The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

5. Reputation rehabilitation: Winter Squash-Chicken Stew

Soup has a reputation, generally undeserved, of being where odds & ends and bits & pieces of random almost-past-its-prime food go to die (or, if they're lucky, be reincarnated). This soup does just that, but it's to far better effect than one might imagine.

Winter Squash-Chicken Stew (or Winter Squash-White Bean Stew), Made in a Slow Cooker
Serves 4 to 6, probably

Two slices thick-cut bacon, diced (or a couple tablespoons of olive oil)
One medium onion, chopped
One red bell pepper, chopped
About 4 oz. mushrooms, roughly chopped
One smallish can of tomato sauce
2 cups chicken (or vegetable) broth
Half a medium butternut (or other winter) squash, cut into smallish cubes
3 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1" cubes (or 1 can white beans, rinsed and drained)
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1/2 ancho chile, stemmed, seeded and minced (if you like such things; it makes the soup fairly spicy, so feel free to omit)
2 Tbsp softened butter
2 Tbsp all-purpose flour

Place bacon (or, if you don't eat the pig, just heat up a couple tablespoons of olive oil) in a large saucepan; cook over medium heat until crispy; remove with a slotted spoon; drain on paper towels. Drain off all but 2 tablespoons fat.

Add onion; cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add pepper and mushrooms; cook until mushrooms give off their liquid (you'll know by looking at them), about 3 minutes more.

Pour sauteed vegetables into a slow cooker. Add tomato sauce, chicken broth, squash, chicken (or beans) and seasonings. Cover and cook over low heat until you're ready to eat. This is not an all-day soup; four or five hours should do it.

Mix together softened butter and flour. Add to slow cooker. Increase heat to high and cook 30 minutes, or until slightly thickened.

Serve spooned over rice with (optional) bacon sprinkled overtop, and enjoy the clarity of conscience that comes with knowing that you have successfully rescued some little orphans from your crisper drawer that otherwise would have moldered away into sad oblivion. Of course you will now be eating them, which is not ordinarily a happy ending for orphans, but there it is.

This soup adapts easily to whatever you have in the refrigerator that looks like it needs to be eaten NOW. Kale or another green would be nice in here (slice it into ribbons and put it in with the flour/butter mixture); green beans or other veggies could easily be added partway through cooking; potatoes or other sturdy root vegetables (though probably not beets) would be a welcome addition too.

And because my sweetie's working and therefore I can't get a pretty picture of the soup, you get a none-too-pretty picture of my pretty red Crock-Pot (tm) instead.

4. Sweet and humble Tomato-Garlic Soup

I skipped over the recipe for this soup (from New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant) for years, figuring anything this simple (gosh! you don't even have to chop any onions!) couldn't be much good. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I needed to get some dinner made fast and didn't have much in the house except basic pantry staples. It took less than twenty minutes, start to finish, to get this put together, and the garbanzo beans and (optional) cheese garnish made it substantial enough to work as a light meal.

 
It took longer to set up all the ingredients in cute little mise-en-place bowls and shoot this photo than it did to cook the soup.

Tomato-Garlic Soup
Serves six, or thereabouts

Mince four to six cloves of garlic and saute them in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil very briefly--no more than a minute. Add a tablespoon or so of sweet Hungarian paprika and cook, stirring, for just a few more seconds. You really don't want the paprika to scorch or your lovely soup will taste nasty.

Add roughly 56 ounces of canned tomatoes, pureed fairly smooth in a food processor or blender. The type and cut of tomatoes don't really matter very much. I like using part tomatoes with green chiles, but if you're not a fan of hot food you can use plain tomatoes alone. Tonight, I used a big can of whole peeled tomatoes and one fourteen-ounce can each of regular diced tomatoes and toms-with-chiles. Stir in 1/2 cup dry sherry and two cans of garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained. Simmer for five to ten minutes. Taste for salt and pepper.*

Top each bowl with a generous sprinkle of crumbled feta cheese and some chopped scallions (or flat-leaf parsley, which I used last time, but out of which we freshly were this time). It is beyond cliched to say "serve with crusty bread and a green salad," but the bite of a nice vinaigrette really balances out this soup beautifully, and of course soup without bread is like a day without sunshine.

