recipe: african stew

Last night, while I should have been revising my novel and cretiquing my partners' work, we took time off to make dinner with friends and play some mahjong with the set H brought back from China for us. I can only say that this is one of the most delicious soups I have ever had, and we have firm plans to make it again with different vegetables and different meats to see how it goes. We're thinking orange veggies, like butternut squash, pumpkin, sweet potato, things like that would be good as a blended soup. We're thinking potatoes and carrots. We're thinking beef stew meat, left to cook for several hours, maybe in a crock pot.

We served this in handmade bread bowls (handmade by Publix, but still handmade), and it was perfect.

Ingredients

4 cups water
3 each chicken bouillon cubes
1/3 cup curry paste (or can be dry curry)
2 Tablespoons ground coriander, toasted
2 Tablespoons granulated garlic
4 cups coconut milk
¼ cup sugar
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 pounds beef/pork/chicken, large diced
2 cups mixed red and green peppers, diced
2 cups onions, diced
½ cup whole kernel corn, frozen
1 bay leaf
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 Tablespoons cornstarch (make slurry)

Method:

1. In kettle, heat water, chicken bouillon cubes, curry paste, ground coriander, and granulated garlic. Let boil and add in sugar and coconut milk.

2. Add in the soy sauce and the diced meat. Let simmer for 20 minutes.

3. Add vegetables, spices, and cook until tender.

4. Bring to a boil and add cornstarch slurry slowly to the mixture and whisk until thickened.

From the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disney.

Acorn squash soup

Making the best of leftovers.

It's really hard to take a decent picture of soup on a cellphone.

This is basically a different sort of what'cha'got soup. Normally, I'd throw it all into a minestrone sort of deal or maybe into a Gypsy Stew*, but today, I didn't have the right ingredients for either of those things, so I went for the Ally Method of what'cha'got soup making. I had 2 very old acorn squash, one fire-baked potato, one fire-roasted onion, some shallots, some garlic, some milk, some stock cubes, and a selection of spices and herbs**.

The method!
As usual in situations like this, I didn't measure anything, so you'll have to eyeball it.

Cut the acorn squash in half, clean out the seeds and the worst of the fibers, and microwave for about 6 or 8 minutes under damp paper towels until soft enough to scoop out.

While that's nuking, sautee your fire-roasted onions (previously cooked for about a half hour in in tinfoil in the embers of a fire pit), your shallot and your two or so cloves of garlic in a mix of olive oil and butter until everything is sweet and caramelized. The roasted onion gets a jump on that, but if you don't have one, you can caramelize from raw, it'll just take longer.

Put your stock cubes in hot water and make it into stock. I had one each of veggie, beef and chicken, and added five cups of boiling water (which is one cup less than the stock instructions called for, but that's how big by bowl was and it seems fine).

Scoop out all the meat from the squash and just drop it right into the onions. Don't burn yourself too much. Stir it all around and mash it up some with the spoon. Chop up the old baked potato with most of the skin taken off, and throw that in, too.

Add all the broth, stir it up real good, and mash it some more. I used a potato masher. Start seasoning. I have no idea how much I threw in, but it was about two rounds of the following: Fresh cracked black pepper, sea salt, thyme, a little saffron (this only went in once because it's expensive and I don't have much), cinnamon, nutmeg, five spice powder, sage, cayenne, bay leaf, . Old squash are apparently not as sweet as fresh, so I added some wildflower honey (local, of course, because I'm a honey snob). Cook it a lot.

While it's cooking, periodically mash it up more and stir it vigorously to get it all breaking down. Check on flavorings. It should be sweet and savory.

Mine started burning on the bottom of the pan, and that really just added to the roasty flavor and gave it a nice orangy-brown color, but I wouldn't let it burn too much.

Once everything starts looking like it's not going to mash up any more without help, you can blenderize it or use one of those motorboat blenders. Our blender was mouldy and we don't have a motorboat, so I ran the whole giant batch through a fine-mesh sieve***, which took way too long and used up, like, three mixing bowls, but came out with a nice texture.

Throw it all back into the pot, stir it until it's smooth and check on seasoning. Add about 2/3 to a whole cup of milk (less if you have cream) and some more butter, and heat it back up until the butter is totally melted.

Gobble it all up like woah. Perfect fall soup, and would likely work with almost any squash, or sweet potatoes, or root veggies. Ally frequently makes her's curried, and that would have been nice here, too, except I unaccountably couldn't find the curry powder, so I went for thanksgivingy seasonings instead.



