Cream of Tomato & Dill Soup

This is the soup I made the other night that I made the cornbread to go with.  I've made this before and it's so easy and delicious...And I really don't even like tomato soup that much.  The aroma from this was so tantalizing that my roommate was drawn from a rather important phone conversation to come into the kitchen demanding to know what I was making that was torturing her so!

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo - my bad.  I don't know where my brain was because I did take photos of the cornbread.  Oh well!  Here is the recipe.

Cream of Tomato & Dill Soup

2 lbs tomatoes, peeled, then roughly chopped (de-seed if you feel like it; I didn't)
4 cups water, with an adequate amount chicken boullion dissolved in it (use veggie stock if you don't want to use chicken stock)
1 carrot, 1 onion, and 1 stalk celery, chopped
dill, to taste
1 cup half & half cream (10%)
2 - 3 cloves garlic, or to taste, grated

Saute the carrot, onion, and celery until soft.  Add tomatoes and water/chicken and bring to the boil. Add dill.  Simmer until all the veggies are soft. Add more dill as you feel necessary.  With an immersion blender, or in batches in a food processor or blender, whiz until smooth but still has texture; don't puree.  Add garlic.  Finish with cream and serve.

Sooooooooo good, let me tell you!

And I did a food pricing breakdown, too.  This soup cost me about $0.85/serving.  Way better than canned!

Clam & Salmon Chowder

The other week I was lamenting on Facebook how difficult it is to live on a $50/week food budget, and one of my friends told me about two blogs she regularly uses that are focused on creating cheaper dishes for those on tight budgets.  I could live on $50/week if I wasn't buying baking ingredients all the time, though, but that's besides the point.  I'm not going without baking ingredients.  I am realizing how lucky I was in Rossland that my dad regularly contributed baking ingredients to my pantry since I baked things for him, too.  Ah well.  I do my best, and usually I succeed.

Anyway!  The two blogs I mentioned are Budget Bytes and Poor Girl Eats Well.  Budget Bytes is particularly interesting because the author does a comprehensive breakdown of her ingredient prices to get an accurate price per serving amount.  This inspired me to do some of my own calculating, just for interest's sake.

The other night I made a salmon and clam chowder for dinner.  The story behind the salmon is that I saw a package of ground salmon in the grocery store that looked perfect for a salmon burger.  But when I got it home to make the burger, I saw that the meat had not been ground properly and that is was in long thin shreds.  So froze it for a later use and decided to stick it into some clam chowder.

So here is what I used, the prices, and then the price per serving.  I got 8 servings out of this recipe and put half of it into containers for freezing.

2 cans clams @ $1.67 each = $3.34
half of one container of 10% cream = $0.86
carrots = $0.37
potatoes = $0.76
6 slices bacon (17 slices/package at $4.97/package = $0.29/slice) = $1.74
1 cup of whipping cream left over from another recipe = $1.39
fresh thyme left over from another recipe = $2 (approx.)
salmon = $2.79 (approx. - I didn't keep the receipt for this as I bought it a few weeks before I started keeping track, but this is what I remember it to be approximately)

total cost of chowder = $13.25
8 servings = $1.65/serving

Not bad, eh?  There is room for improvement, though.  But not bad at all.  And the chowder was good!

Adventures in Ramen

First of all, I have to share this with you. I bought more baby bok choy for super cheap at T&T last week, and as I was cutting it and cleaning it to put in this soup I'm about to tell you about, I came across a nice little surprise:


Yes, it's a nice juicy caterpillar! It was dead. But it totally grossed me out to the point where I had to chuck out the rest of the head.

Anyway, on this trip to T&T (I went to the bigger store at Surrey Central), in addition to buying bok choy, I wanted some soup. I love ramen. I know I should not, but there you go. There is a TON of ramen and ramen-like instant noodle packages at T&T it's almost ridiculous. I hardly knew what to choose because I wasn't used to any of the brands other that Sapporo Ichiban, and that was 99¢/package and there was stuff there that was way cheaper. I went for some that was 39¢/package, made by this company from Thailand. The noodles are called Mama something, the something being in the Thai language that I obviously don't read. But this is basically the deal:


Inside the package with the noodles were 3 seasoning packs. One was a powder, one was a paste, and one was marked chili powder. The paste had a shrimpy scent to it, which made sense because it was a package of shrimp-flavoured noodles. I tossed the chili powder.