* My whole life, I've been reading "add salt and pepper to taste," and somehow it only dawned on me relatively recently that tasting, and then tasting again, and maybe one more time just prior to serving, was really the best way to go about doing this.

3. Semi-quasi-drunken salmon potato chowder

 

So, I bet you thought I forgot to blog my soup today, yes?

Ha! It is to laugh! I do not forget to make a soup. I only make it late in the evening and serve it at 1:15 to my beloved drinking buddies who hang out with me of a Monday night.

After you've been out sipping hot toddies and avoiding the embraces of hippies named Daniel (yes, I'm talking to you, Miss Angel) and drinking ill-advised tequila shots and oh, having a fabulous time at the Portland Spelling Bee, this soup will restore whatever spring is missing from your step. And if there's already plenty o' spring in your step, this soup will turn you into a one-woman disco inferno.

Suggested soundtrack: Iggy and the Stooges, and nothing else.

Salmon-Potato Chowder
Serves 4, theoretically, but 8 of us ate it and no one complained.

3 slices decent bacon, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
4 potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1" pieces
S&P, and plenty of 'em
1 cup water
2 cups milk
1 pound skinless salmon fillet, cut into 1" pieces*
1 Tbsp butter
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill

Heat a soup pot over medium heat; add bacon. Cook until just crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon to a plate lined with paper towels; set aside.

Add onion, celery, potatoes and salt and pepper to pot. Cook until onion is barely tender, about 5 minutes. Add water. Bring to a boil; cover, reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are just tender, about 10 minutes.

Add milk; return to a simmer; add salmon, butter and dill and cook until salmon is just cooked through, about 5 minutes.

Ladle into shallow plates. Sprinkle cooked bacon overtop. Serve forth to much acclaim. Acclaim will be greater if your friends are drunk. Your friends are greater if they are (a) drunk, and (b) willing to come to your house for salmon-potato chowder at 1 a.m. so that you don't mess up your stuntblog.

I love you guys with all the love I have to give. Mwah.

*A funny thing to see: a semi-drunk girl cutting the skin off a decidedly non-skinless salmon fillet. Hahaha. Hilarity ensues. Ow. My thumb. My fingers.

2. Lemony fresh Avgolemono

 

There might be a more pleasant way to while away the small hours between midnight and 3 a.m. than riffling through cookbooks and marking recipes with wee Post-It flags, but I'm not sure what it is. Or, if it exists, I'm probably too old and too domesticated for it.

Last night was spent in a sexless orgy of recipification, making lists of thirty or so soups (of the 365) that I'll be making over the next year. I'm trying to find a balance between meat and veggie (with the occasional foray into veganism), first-course and main-dish, complicated enough to warrant the Project title and simple enough to throw together on a Wednesday before hosting Quizissippi*. I definitely welcome suggestions for favorite soup recipes if you want to send them my way; just let me know. 365 soups is a hell of a lot of recipes.

I'd never eaten the classic Greek soup avgolemono before, but I felt like this rendition (from Gourmet Today) was pretty worthwhile. It's definitely a first-course soup, and it has a little bit of a fussy fancy-restaurant feel (without the fancy-restaurant demand on time or resources). The pronounced lemony bite is unusual and works wonderfully as a lead-in to a creamy, eggy or otherwise substantial main course, while the slight thickening from the egg and rice gives it just enough heft to differentiate it from a basic brothy soup. I ate mine up; Jim ate his up; Fisher ate his up; Rhys picked at his (probably because he got the "for photo" bowl with the rococo dill garnish) and then Fisher ate Rhys' up.

