its arrival (although a more fashionably late hour would suit me better)

No, the cause of my outburst was that there was meant to be parsnips in the box this week, which were going to form the basis for this weeks soup, Curried Parsnip.  Only, now bereft of parsnip, what is a boy to do?  Well, what is that I spied in the veg box, nestled under some cabbage and next to the potatoes?  Carrots?  Still covered in mud you say?  Well that gives me an idea...

I told you all a while ago about the first ever soup I made, minestrone as part of a home economics class when I was 12? Well today I'm going to tell you about the first soup I ever cooked to impress a girl...  Carrot and coriander soup.  This soup seems to be a bit of a student classic, probably because it's cheap and easy to make, healthy and quick, and there are hundreds of ways to do it.

Some people add lentils, some tomatoes, cream, sour cream, coconut milk.  It is, in a nutshell, what is brilliant about soup - it's tasty and it's very hard to mess it up.  So I thought it would be perfect for impressing a girl that I invited to come round for a meal.  It was the first time I'd ever cooked to impress, so needless to say, I was worried.

The soup simmered away, with vegetable stock as she was a vegetarian, not too much chili as she didn't like her food too spicy. The ginger and lemon a sharp counterpoint to the earthy carrots sweet tomatoes and spices.  It was perfect...

She turned up, the lights were low, the music was soft, the chat was small, and then I dished up the soup and... she loved it, was very impressed - in fact, it was the best carrot and coriander soup she'd ever tasted - even better than her friend who worked in a vegan cafe made (which was previously the pinnacle of soupy perfection for her)

I could hardly believe my luck.  Maybe there was something in this cooking malarkey after all.  And then I served the main dish - tandoori salmon, choked on a fish bone and spent the next three hours retching and coughing like a cat coughing up a hair-ball...  The girl left rather quickly after that...

Ingredients
500g Carrots
10 Medium Tomatoes
3 Cloves of Garlic
1 Lemon (Juice Only)
750ml Chicken Stock
1 Tin Coconut Milk
1tsp Grated Ginger
1tbsp Coriander Seeds
1tsp Cumin Seeds
1tsp Chili Flakes Oregano


Balsamic Vinegar
Bunch of fresh Coriander
Olive Oil
Salt and Black Pepper

Method

1.  Heat the oven to 200ºc.  Cut the tomatoes in half and de-seed.  Put them in an oven dish and drizzle with olive oil.  Sprinkle on a pinch of dried oregano and a splash of balsamic vinegar, then a pinch of salt and pepper.  Put the dish in the oven and roast the tomatoes for 35-40 minutes, until they have started to brown.  Remove from the oven and set aside.

2.  In a dry frying pan, heat the coriander and cumin seeds over a moderate heat for 2 minutes, until the seeds start to pop.  Transfer them to a mortar and grind.

3.  Slice the onion and fry gently in a little oil.  Add the  garlic and ginger and fry for another 2 minutes, then add the ground cumin and coriander seeds, as well as the chili flakes and stir until everything is coated in the spices

4.  Add the tomatoes, stock and peeled sliced carrots.  Bring the soup to the boil and then cover, simmering and cooking for 30 minutes, until the carrots are cooked through

5.  Blend the soup until it's smooth and then return to the pan.  Gently heat through.

6.  Stir in the coconut milk, chopped fresh coriander and the juice of a lemon.

7.  Garnish with a few coriander leaves.  Serve and enjoy!

African Chicken and Peanut Soup

Here's a little known and rather sad fact.  Mr Ed, the talking horse (of course) was often said to have been made to talk by having peanut butter smeared on his teeth.  As the horse attempted to lick it off, it looked like his mouth was moving in speech.  The truth of the matter is that the horse had wires attached to his mouth, but the animal trainer thought that the peanut butter story was more charming, child-friendly and less likely to have those pesky animal rights busy-bodies interfering. Nowadays of course, Mr Ed would be made to talk via the wonders of computer animation (and probably voiced by Eddie Murphy - which would be a good thing...)

Another little known fact is that peanut is actually a bean.

A third (and final) fact is that peanut butter is my father's least liked food in the entire world.