This is the soup I made, with shrimp and caterpillar-free bok choy:


I will never buy Sapporo Ichiban again! This was great. There was a bit of heat in it, and it did not have a salty fake taste to it like other ramen. This tasted like a more "authentic-ish" broth. The noodles were better, too.

And at 39¢ you can't go wrong, really. I have two more packages in the pantry, one is chicken.

And I think I'll be giving bok choy a break for a while...

Pho!

My brother & SIL live in downtown Vancouver, right at Robson & Seymour, and there are like a zillion options for eating out right within a block's radius. It's ridiculous. When I went to visit Jem last Saturday, after our Miura Waffle experience, we decided a couple of hours later that it was time for dinner. Since Jem was very under the weather, he was in the mood for soup, and he recommended a pho joint near Robson & Richards - a mere two minute walk from his place.

Alas, I did not get the name of this pho place! But as soon as I entered it - it was tiny and had two chairs available at a small window front counter for people to eat at, so it's definitely a take-out place - I was overwhelmed by the smell of broths containing star anise. It made my tummy grumble. There was a small menu that included four types of pho, a few Vietnamese subs, and some salad roll type things. My brother opted for one of the beef phos and I had the chicken one. They were all $6.45. I also ordered a Vietnamese salad roll for $2.75.

This is not environmentally friendly take-out, as you can see. You get with the pho three containers: one for the noodles & meat, one for the broth, one for sauce, and then you get a plastic baggie with bean sprouts and fresh basil. You mix all this up at home.


Plus, I of course had a container for my salad rolls. Mother Nature is no doubt justifiably upset.

Guilt aside, the meal was great. The salad rolls were OK (I've had better other places). The noodles were a rice stick, there was plenty of chicken, the addition of the bean sprouts and basil was great. But I had some surprises in store for me. As I was eating the soup, I came across two small eggs. I am assuming by their size that they are quail's eggs. I was not expecting that. I also was not expecting a few large chunks of pale sausage of unknown origin. It tasted OK, but I was a little leary at first. I doubted it was a pork sausage but I also doubted it was a poultry sausage. In the end, it was a mystery. It tasted fine, though.


The sauce that came with the pho was not to my liking. It was actually a brown sauce with a large squirt of a red spicy sauce, so I just skipped that part of it. All in all, excellent meal at an excellent price. I just wish there was a more environmentally friendly way of doing this particular kind of take-out.

Peruvian Chicken & Rice Soup

I finally got around to making that delicious Peruvian Roast Chicken carcass into a soup. It was very straightforward and I used the same flavours in the soup that appeared in the rub on the roast - minus the mint, though, because I was out of it. I use a lot of mint and my AeroGarden can barely keep up!

The stock was a very basic carcass-celery-carrot-onion-garlic affair, with some salt & pepper. As usual, I did it in my crock pot. The flavours still on the carcass infusing themselves into the stock were utterly mouthwatering.

For the soup, I used:

• carrots
• onion
• cabbage (from a coleslaw mix)
• 1/2 cup of white rice
• more garlic
• 1 720 mL bottle passata

For the spices, this is a general idea of what I used but I think I adjusted after tasting, so I recommend you do the same thing.

• 1tbsp cumin
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp oregano
• 2 tsp paprika
• generous squeeze of lime
• 1 tsp chili powder

In the end, it was really missing the mint, so I'll know for the next time to make this when mint is readily available to me. Otherwise, the results were fantabulicious and I got 9 servings in total. Which means I got 12 meals from one measly carcass - awesome! I am cheap and proud of it!

C's Borscht

You might recall C, my SIL's mom, who does catering on top of her busy day job. She also created a homemade cookbook with some of her favourite recipes in it, as well as the fave recipes of some of her friends and family. Last weekend, I helped C cater the concession at the curling club, and one of the items on offer was C's homemade borscht.

I have previously posted about borscht here, and that post included some information about this hearty Russian soup as well as a recipe I've previously made with great success. C's version is also extremely awesome, and although there are beets in the soup, they are there more or less for colour and are discarded during the cooking process. I only like non-beety borscht because I am not a fan of that particular root veggie; however, C's borscht is the most brilliant pink colour I can barely describe it. I was too busy during that concession to take a picture of her borscht, so you'll have to trust me when I say that stuff was PINK, man!