We followed it with this stellar Spinach Torta with Potato Crust from Deborah Madison's demanding but all-around excellent Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. (The first instruction for this recipe is "Neatly peel the potatoes with a paring knife," which convulsed me with laughter. Yeah, I'm going to peel four large potatoes with a damn paring knife. "Neatly," to boot.) Jim made it and it was seriously delicious. It was intended, originally, to feed us tonight and possibly tomorrow, but we devoured the whole thing. Looking forward to using this springform-pan potato-crust technique with a variety of fillings (leek & Gruyere, anyone? roasted red pepper and fresh mozzarella?)

 

To the soup, y'all! (Easily, obv., made in either a flesh-consuming or vegetarian version.)

Avgolemono
(original recipe served 8; I halved it and there was no problem)

3 cups chicken stock or vegetable broth
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup long- or medium-grain white rice
1 egg, brought to room temperature
Juice of one lemon
About 2 Tbsp chopped fresh dill, plus additional fresh sprigs of dill for garnish

Combine stock, salt and pepper in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil. Stir in rice; return to boil; reduce heat to low, cover and cook until rice is just tender, 15 to 17 minutes. Remove from heat and cover.

In a medium bowl, beat egg with an electric mixer on high speed until it is pale and thick, about 3 minutes. Still beating, drizzle in lemon juice; mixture will thicken briefly and then thin out a little. Remove 1/2 cup hot stock from pot; drizzle into egg mixture, beating constantly. This step tempers the egg and keeps it from curdling in the next step.

Whisking vigorously with a wire whisk, drizzle egg mixture into soup. Keep whisking until all looks smooth and lovely. Stir in chopped dill. For optimal presentation, skim foam from soup before ladling into bowls. Garnish, if you like, with a few sprigs of dill (though you may wish to garnish not quite so determinedly as was done for the above photo), and serve it forth.

* as I announce every week, "the best trivia quiz on Mississippi Avenue at 7 p.m. on Wednesday nights, guaranteed."

1. I am not proud

This is how you make Fisher's favorite soup, Spaghetti Soup.

It starts with a can.

The boys got home tonight from their latest sojourn in the wilds of Western Colorado, where they spent nine days playing in the snow, mastering Wii bowling, going to the planetarium and generally having a heck of a time with their grandparents. Grandma just retired a couple of months ago, so now she has lots and lots of time to spend with them when they visit. Lucky kids to have two sets of grandparents who love having them come for days on end.

It's weird. For as crazy as they drive me when they're here you wouldn't think I'd miss them so much when they're gone.

Anyway... the recipe. Adapted from this "cookbook," which I probably got at a grocery store or somesuch. But seriously, it's pretty darn good.

Spaghetti Soup

2 Tbsp olive oil
2 boneless/skinless chicken thighs, trimmed of fat and cubed
Mirepoix! Again with the mirepoix! This time, 1 medium onion, 2 small celery stems and 1 large carrot, all chopped fine.

See? Mirepoix bustin' out all over.

A pinch of red chile flakes (and again with the chile flakes!)
3 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups chicken or vegetable stock or broth
1 can CAMPBELL'S CONDENSED TOMATO SOUP
1 cup water (or heck, a soupcanful, which is close enough)
3 ounces spaghetti, broken into 1" lengths (hence the name)
1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley (and yet again with the parsley!)

Heat the oil over medium heat in a soup pot. Add the chicken and cook, stirring frequently, until browned. Remove to a plate with a slotted spoon.

Add mirepoix; cook, stirring often, until onions are just translucent. Add chile flakes and garlic; cook and stir 1 minute more.

Add stock or broth, soup and water. Bring to a boil. Add spaghetti and cook at a low boil until spaghetti is barely tender. Return chicken to pot; heat through, about 3 minutes more. Off heat, stir in parsley.

This is good with corn muffins. In fact, we may never have had it without corn muffins.

The photos in this post suck, because (a) I took them myself, 'cause Jim's at work, and (b) rather than spending the rest of the night screwing around Photoshopping them, I'm'a go eat soup and watch "Connections" with my boys. Kthxbai. Overandout.

N.B.: Tomorrow: avgolemono, probably.