At least two of these facts were brought to you with the aid of Wikipedia, see if you can guess which one wasn't...

The reason, of course, for these nut-based facts was that today's soup has peanut butter as an ingredient.  I love peanut butter on toast from my breakfast, but for some reason, I'd never gotten round to using it as an ingredient in cooking before.  I now feel that I have been remiss for all this time, as it added so much to this soup.  Indeed, if anyone has any other recipes which use peanut butter, feel free to point me in their direction in the comments section below!

On the question of crunchy vs smooth, however, I leave the choice entirely up to you!

Also, I used left-over chicken from a Sunday Roast (Again) but there's no reason on that you couldn't use chicken thighs or breast if you wanted.  This is a lovely, hearty and a little bit spicy soup

Ingredients
450g Cooked Chicken
1 Onion
1 Small Squash
2 Red Peppers
1 Tin Chopped Tomatoes
3 Cloves of Garlic
3tbsp Peanut Butter
2tbsp Sesame Oil
1 Small Piece of Ginger
1tsp Chili Flakes
2tsp Curry Powder
1l Chicken stock

Method
1. Peel and de-seed the squash then cut into cubes.  Finely chop the onion and garlic.

2. Heat some olive oil in your soup pan, then cook the onions until the soften.  Add the garlic and grated ginger, then cook of 3 minutes over a low heat.

3.  Add the squash, chopped pepper chili flakes as curry powder and cook for a further 5 minutes.  Then add the tomatoes, stock and sesame oil.  Finally add the cooked chicken

4.  Bring the soup to the boil and then simmer, covered, for 20 minutes, before adjusting seasoning and serve.  Enjoy!

Soupe Djiboutienne - Olympic Food Challenge : Djibouti

Just when I thought it was all over, they pulled me back in... It seems that not all the countries allocated to the various bloggers as part of the Olympic Food Challenge got completed, so there were some going spare.  I put my name in the hat and got two further countries to have a crack at.  The first is Djibouti and because this is a soup blog, I'm making a soup! (Well, I say soup, but this dish is more stew than soup.  It's delicious whatever you want to call it though)

Djibouti (and every time I type that I'm thinking 'shake djibouti' for some reason) sent 5 athletes to compete at London 2012, but sadly failed to win any medals to add to their grand total of 1 Bronze, won in Seoul in 1988.

A lot like the soup I made for Tajikistan, this is a no-frills affair.  No spices, no frying of ingredients or browning meat, not even any stock, just throw everything in the pan and cook it for ages.  When I find a recipe like this, I'm always caught between following the recipe as is, or adding, changing and generally tinkering, but when it came to the Olympic Food Challenge, I decided to try to keep as much as possible to the original recipes, as adding too much myself seemed to be going against the spirit of the thing.

Menudo Rojo (Tripe Soup)

This one has been a long time coming!  I've had my eye on making something with tripe in it since I started writing this blog.  As regular readers will know, I have two culinary obsessions - black pudding and dumplings - and I would say that the first one extends to all manner of offal and unusual meat stuffs.

After a visit to a really nice Chinese restaurant, I had tripe for the first time and really liked it, despite horror stories from my Mother about how awful it was.  My grandfather apparently loved it, and I have memories of seeing it in the butcher's shop we used to shop in when I was a child.  I was fascinated by it, looking more like fish than meat, and vowed to eat some, even going to far as to pester my mother to get some - a wish she never acquiesced to.

But now I am master of my own shopping list, I have finally gotten round to making some tripe soup - a slow cooked mexican affair which also uses a pig's trotter, but only to thicken the soup.

It's apparently the texture of tripe that people can't stand, but I would say that it's very similar to squid or octopus (however, I'm aware that there are a large number of people who don't like those either...) and it's worth trying at least once, just to say you've done it and not be swayed by others opinions.

And now tripe is checked off my list, I'm hunting for tongue and lung soup recipes...