Anyway, I had a bowl of C's borscht for lunch at the curling club one day and it inspired me to make some of my own so I could freeze it in portions for quick nuking when I don't feel like cooking. Yesterday, I got down to it and made the soup. The total cost for ingredients was $9.95; I got 11 portions, which makes each portion $0.90! You cannot beat that! That's even cheaper than my cabbage rolls!

Here is the recipe, which C generously allowed me to share here.

C's Borscht (I am taking some liberties with the method; these directions are not exactly how they appear in the original recipe)

2 beets
2 large carrots
4 large potatoes
dash of salt
1/2 cup butter
1 cup whipping cream (35%)
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 quart canned tomatoes (I used 1L diced)
1 head cabbage
2 tbsp dill, preferably fresh, or to taste (to be honest, I used WAY more than that!)

1. Peel the beets, potatoes, and carrots; chop and add to a large pot. Cover with water & add a dash of salt. Bring to a boil and cook until veggies are tender. (I personally wouldn't dice the beets again; I'd keep them in chunks; they are there more to impart colour and you don't want to spend a lot of time fishing them out when it comes time to discard them.)

2. When the veggies are tender, drain everything and discard the beets. Save the water! Mash the carrots and potatoes with 1/2 cup of butter and half the cream. Add back the water from the cooking vegetables. (Now, I deviated from this and it was a BIG MISTAKE. I just fished out the beets with a slotted spoon and mashed the carrots & potatoes in the pot with the water, but I couldn't get a nice smooth mash. No wonder. It wouldn't happen in the water; you have to do it out of the water. I ended up pureeing mine with an immersion blender. This was my first mistake on the path to getting a completely different borscht than the one C makes.)

3. In a large frying pan, saute the onion & pepper with 2 tbsp of the butter until the onion is clear and soft. Add tomatoes and dill & simmer.

4. Chop the cabbage very fine. Add it to the sauteed tomato mixture. Cook until cabbage is tender. (I had to deviate from the original recipe at this point, too, because I didn't have a pot big enough to accommodate the cabbage; I was using the big pot to boil the root veggies. So I wound up added cabbage to two pots and making two pots of borscht in the end, which I mixed together to make it all consistent.)

5. Gradually add the cabbage mixture to the potato mixture.

6. Very gradually add the rest of the butter and cream to the soup, stirring frequently (if added too quickly the acid in the tomato mixture will curdle the cream). Do not boil. Serve. (I just added the cream with the cabbage and didn't experience any curdling. I also boiled! No ill effects at all, but I had to in order to cook my cabbage since I was splitting it between two pots.)

My soup looked like this:


Yeah...very different from C's. But it tastes fantastic! Which is what counts, I guess. Next time I'll follow C's directions more closely and hopefully get that fantastically pink borscht she does!

Sockeye Salmon Three Ways

At the tail end of August, one of my fellow cooks at the senior's residence came by our work with an offer I could not refuse: he was selling freshly caught sockeye salmon for $10 each. At the same time, I happened to know that the Local Overpriced Grocery Store (aka LOGS) was selling whole sockeyes for about $22 - $24 each. So, I bought one sockeye from my colleague. I should have bought more.

The fish was cleaned and gutted and headless, but needed filleting. So, after work, I went to LOGS, which has an excellent set of butchers, and asked one of the guys there how to fillet the darned thing. He said, "I'll just do it for you. It'll be quicker." I told him I had not purchased the salmon from the store, but he didn't mind. He went a head and filleted the fishy for me while I watched so I could learn. I then went home and cut eight portions from the fish! What a screaming deal! I should have gotten more from my colleague, but at the time I had no idea what I was getting. Oh well.

I have had a few meals from this salmon, and they were all awesome. I took some camping for Shan & me, and that was lovely. But at home, I have prepared this salmon three different ways.

Exhibit #1: Salmon with Key Lime seasoning from World Market (love that stuff!), rice, and Asian coleslaw (coleslaw mix, seasoned rice vinegar, sesame oil).

Totally awesome meal, very easy & quick to prepare, and healthy to boot.





Exhibit #2: Grilled sockeye with maple, soy, and ginger glaze.