0. Commencing with soup

So I've been reading--and thinking--a lot about the phenomenon of "stunt writing." It was a comment from Summer that got me started:

I'm currently reading nothing but Entertainment Weekly magazine and lamenting my lack of good reading material. Oddly enough, in this weeks Weekly, it compiled a list of books written by people who completed a years-worth long of "something" be it, a Jewish person living like a Christian, or A man and his homely mutt training to win the Agility Dog championships....call me crazy but I might start a year long list to finish all the books on that list. And then of course write a book about it.

Obvs. that is an extremely fantastic idea, and I wish Summer the best of luck with it.

The notion led me to contemplate the success of blogs like A Year of Slow Cooking, the new book Living Oprah, and of course the ultimate stuntblog success: The Julie/Julia Project. And since I've never heard of an idea that I didn't immediately try to figure out how to turn into some self-aggrandizing thing, I thought...

"You know, I make a lot of soup. A LOT of soup. I should probably blog about that. Hell, I should probably HAVE a blog about that. Yes! A blog about soup. A different soup every day for a year. I can do that. I'm cooking anyway, and I'm screwing around uselessly on the computer anyway, and I can combine the two and HEY PRESTO! Soup for a year and let's see what happens. Fame! Fortune! Adulation! Recognition in the Powell's cooking section! Or at least the opportunity to eat lots of soup!"

So this is my commencement. With soup. And photographs. By my sweetie.

 

Pasta e Fagioli
[adapted from the Moon River Collection Cookbook, published by the Savannah Landings Landlovers and apparently not really available anymore, which is too bad because it's a great cookbook]

2 Tbsp olive oil
3 slices prosciutto, chopped, optional, but lending the soup a lovely flavor; one could also use pancetta, which is what Beloved Sweetie was supposed to pick up at the store and which would be rather more similar to the bacon specified in the original recipe; but prosciutto worked out fine; bacon probably would too, and mean one didn't need to add quite so much salt
A mirepoix (about which, more to come) consisting of one cup each chopped carrots, celery and onion
A teaspoon or so of red chile flakes (about which, again, more to come)
Three or four healthy cloves of garlic, minced
6 cups chicken or vegetable stock (I used half homemade turkey stock and half Better than Bouillon; if you're using canned broth, just go for three cans and make up the difference with water if it seems too thick)
Four cups cooked kidney beans, or three 15-ounce cans, drained and well rinsed, divided
One cup small shell or macaroni pasta--the original recipe called for 1.5 cups, which was rather too much
Salt (generous) and black pepper (less generous)
Chopped flat-leaf parsley and grated Parmesan for serving

Heat the olive oil in a largeish soup pot over medium heat; add prosciutto and mirepoix; cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle in garlic and cook, stirring, one minute more. *

Add stock; bring to a boil; cover, reduce heat and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, puree about two-thirds of the beans until smooth. If your food processor is aging gracelessly, like mine, you may need to add up to half a cup of stock or water to allow the beans to puree smoothly and prevent the food processor from choking on the solid and thoroughly unappetizing-looking beany mass. Persevere. The final product will be worth it.

Now you have a choice to make: either scoop out all or part of the vegetables with a slotted spoon and puree them until smooth, or do as I did and just stick an immersion blender in for a few seconds and puree the whole thing briefly but not completely. Then return the soup to the heat and add the bean puree, stirring thoroughly to incorporate; sprinkle in the pasta; bring the whole thing to a boil and let it cook at a low rolling boil until the pasta is tender, about another 7 to 10 minutes. Pay attention to the state of the pasta, because it will be quite disappointingly yucky if it gets overdone.

Check for seasoning; this will probably take considerable salt, especially if you use home-cooked or low-sodium canned beans. Grind in some black pepper.

Serve with a sprinkle of chopped parsley and a delicate snowdrift of Parmesan overtop.

This soup thickens considerably on standing, so you may wish to do as I did and thin the leftovers with a cup or two of water or additional stock (if you use water, add more salt and pepper too) before packaging up and refrigerating.

Makes, roughly, a ton. Fortunately, it's quite tasty.