Ingredients
450g Tripe
1 Pigs Foot (Quartered)
1 Small Onion
2 Red Chilies
1 Lime
3 Cloves Garlic
1tsp Oregano
1tsp Cumin Seeds
1.2 l Chicken Stock


Method
1. Wash the tripe in warm water, then put in a bowl, sprinkle with salt and then squeeze the juice of a lime over it.  Leave to stand for 30 minutes and then wash again in warm water

2. Cut the tripe into thin strips, then put into boiling water, simmer and cook for 15 minutes.

3. In a large pan, put the drained tripe, pig's foot, stock, onion, garlic and oregano.  Bring to the boil and then simmer for 2 hours.

4. Using a blow-torch, sear the outside of the chilies until the skin goes black.  Let them cool and then peel to charred skin off.

5. In a blender, put a ladleful of stock from the tripe pan, the chilies and ground cumin seeds.  Blend this until smooth, then add to the pan with the tripe in. Remove the pig's foot at this point.

6.  Cook for another 30 minutes

7.  Serve with slices of lime and garnish with sliced green onions.  Enjoy!

Callaloo Soup

I love food, I love cooking and I love trying new eating experiences.  That much should be obvious to anyone who's even taking a passing interest in this blog, which will shortly be celebrating it's first birthday - and thanks to everyone who's taken the time to read my witterings, and even perhaps tried a recipe or two that I've published.  And if you have, I'd love to hear if they turned out well!

Sometimes, when making a soup that I've never tried before, I feel a bit guilty for not doing the spirit of the dish justice.  None more so than one of the first recipes that I tried on the blog - Callaloo soup.  Although there are any number of variations on the recipe, there are some ingredients that make Callaloo, well, Callaloo.
 
Amongst these are Callaloo itself, which when I first made this soup, I used spinach instead, Salt Beef, which I got confused with Corned Beef (The Fray Bentos stuff) so I left it out, and Okra, which I did find and use.

And I always felt like I'd only made half a soup, that anyone would look at my recipe, shake their head and say "Oh come now Dan, that's not right, that's not right at all.  How would you like it if we made Yorkshire puddings and put jam on them, it would be wrong, wouldn't it?" (And yes, I know some un-godly people from the wrong side of the Pennines do that kind of thing, but it won't wash in Leeds!)

Tinned Callaloo and Okra

So here is my actual Callaloo recipe, with Salt Beef with I made myself (method is here) and Callaloo, courtesy of Asda, in a tin, but hey, nobody's perfect...


Ingredients
200g Tin of Callaloo
200g Salt Beef
75g White Crab Meat 
150g Okra
1.2l Chicken Stock
100ml Coconut Milk
1 Onion
2 Sprigs of Thyme
1 Red Chili
2 Cloves Garlic
1tsp Turmeric
2tsp Corriander
1 Tomato
Salt
Pepper

 Method
1 .  Chop the Onion.  Heat some oil in a large pan and fry the onion for 3-4 minutes, until it starts to soften.

2.  Add the garlic, turmeric and coriander.  Fry for another minute

3.  Add the stock, callaloo, cubed salt beef, thyme, finely chopped chili and crab meat.  Bring the pan to the boil and then simmer for 30 minutes

4.  Add the tomato, chopped okra and coconut milk, cook for another 5 minutes, season to taste and then serve.  garnish with thinly sliced chili or tomato.

This soup can be blended before serving it, but last time I tried that, it turned into a horrible swampy mess that looked pretty un-appetizing, so this time I left it lumpy and it looked much nicer.  If you want to blend it though, have at it...

Enjoy!

Thai Chicken Noodle Soup

Snow!  Snow!  Oh blimey, you would think that the world was ending after a few hours of the white stuff on Saturday night!  I remember in ye olde times when it snowed and everyone would help each other clear drive ways and push stuck cars, but now it just seems to bring out the more petty aspects of people - moaning about the lack of grit for the roads, chuntering (good word eh?) about how to get to the shops etc.

Maybe it's just me getting old, but I really wish more people would enjoy the snow - it really does bring out the child in me - snow ball fights, sledging, staring drunkenly at orange sodium street lamps in the dark, watching huge white flakes drifting silently to the ground.  Who cares if you can't get in to work.  SNOW DAY!