Oh, this was absolutely divine! The glaze was easy: maple syrup, soy sauce, and a few drops of ginger oil my dad bought for me at the Nelson Farmer's Market in July. I served this also with rice and the same Asian coleslaw.





Exhibit #3: Salmon & Shrimp Chowder.

Oh, how I love a good seafood chowder, and this was another winner! Very simple to make, and I found some cheap back bacon at LOGS to go in it. I got a huge pot of soup that made me about 8 servings, and for it I used the two tail ends of the sockeye, about half a pound of shrimp, and a couple frozen pieces of chum salmon I had kicking around my freezer that I had purchased at Safeway a while back. God, the difference between the sockeye and the chum is ridiculous! I don't think I'll ever buy chum that way again - it's just pathetic in comparison to the sockeye!

Latest Coyote's Kitchen Article

Here is my most recent article appearing in Bread 'n Molasses Magazine.


Funny thing is, I forgot to put celery in the recipe when I sent it to the editor! Oops! Yeah, just add a couple stalks of celery to the pot and you'll be good!

Clam Chowder for a Crowd

Here is another work recipe that I have made a few times now. When I first looked at the recipe, I nearly had a heart attack! Bacon! Butter! Whipping cream! I thought, You want me to feed this to seniors? Seriously? I was a little shocked. But apparently, this is one of the most popular soups on the menu. And after I made it, I had a bowl myself, and it was sooooo gooooood. Sinfully good. No wonder it's popular!

Clam Chowder

8 slices of bacon, chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
2 onions, diced
4 potatoes, diced
3 cans baby clams, with nectar
1 lb butter
2 cups flour
1 liter water
2 tsp chicken base
2 liters whipping cream
2 tsp each basil, parsley, and ground pepper

Cook the first five ingredients in a large pot until veggies are just tender. In a separate, smaller pot, melt the butter. Add flour and make a smooth paste. Add this to the veggies and combine. Add liquids, and the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a simmer to thicken. Serve.

OK, we don't use whipping cream where I work, but rather a mixture of 10% and milk. It works just fine and tastes great!

101 Uses for a Roast Chicken #23: Cream of Chicken & Caramelized Onion Soup

I don't know exactly what inspired this recipe, although I'd been seeing some great chicken soup recipes on other blogs, and I for some reason this combination came to me. For the stock, I used, of course, one of my many chicken carcasses. It's a really simple soup to put together.

Cream of Chicken & Caramelized Onion Soup

2 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 cup chicken from a roasted chicken
1 cup half & half (10%) cream
2 tsp flour
1/2 tsp ground sage
4 onions, thinly sliced & caramelized (for easy directions, see this post)
salt & pepper to taste

Bring the stock to a boil & add the chicken & sage. Whisk together the flour and cream & add to the soup. Add the onions & season. Simmer until thickened. Serve.

This was...okay...I'm not sure how I feel about it now. I ate it all, for sure, but I'm not sure I'd make this again. It was kind of a strange combination. It definitely tasted better the next day when the flavours had a chance to mellow a bit. I don't know. I wasn't super stoked on it. What do you think of the idea?

101 Uses for a Roast Chicken #22: Chicken & Rice Soup

OK, you are going to be seeing quite a few soup recipes appearing in this series now because I have quite an impressive collection of chicken carcasses littering my freezer these days, and I need to use them up before I start becoming tempted to throw them away. Plus, I bought two more whole chickens in the States a couple of weeks back - sue me - they were 98 cents/lb!!!!! - so I really need to start utilizing this stuff. So, you might all get souped-out because, trust me, I know I will be.

I do enjoy chicken & rice soup, so this is what I decided to make with one of my carcasses the other day. And it was pretty good, I must say - way better than the canned crap.

Chicken, Rice, and Lemon Soup

1 litre chicken stock using a chicken carcass
1 cup chicken breast, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup long grain rice (I used jasmine as that's what I have on hand)
freshly grated garlic, to taste
salt & pepper to taste

Bring stock to a boil, and onion & carrot. Add chicken, lemon & rice. Simmer until rice is tender. Season to taste. Add garlic & simmer a few minutes. Add cilantro last. Serve.
Seriously, it was that easy!

Seafood Chowder

During my last cross border shopping trip, I picked up two cans of clams for really cheap, with the intention of making clam chowder. But I also found a halibut tail end fillet on special at LOGS the other day, so I decided to make a seafood chowder.