Tomorrow: Spaghetti Soup, in honor of the return of the Young Heathens from the wilds of Western Colorado, and maybe some more musings about the nature of this project, or maybe not.

*One of these days I'm going to write about how Harold McGee and Shirley Corriher taught me not to add the garlic with the rest of the aromatics. Thanx, guyz!

A year in books (and a brief digression on music)

What did you read in 2009 that you'd recommend--or discommend--to others?

I read almost no fiction last year: a state of affairs I hope to change in the New Year. But judging from my current list of books on hold at MultCoLib, I'm not making particularly good progress on that front.

Yesterday, I picked up my first holds-batch of 2010: The Professional Chef (the core textbook used at the CIA), Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen (which, after the briefest of perusals, I'm thinking I will have to pony up for so I can own it forever), The Best Vegetarian Recipes: From Greens to Grains, from Soups to Salads: 200 Bold Flavored Recipes* (by the incomparable Martha Rose Shulman, whose recipe for Spinach-Potato Soup has become a Schardt-family-wide classic, and who also writes a very fine column on vegetarian cooking at the New York Times)...

...and Dethalbum II by, um, Dethklok. Because I want to encourage Fisher in his budding passion for METAL**, and also because our house was just not complete without a little more Metalocalypse. (Neither is yours. Seriously. Go watch it.)

After a long dry spell of not really acquiring any new music unless I needed it for Quizissippi (which is a whole nother story and will be told a whole nother time), I spent the last couple days in a frenzy of downloading... The Flaming Lips' astonishingly awesome "Embryonic," Rodrigo & Gabriela's [shut up] "11:11" [shut up... it was free and I kind of like it] and...um... Oasis. Yeah.

So what are you reading? What are you listening to?

*What's up with the double colons in the title? Can you do that? I meet this trend with stern disfavor.

**which takes its funniest form in his use of the word "metal" to mean "a thing I personally like," as in "Spaghetti soup is METAL!" and "Catching snowflakes on your tongue is METAL!"

Greeting the New Year... drunkenly... and with chicken

Is there any other way to greet it, really?

We saw the boys off for their semi-annual Colorado trip yesterday after a flavorful lunch of Drunken Chicken. The name is deceptive; most of the alcohol cooks off, I think. And if it doesn't... who cares? You'll sleep more soundly for it.

It occurred to me while eating this that it's quite a medieval recipe, really, despite the tomatoes. The combination of meat, fruit and spice is oh-so-thirteenth-century. See, for example, the Sauce Madame and Mawmeny recipes from Medieval Cookery.

Drunken Chicken
adapted from a Savannah, Georgia Junior League-type cookbook

8 chicken thighs, boneless and skinless
Salt and pepper
1 cup flour
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped fine
[2 Tbsp bacon fat or other cooking fat of your choice]
1 28-oz can whole tomatoes, undrained, roughly chopped by sticking a pair of kitchen scissors in and giving a few sharp snips
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 cup dry sherry
Scant 1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup raisins
Salt and black pepper to taste
1/2 cup slivered almonds

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Salt and pepper the chicken; dredge in flour. Heat butter and olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add chicken and cook, turning once, until well-browned on both sides. (Depending on the size of your skillet--if it's relatively puny like mine, for example--you may need to do this in batches.) Remove to a shallow ovenproof casserole.

If you have ample time, you can wait and saute the onions in the remaining fat from the chicken, or you can do as I did and just heat up some cooking fat (I used bacon fat) in another pan, toss the onions in and saute over medium heat until they're translucent. Stir in the tomatoes, sherry, cinnamon, cloves, raisins and brown sugar. Heat to a simmer; simmer 15-20 minutes, or until suitably thickish. Taste and correct for salt and pepper.

Pour tomato mixture over chicken in casserole. Sprinkle almonds overtop* and pop the whole thing into the oven. Bake about half an hour, or until bubbly around the edges; this will give you just about exactly enough time to make some rice pilaf to serve alongside.

This is a lucky dish to eat early in the year, according to me, anyway. Serve it forth with great resolution.

*this is going to be my official word of 2010.