*Gypsy Stew is defined by old room mates as anything you can beg, borrow or steal, thrown into a soup pot. In practice, it's usually chicken or veggie broth based, and almost always thickened with rice and beans, and usually eaten communally out of small cups with many servings.
**I think you can judge how much people like cooking and eating by how many spices they have. Our collection outgrew anything as simple as a spice rack and now resides in the entire knife drawer beside the stove. We have literally dozens of distinct herbs and spices, almost all bought individually for specific meals we've been making over the last few years, not as kits or anything like that.
***Someone should buy me a hand-powered food mill for Christmas. Or an immersion blender, but I kind of like the freedom of old-fashioned tools.

basic what'cha'got italian soup

This is a canned-food based soup, just so you're warned. Because that's what I got this week.

1 can condensed tomato soup + 1/2 can water and 1/2 can milk
1 can ham-flavored green beans and potatoes
1 can peas
drizzle of olive oil
few tablespoons of fried onions
some italian herbs with extra oregano and basil
1 bay leaf
cracked black pepper
1/4 c shaky-cheese-- we had a parm-romano-asiago blend
1 beef bullion cube

Throw everything in a pan, stir well and heat until cooked.

Modifications:
- I think any ham-or-bacon-flavored thing could go in instead of the greenbeans-- maybe bacony beans? Bean with bacon soup? Hoppin' John? Something like that. Maybe even bacon-or-ham-cooked greens, and then add the potatoes separately.
- Peas could be subbed with anything sweet to cut the acidity of the tomato soup.
- More flavor could be added by using broth instead of the water.
- Garlic could go in stead of onions-- or both.
- Any sort of leftover meat, veg and/or most starch could be thrown in to make it more of a meal, I think.
- I might add a can of condensed veggie soup next time to add more vegetables and the flavor that comes from them.
- Could add extra liquid, and then cook pasta right in there-- or cook the pasta separately and add it, but then there's two dirty pots to clean afterward.

Review:
- I think next time, I'll use a higher quality tomato base-- this way-off-brand stuff is too acidic AND too sweet
- I'll plan for it next time and have protein to throw in.
- Overall, a good experiement, though, a sort of creamy tomato-bisque based minestrone.

Leftovers: Fishpocket Miso Soup

Remember the fishpockets from the grill? Even after D made the stirfry, there was enough leftover for one little packed lunch: Miso soup with the leftovers.

I get my Miso from J-List (which I’ve probably mentioned before). It’s a moist instant, not a powder*, and all you need is hot water. It lasts for ages and doesn’t need refrigeration, too, so it’s perfect for lunches.

I added sesame seeds, Kastuo bonito furikake and alfalfa sprouts, then mixed the miso and added the grilled veggies and catfish, and there you go! Lovely lunch!

 

*Here’s what it looks like:

CSA Soup!

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the haul were entirely blacked out by a stuck shutter that I didn't realize I had, so you can't see it, but I figired it out in time to take this picture of the soup I made the first night:

Note the offcentered-ness because the lcd is still busted. But I kind of like it.

Anyway, it's made like so:

Into the biggest pot you have, throw a bunch of broth. I used the last of our turkey stock (one old yogurt tub, so, like, two cups? three?) and a tub of roasted chicken stock (probably about two cups). Turn the heat on and let them start to melt as you prep, if they're frozen; if not, leave the heat off until everything's in.

sautee some thinly sliced meat. I used chuck, which is fatty and flavorsome. Add it to the broth.

Sautee an onion and a few cloves of garlic (but a few, I mean, like, five; we're garlic-folk) in olive oil until they're all yummy and golden. Toss them into the broth.

Chop and toss in two stalks of broccoli, florets and as much as the stalk as will chop easily (stalks are tasty and full of fiber!); four carrots and the minced tops of one of them, if the carrots are organic and with tops; two big red potatoes, skins on; a handful or so of fingerling potatoes, skins on; a half to one whole sweet potato, skins on; a half-pint of wee little tomatoes, chopped some.

Add salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary and basil. 

Boil it a bit until everything's eatably soft, probably somewhere around a half hour, then add a big handful of chopped fresh spinach and continue cooking until the spinach is all soft and melty.

Eat it up yum yum!

Chinese Onion Soup

A really extreme example of making something from nothing. We had rice. We had one chicken breast. We had all that broth. We had half an onion. We had Nori. We had five people who needed dinner.

Here's what I did: I put alot of rice on to cook, the usual Basmati (we have a 10lb bag that we graze from). Into the pot went the frozen broth and a few tablespoons of soy sauce, my dear old friend and humble standby. The a tablespoon of nori rice seasoning with toasted sesame seeds (usually used for rice balls), a few minced garlic cloves, that half an onion sliced thinish, and some pepper. While that cooked and mingled, I sliced the chicken as thin as I could make it, and when the soup had come to a boil, I turned it off and dropped the chicken in to poach, which litterally took about two minues with it sliced all thin like that. Then I added a little instant miso soup, the last one in the cabinet because I thought it needed just a little something more. Green onions from the garden, grown from the root-ends of old onions that we tossed into a bag full of dirt, and there you go. Pretty and yummy.