One of my very first posts on this blog, back in January 2005, was about a seafood chowder I made when I was living in Vancouver. Vancouver is the mecca for amazing Pacific coast seafood, and I miss that about living there a lot.

I basically used the method in that post. Only, I didn't have any white wine on hand, which made a huge difference in the flavour of the broth. I also used half & half cream instead of full whipping cream.

It was a great chowder! I got enough for four meals plus I froze four more, so it was very economical.

I served the chowder with buttermilk biscuits I made with some lemon pepper. I'll post the recipe for those tomorrow.

Cooking with Kylie: Wonton Soup

All right, after last week's dreary chicken noodle soup, I decided to use some of the left over stock for wonton soup. I just love wontons and wonton soup! And luckily, Kylie's wonton recipe is one of the best I've ever made. You can find the recipe for the wontons here; it's the same one that appears in this post.

When I made this batch of wontons, I saved myself a lot of hassle by whizzing the ingredients all up in the food processor. This was most excellent. Again, I used my #100 cookie scoop, which is about 1 tsp, to easily fill the wonton wrappers.

Because I knew beforehand that the stock needed help, I was able to tweak it so it was flavourful - and I did a damned awesome job, if I do say so myself. I made half a recipe and got two meals out of it.

Prawn Wonton Soup (adapted by me from Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking, page 46)

1/2 bunch of bok choy
3 cups Chinese chicken stock
1 tbsp grated ginger
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp sake
2 tbsp oyster sauce
green onions, sliced, for garnish

wontons

Simmer everything except the bok choy & green onions for a few minutes. I boiled the wontons in a separate pot because I didn't want a starchy soup. When wontons are done, add to soup with the bok choy & simmer for a minute. Serve with green onions.
The chicken noodle soup failure was a good learning experience, because this soup was far more flavourful than the chicken noodle soup. In fact, it was fantastic! The wontons were also fan-fracking-tastic! It is so worth it to make homemade wontons, I think.

So this was another winning Kylie recipe!

Magazine Monday #54: Chicken Soup

I've been keeping myself busy with NaNoWriMo (or my version of it) and if you want to see my latest update you can do so here. If I've been quieter around blog land, this is why. I'm surprised at how productive I am with this novel-writing thing; it's going better than I expected!

I haven't made a new Magazine Monday recipe to post this week, so I thought I'd repost a recipe I initially posted here in October 2005. The original post is here. This is, once again, a Canadian Living recipe, and for some reason, I haven't made it in ages! I'd better remedy that!

This recipe isn't in the CL online recipe database; knowing those guys, it's probably been taken off because the recipe is in one of their cookbooks.

Chicken Noodle Soup

2 tbsp vegetable oil
12 oz boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite size pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
1 grated carrot
1 tsp each dried oregano and basil
4 cups chicken stock
2 tsp Dijon mustard
3 oz. spaghettini, broken up (about 1 cup)
2 cups sliced celery
2 tbsp all purpose flour
2 1/2 cups milk
salt & pepper to taste

1. Brown chicken is a large saucepan with oil. Remove to a bowl. Add onion & carrot and saute until onion is softened.
2. Add stock and mustard; bring to boil. Stir in celery and pasta and return to the boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and simmer until noodles are almost tender. Add chicken with accumulated juices and cook for 5 minutes longer.
3. Whisk flour into milk and gradually whisk this into the soup. Simmer, stirring, for about 3 minutes or until slightly thickened. Serve and enjoy!

Cooking with Kylie & 101 Uses for a Roasted Chicken #21: Stock & Soup

First of all, a Coyo-NoWriMo update can be seen here. So far so good with the word count, but my back is feeling it sitting in my chair all day! I'm peeking in on your blogs, by the way, but not posting as many comments.

OK, now onto Kylie...

You all know of my love for whole chickens, right? And I believe I have lamented a few times that this leads to a build-up of chicken carcasses in my freezer. I refuse to throw these things away because you can do so much with them! And because I'm cheap!

So, I decided to make another Kylie recipe with one of my carcasses, as she has a chapter in Simple Chinese Cooking on different kinds of stock. She uses whole chickens in her stock, but since I have a surplus of carcasses hanging around, I thought I'd use one of them. And then, I decided upon a soup to make once the stock was done.