At least my cold disappeared in time for me to enjoy Snowmageddon 2012, and allow me to go for a lovely walk along the frozen canal, before returning home to a lovely roast chicken.  And me being me, I couldn't let any single tiny bit of the chicken go to waste, so into the slow cooker went the flesh-stripped carcass to cook overnight for stock.

That meant that I woke up to a house that smelled delightfully of chicken, but also that I had lots of lovely stock for soup, as well as left-over chicken to use up.  So I decided to make a spicy chicken noodle soup.  I even experimented with clarifying the stock, by mixing 2 whisked eggwhites, 100ml of cold water and some chopped chicken into the cold stock, then slowly bringing it to the simmer, not stirring it until all the egg white floated to the top, bringing with it all the impurities from the stock, then I skimmed this off and was left with a rich golden stock.  I thend to water this down a bit before using it ina soup - about half and half, or the taste can be a bit too strong for my liking, but you can always play around with it

Anyway, with no more digressions, Thai Chicken Noodle Soup...

Ingredients
1.2l Chicken Stock
1 Red Chili
1 Green Chili
2tbsp Fish Sauce
Juice of 1 Lime
60g Roasted Peanuts
150g Broccoli Florets
200ml Coconut Milk
100g Thin Egg Noodles
Oriental Spinach Leaves
Fresh Coriander

Method
1. Heat the stock in a large pan, slowly bringing it to a simmer

2. Add the fish sauce, lime juice.  De seed and finely chop the chilies and add them.

3. If you are using uncooked chicken breast, cut it into bite sized strips and add it to the soup, if you are using left-overs, add them now as well.

4. Crush the peanuts in a pestle and mortar and add them to the soup, as well as the broccoli florets.

5. Cover the pan and leave to cook for around 10 minutes

6. In another pan, heat some water and cook the egg noodles as directed on the packaging.

7. Before serving, add the coconut milk to the soup and adjust seasoning to taste

8.  Add the shredded spinach leaves (or you could use spring onions) to the soup

9.  Put a serving of the egg noodles in each bowl, then top off with soup

10 Garnish with a few fresh coriander leaves

Mulligatawny Soup

So this week I was still full of cold - a continuation of last week's suffering (and it's NOT man-flu, OK?) but at least I got my sense of smell and taste back, which I can only think is a good thing, and a sign that the illness may have reached a high-water mark and is now receding!

As soon as I developed a sniffle, it seemed like everyone was tripping over themselves to offer remedies, from staying in bed (my favourite) to drinking Hydrogen Peroxide (Not so keen on drinking rocket fuel...) and also as people know I write a blog about soup, people are also offering their idea of the perfect illness fighting soup.  (indeed, a quick check at search terms that brought people to my sight reveals an increase in interest in my chicken noodle soup, and also a search for 'chicken soup vs minestrone for illness.  If you are still reading, person who searched for that, I hope you are feeling better now!)

Anyway, most of the recipes involved either spices or lots of garlic and ginger, and the one that I thought I'd try - never having tasted it before - was Mulligatawny.  Now I know that this is an Indian recipe, and I imagine that bluff colonial types with mutton chop whiskers sat eating it in Victorian times.  Well, one can dream anyway....

Ingredients
1 Red Onion
1 Parsnip
2 Carrots
1 Potato
200g Lamb
3 Cloves Minced Garlic
1  Green Chili
50g Basmati Rice
2 Pints Vegetable Stock
1tsp Salt
1tsp Black Pepper
 2 Cloves
1ts Cumin Seeds
1tsp Turmeric
2tsp Coriander Seeds
Handful of fresh corriander

Method.
Cube the lamb and fry it off with some oil in a frying pan until its brown.

Chop the onion, parsnip, carrot and potato into small cubes.

In a pestle and mortar, grind the chili, salt and pepper, cloves, cumin and coriander seeds and turmeric into a paste

In your soup pan, heat some more oil and then add the cubed vegetables and garlic, and fry them off until they turn a little brown and start to soften up a bit.

Add the spice paste and basmati rice to the vegetables and allow to cook for a few minutes, then add the vegetable stock, bring the soup to the boil and then simmer for 30-45 minutes, until the rice is soft.