Came out tasting like a lighter onion soup. And it's wide open. I found myself wanting mushrooms sliced thin and chopped bokchoi or something equally greeny and stemmy. 

Scarburough Faire Fall Soup

This picture doesn't nearly look as good as it does in the bowl.

So C and I were cooking down the raw pumpkin scraps that were taking up too much space in the fridge to make pie, and realized we didn't have enough ingredients, so we decided to just drain it off and put it away till later. That left us with several cups of pumpkin juice after all the puree was squeezed like so much orange cheese. We were going to toss it, but C said 'I bet this'd make a nice base for soup'-- and buy did it ever!

Here's what we did:
In the soup pot, we sauteed an onion, a miscelaneous shallot and about six cloves of garlic in butter and oil with maybe a teaspoon of sugar and some salt until they carmelized all over the bottom of the pot.

We added one-ish carrot (it's the leftover other half of that giant carrot, that I'd chopped for a previous meal and then didn't need), and two stalks of celery, and sauteed that for a bit to get them softening a little.

In goes the pumpkin juice and an equal amount of chicken stock from the ever-present chicken boiling we do almost weekly.

Then a massive sweet potato, six redskin potatoes, one stalk of broccoli and it's stem, four or five sliced mushrooms, a handful of frozen veggie mix (the kind with greenbeans, limas, peas, corn and a little carrot). Seasoned it with more salt and alot alot alot of pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (hence the name!), and cooked it until the potatoes were soft; every thing else was done just before, and had reached that perfect level of soup-softness.

It thickened up some as the potatoes cooked, and all the spooning broke up the sweet potatoes and thickened it a little more. It came out just a little sweet, a little roasty (I'm assuming from the carmelizing), and the first sip reminded me of a corn chowder but lighter as there's no cream at all. After that, it was a nice balance of salt and sweet and peppery and herbal, and the veggies were all perfect.

This one's definitely a keeper.

Salmon, Rice and Red Miso

Since I'm sick and everyone else is not home for a meal, today's dinner is simple: soy-sauce steamed salmon over white rice with red miso soup. Sounds fancy, but really it's very simple.

It's one serving of frozen salmon, dropped still frozen into a little pan with sweet and regular soy sauce, and heated on low until the sauce as become a glaze and the salmon is cooked through. Meanwhile, short-grain rice is cooked and water is boiled for the instant red miso and genmai-cha.

The miso is one of my favorite finds. Instant misos that dry out the base are always chalky and more salty; this company-- no idea what it's called because, again, it's all in Japanese, which I really should learn to read-- uses wet miso sealed in individual packs just big enough for one bowl. This ones's plain, and comes with chunks of seaweed. The pack they come in also has clam and mushroom, which add those things in addition of the seaweed.

The genmai-cha is from Yamamoto Yama, which can be expensive in American shops, but is only a buck and a half at the Asian Market, and I always buy two or three boxes, since we only visit two or three times a year. (If I didn't have so many other teas, I'd have to buy alot more to last a whole season or two!). It's a perfect balance of roastyiness and a good solid green tea, and even when I forget about my cup for ages, it doesn't get bitter, just more roasted. One teabag is strong enough to make a decent-sized pot, but smooth enough that it's fine just in a cup. The only genmai I've had that's better is the looseleaf that C brought be back from her stay in Japan's tea region.

See, easy. Just have to have the right things around. If I was better, and didn't get dizzy every time I stand for more than five minutes, I would have glazed the salmon better, and maybe put a little butter on it to contrast with the soy more. Probably would have added some veggies, too...

Review: Japanese Green Tea Soup

I have no idea what this says as I don't read Japanese, but I think this is one of the tastiest things I've found in ages. See, there's a tradition we have-- whenever we go to an Asian Market of any sort, we chose one thing that has no English on it at all, and we try it. For one, it expands our horizons and makes up bolder, and for two, it lets us sample things we never would have tried before. This is one of the good things to come out of that little experiment.

It tastes very Japanese; I'm chalking it up to the seaweed and sesame seeds in the broth it forms when you add the hot water. It's savory without being too salty, mild without being bland. Reminds me more of miso than of tea, but has a lovely greenish color like a really perfect cup of green tea. It's easy to make, and it's tasty, and served over a pile of rice like the picture on the back shows, it's remarkably filling.

I had these little packets for a long time before I got up the nerve to try one, and now I'm sad I waited so long, because it really is delicious. My only regret is that I have no idea what it's called in Japanese, so I can't search for it online when I have no access to the Market.