So, I made Kylie's Rich Chinese Stock on page 22 of Simple Chinese Cooking. As usual with stocks, I did it in my slow cooker and it turned out great! I added some stare anise as I had some courtesy Palidor's wonderful gift, and the house was filled with such a wonderful aroma.

Rich Chinese Chicken Stock (adapted by me from Kylie Kwong's recipe)

1 chicken carcass
2L cold water
2 star anise
5 spring onions, cut in half crosswise
1 medium red onion, roughly chopped
5 large slices ginger
5 cloves garlic, whole

Stick everything in crock pot & crank it to high for about 6 hours. After that, strain out all the solids & pick the meat off the carcass, reserving the meat for soup.

Notice there are no seasonings in here, just aromatics. I wondered about this, because when I make stock I always make sure to season it & adjust the seasonings as I need to. In this case, however, the seasonings are added when the soup is made, as you will see in the upcoming recipe. I can see why holding off would be an advantage; you get a more neutral -tasting stock that can be seasoned in a variety of ways when you go to make soup, making it more versatile. This stock was good & I'd make it again.

The soup I decided to make was the Chicken Noodle Soup from page 40 of the book. It calls for Hokkien noodles. Well, good luck trying to find those around here! LOGS sells fresh Udon noodles but they are very cost-prohibitive for me. There were also some fresh chow mein noodles, but I've tried using them for soup before and they didn't work so well. Over in the Asian section of LOGS (and it's a miracle there is a small Asian section as this is an Italian grocery store) there were some rice noodles, more chow mein noodles, an a selection of different Chinese egg noodles. These were decently priced, so I went with them. This would turn out to be a big mistake.

Chicken Noodle Soup (adapted by me from Kylie Kwong's recipe on page 40 of SCC)

3 stalks bok choy, chopped
3 bunches Chinese egg noodles
3 cups rich Chinese chicken stock
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 tsp oyster sauce
1/2 tsp white sugar
meat from chicken carcass, about 1 cup
1 tsp sesame oil
green onions, sliced, for garnish

In a medium pot, cook noodles according to package directions. Drain & set aside.

In a separate pot, bring stock to boil. Add soy sauce, oyster sauce, ginger, & sugar. Simmer gently for a minute or so. Add bok choy & chicken & cook about 2 minutes. Add noodles. Serve.

This soup was terrible! It's the first recipe of Kylie's I haven't liked. It was bland, for one thing; I needed to add a lot of soy sauce to the soup as I was eating it in order for it to be palatable. Also, the noodles were awful! My first clue was when I went to drain them, a terrible yellow slick of God knows what separated from the rest of the water, alarming me as I saw this all go into my sink. I don't think it was fat, though it was thick like that, and I don't think it was unnatural colouring in the noodles. But the noodles left in the pan after draining were a different colour than they were when I put them on to boil. This prompted me to take a very close look at the ingredients, which were also quite alarming! Check this out:
First of all: "lye water?" WTF is that? Second of all: MSG? Shit! I try to avoid the stuff like the plague.

I also love the third part of the instructions: "serve with meats, vegetables, or soys, if pleased."

But I wasn't pleased! These noodles, weird yellow slick and all, tasted terrible and had a heavy texture.

I am not sure what I'm going to do with the soup now. I hate throwing stuff out, but I just didn't like this at all. And I will never buy those noodles again.
Sigh...Oh well, onwards and upwards, right?

Lunch at The Hume Hotel

Another week, another trip to Nelson to take advantage of Save-On Foods' weekly specials. Which also means a lunch out with my most constant dining partner nowadays, my dad.

This week, I suggested the Hume Hotel, which has a salad bar I was interested in. My appetite being what it is these days, I needed the flexibility the salad bar had to offer. That, and I really wanted some soup. The salad bar comes with soup of the day, which that day happened to be white bean & chorizo. Not my bag, so I subbed in the French Onion Soup.

Now, if you read this post, you'll see that the Hume has a history, and part of that history for me, involves a spectacular French Onion Soup I had there when I was a kid that had beer in it. To this day, it is the yard stick against which I measure all other French Onion Soups! In fact, my dad is the same - he still rhapsodizes about that soup. I knew, however, from our last lunch there that the recipe had changed and the beery soup was no longer on offer, but the current soup is supposedly made with sherry, as specified in the menu's description.