Serve and garnish with fresh chopped coriander leaves.  Enjoy!

Spicy Carrot, Bean and Coconut Soup

Winter is coming... well, winter is here, actually*.  The trees and the ground is dusted with a fine sprinkling of silver frost, one's breath can be seen as a mist on the chill air, the sunlight is brittle and bright and everything has a slightly unreal, fairy tale quality about it.  It really is quite spectacular.

See how nice everything looks at this time of year?

Apart from the cold I have got.  Now my nose is blocked, my throat feels like it's caught in a vice and my mind seems to wander at the slightest distraction.  It really is rather unpleasant and another rather annoying side-effect it the magical disappearing sense of taste. So I thought that to ease this, and also to make myself a little bit more healthy, I would cook up something hearty, wholesome and perhaps a little bit spicy to see if I could actually taste anything.

If this soup tastes awful, don't blame me - I can't taste a thing at the moment and I'm more pre-occupied by why you can't get Lucozade in glass bottles wrapped in orange cellophane any more.  That's what I had when I was a child and it always made me feel better and I demand it now (Lucozade in plastic bottles doesn't taste the same, and I'm sure its restorative powers are somehow dimished as well - its chicken soup for those of us without wise Jewish grandmothers to make it for us...)

When Mrs Soup came in, the first thing she said was "That smells amazing", sadly I can't smell a thing, so you should take her word for it and give this recipe a go, nop matter what I say, being grumpy and with cold and all that...

Ingredients
2 Onions, diced
500g Carrots, Chopped
400g Tine of Mixed Beans
40g Ginger
1/2 tbsp Garam Masala
1tsp Cumin Seeds
1 Red Chili
2tbsp Oil
Juice of 1 Orange
800ml Vegetable Stock
250ml Coconut Milk
Fresh Coriander
Salt

Method
In a large thick bottomed pan, heat the oil, and then add the chopped onions and carrots.  Cook them for about 10 minutes over a low heat, until they are soft and starting to colour.


Whilst the vegetables are cooking, grind the ginger,  chili, cumin seeds, salt and Garam Masala with a pestle and mortar, until they make a thick, smooth paste.


When the vegetables are ready, add the paste and cook for anothr 2-3 minutes over a low heat.  Then add the stock and orange juice and bring to the boil, then simmer for 10 minutes.

With a hand blender, blend the soup until it's smooth (you might want to let it cool down a bit first) and then add the beans, cook for a further 10 minutes and then add the coconut milk, heating through before serving with chopped coriander leaves on top.

I served mine with hmoe made naan bread - aren't I a fancy-pants today? Enjoy!

*I've been reading too much Game of Thrones recently, hence the quote and hence some of the flowery language in this post.  It's coming back in April on the telly!  Yay...

Beetroot, Lime and Wasabi Soup

Ahh, beetroot, stainer of shirts, pickled pink nemesis of salads, how maligned you are these days...

I'm a sucker for hard-luck vegetables - sprouts, parsnips and the humble swede, are, in my eyes every bit as wonderful as butternut squash, or whatever is the flavour de jour.  So here is a rather nice beetroot soup, which turns the rather ugly tuber into a thing of ruby red magnificence, a spicy and zippy little number that is almost as good as my sprout soup

This is a really light soup, and the coconut milk does wonders to counter-act the earthy flavour that puts a lot of people off.  It would work well as a starter or put it in a flask to take on a picnic.

Beware the fact that your kitchen may get messy when preparing the beetroot.  My hands were stained red for a few hours afterwards!

Hot and Sour Chicken Soup

I first had Hot and Sour soup in a restaurant and was a bit wary, due to my dislike of Sweet and Sour Sauce served in Chinese Take-aways (you know, that radioactive red/orange stuff that they all serve.  Where does it come from anyway? )  But anyway, I was persuaded to try the Hot and Sour soup and needless to say, found it rather lovely.

This recipe seems to be an American version of a Szechan style soup, on account of the egg and cornflour in it, which makes it a lot thicker.  There are a number of variations, for instance Tofu makes a good chicken substitute, or you could go the other way entirely and add pig's blood to flavour it! Or at least use pork as the meat