After having a sampler from the salad bar, my soup finally came. And...
...Well, it was good, but not that good. A bit weak, and not tasting too much of the sherry. It also didn't have very many onions in it. Also - they hadn't taken the bay leaves out and had used small bay leaves, so twice I took a spoonful and chomped down on bay leaves. I was a little annoyed.

My dad had ordered the lasagne, which came with garlic toast and a surprise Caesar salad. The salad was a surprise because the night shift had just come on and they put salad with their dinner entrees, so Dad got lucky.He said the lasagne was really good and enjoyed it very much.

The shift change might explain the slowness of the service. Because it was S-L-O-W.

Dad was full, but I wanted dessert, and I knew that the Hume has a great dessert list. I opted for the lemon meringue pie and was not disappointed at all - except, once again, it took forever to come out. But it was delicious and I realized I hadn't had lemon meringue pie in ages. Yum!
So, while the food was good, the service was iffy. Perhaps they were having an off day. It happens.

101 Uses for a Roast Chicken #17: Mexican Chicken Soup

OK, so it's been hot out and I haven't been cooking or baking much. So, what do I do? I make soup.

Yeah!

Well, actually, I have about 80 billion yellow beans growing in my garden and I wasn't sure what to do with them all, so it made sense to start making stuff to put them in, since steaming them and having them as a side dish is going to get boring really soon.

Throughout this series, I've made all kinds of soups: Thai, Indian, Italian...Mexican is just another ethnic cuisine that lends itself well to using up chicken carcasses (I just found another carcass in my freezer tonight, actually...What's next?) To be honest, I'm getting a bit souped-out, so I needed to be particularly creative this time.

And so the Mexican Chicken Soup was born last night just in time for dinner (for which I had no appetite when it came to eating it...damned these pills I take!).

This soup is so healthy it will make you sick!

Mexican Chicken Soup

4 - 6 cups chicken stock (I made homemade, of course, using this method)
1L home-canned tomatoes
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, chopped
1 onion, diced
1 carrot chopped
a whole bunch of yellow beans, chopped
1 can black beans, rinsed & drained
1/2 cup barley
1 bunch cilantro chopped
a few squeezes of lime juice

Bring stock, tomatoes, spices, onion, chipotle & carrots to boil. Add barley & simmer until nearly done. Add yellow beans. Add black beans. Season to your taste - you might like way more heat than I do. When veggies are tender and the barley is done, add cilantro & lime. Serve.

This was really good, but like I said, I had no appetite once I sat down to eat. It's weird how that works for me. But, I have lots of leftovers, and I portioned most of them out in individual servings to freeze so I can enjoy this later on.

Stock 101

My dear friend S revealed to me in a recent phone conversation that she'd taken it upon herself to roast two chickens. She was very proud of herself, and I was proud of her, too. But, when I asked her what she did with the bones, she said they looked so gross to her that she just chucked them out.

I was shocked!

I told S that bones make great soup, but she said she hasn't the time to make homemade soup. When I told her she could do it in her crock pot (an appliance I know she has because I was at the bridal shower where she received it from our friend J), she was still skeptical that it would be worthwhile. After I continued to razz her about this total waste of a great resource, she said that if I did a blog post spelling out in easy steps how to make chicken soup in one day, she'd give it a try. So, here is that post.

Stock 101





Step One: Put bones in pot and cover with water. Same deal if you're using a slow cooker. Just put the bones in the crockery and cover with water. Turn the crock pot on to high at this point because it needs more time to heat up.






Step two: Add aromatics and flavourings. Aromatics typically mean carrots, celery, and onion. No need to spend a lot of time chopping; large chunks are OK. For additional flavour, I added half a bunch of cilantro (just chuck it in whole), a couple of teaspoons of whole peppercorns, several whole cloves of garlic, and some salt. Adjust the amount of salt to your own tastes. I have often added a lemon, quartered, to my chicken stock, as it makes for a really nice flavour.



Step Three: Simmer the crap out of all this. Bring to a boil, and then reduce the heat to simmer. You basically want to cook this until the veggies have nothing else to give the stock: you are transferring all of their flavour to the stock. The veggies should be beyond tender but not total mush. On the stovetop, this can take 3 -4 hours, depending on the size you cut your veggies and the size of your pot. If using a crock pot, just keep the temperature set to high all day, or about 6 - 8 hours.



Step Four: Strain the stock. Using a colander, pour the stock into either another pot or a bowl. If using a crock pot, strain the stock into a large soup pot. Pick the carcass and its detached parts (this inevitably happens during the simmering; it's annoying, but deal with it). Discard all the veggies and flavouring stuff. Pick the meat off the bones. Discard the bones and add the meat back to the stock.




Step Five: This is the point where I cool my stock and refrigerate it overnight so I can skim the fat off the next day, but this is supposed to be an all-in-one-day lesson, so now you want to add to the stock whatever you want to put in your soup. This time, chop the veggies small but evenly. I used carrots, onion, a can of baby corn chopped up, a large jar of my home-canned tomatoes, and more garlic. If you want to put potatoes in, now's the time. Bring the soup - for it is now soup, not merely a stock! - to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer. Simmer until the veggies are almost tender.




Step Six: Add pasta. Fresh is best - less starchy and it takes less time to cook. I like using fresh tortellini or even smaller ravioli. In the case of this soup, I used a porcini mushroom and ricotta tortelloni. It was fab. Cook until desired doneness.









Step Seven: Serve & eat. This is the best step of all, of course!









All right - how was that? Let me know if you have any questions or if I wasn't clear about something.

So, S, are you going to try it now?

Cream of Potato Soup with Roasted Garlic & Dill

Last week I wrote a post about a lunch I had at the Hume Hotel in Nelson. I had a really great soup that I thought would be really easy to replicate at home. This, folks, is that soup - as close as I could figure.

Cream of Potato Soup with Roasted Garlic & Dill

4 medium baking potatoes
1L chicken stock
3 whole heads garlic
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp dried dill
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1 1/4 cups cream
salt to taste

1. Trim the tops of the garlic heads off, smear with some olive oil, place in some foil, and bake in a 400F oven for about 25 minutes or so, or until nice and golden brown. Take out and let cool slightly so you can handle them without burning yourself.

2. Meanwhile, peel and chop the potatoes into 1" cubes. Place in a large pot and pour in the stock. If necessary, add enough water just to cover the potatoes. Add the pepper and dried dill. Boil until the potatoes are tender.

3. Mash the potatoes with a masher. Squeeze out the roasted garlic from it's shell directly into the potatoes. Blend the soup until smooth either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender. Add the cream and fresh dill. Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve.

Very simple, and my soup was, I can honestly tell you, just as good as the Hume's. Perhaps even better. The flavour was delicate and the soup was satisfying. I just wish I hadn't burned myself while whizzing the soup with my hand blender - I hate it when that happens!

Tofu Tuesdays #1

Oh yeah - another series!

I was inspired to start this tofu series after writing this post about greening up the kitchen and my eating. In that post, I mentioned an article in Bon Appetit called "50 Easy Ways to Eat Green", and idea #39 was to eat more tofu. I used to eat tofu somewhat regularly in university and every so often when I was on Weight Watchers. I kind of got over it though, and haven't had any in quite some time. I haven't really missed it. My main knock against it is that it's very processed, as are many tofu products, and my focus has been to eat more unprocessed, whole foods instead of stuff that bears no resemblance to it's natural form. But, as the article states, tofu is quite green, and takes less resources to produce than your average pound of beef (which I eat rarely anyway). Replacing 1lb of beef with 1lb of tofu per month apparently saves 20,000 gallons of water annually.

Fine. I can add some tofu to my diet.

Enter Canadian Living Magazine, February 2009 issue, and a section on a Chinese New Year menu, which included this recipe for Bok Choy, Mushroom, and Tofu Soup. It looked simple and delicious, and has about 59 calories per serving. Now, this soup is supposed to be part of a larger meal, so it's not too hearty on its own. In order to make it more filling and a little more...ah...fun, shall we say, I added some fresh chow mein noodles to it - because, let's face it, noodles make everything better, right? I also made my own stock once more, as seen here, only leaving out the lemon and adding ginger and some celery tops instead.

The soup turned out really well and I used medium tofu instead of firm. Big difference! Not rubbery or chewy and its softness took in the flavour of the soup much more than firm tofu would have. I'll have to remember this little tofu tip for the future.

Bon appetit!