Onion Soup with Cheddar Croutons

Up to the age of about 15, I was a bit of a fussy eater. I would often decide what to eat in restaurant by ruling out all the dishes that contained things I didn't like, leaving a choice of only one or two dishes. I got away with being fussy, because I was comparatively normal compared to my siblings. At least I ordered something from the menu. My brother would just demand new creations. Pizza Express was the restaurant of choice as they would happily make a pizza with no tomato, extra ham and extra cheese. I always ordered Mushroom or La Reine. ALWAYS.

Eventually I got bored of this and started eating like a normal person. I even went to the other extreme, picking the thing on the menu that I thought I would least like, just to get over the fussiness. I knew I'd conquered it the day I ordered a Four Seasons pizza (Olives! Capers! ANCHOVIES!)

However, the one fussiness that I couldn't seem to shake was cheese. Mozzarella, cream cheese and Boursin were the only cheeses I'd eat, and only then when combined with other ingredients, preferably strong enough to mask the flavour of the cheese. I remember a family holiday in France, where a particularly insistent waitress asked if I wanted to share a cheeseboard with my parents. No amount of reasoning in English would dissuade her, but a firm "Je deteste le fromage" got the message through. On a field trip at uni we were served macaroni cheese, and just the smell of it made me want to heave.

Onion Soup with Cheese Crouton

I still want to get over my dislike of cheese. I'm slowly getting there. I'm usually fine with cheddars, brie and mild goats cheese. Parmesan and blue cheese still freak me out, but maybe one day I'll get there.

I thought onion soup and cheesy croutons would be a good way to introduce cheese into my diet. I went with a recipe from "Roast Chicken and Other Stories" by Simon Hopkinson, even though I was initially skeptical of pureeing the soup and adding cream. I really liked the tanginess of the vinegar and the wine, and a crouton added interest to the otherwise boringly silky texture.

Smooth Soup and Crunchy Crouton

Onion Soup (from "Roast Chicken and Other Stories")
Makes 4 portions

3 large onions
110g butter
50ml white wine vinegar
250ml dry white wine
600ml chicken stock
300ml double cream

1) Chop the onions into fairly small pieces. Sweat them in the melted butter with salt and pepper in a covered saucepan on a very low heat. After about an hour, they should be very soft and mushy but not coloured.
2) Add in the vinegar, and simmer until it is almost completely evaporated.
3) Add the wine, and reduce by two thirds.
4) Now add the chicken stock. Bring the soup to a simmer and cook gently for 30 minutes.
5) Puree the soup, and return to the heat. Stir in the cream, and reheat the soup, but do not boil. Check the seasoning and serve with a toasted cheese crouton (or 4).

Borscht

After my recent trip to Russia, I have been craving borscht. I've made it once before a few years ago (and stained practically everything I owned red in the process) but it wasn't as good as the stuff I had in Russia.

After reading multiple recipes, and even tweeting about it, I picked the Valentine Warner recipe from "What to Eat Now". It was in two stages, firstly making a meat broth from vegetables, stewing beef and ham hock, and then adding in roast beetroots, parsnips and apples.

Borscht with Sour Cream

The soup should take about 3 hours to make, as the broth and the roasted beetroots both took 2 hours of slow cooking. However, I ended up taking more like 5 hours, as about 2.5 hours in, there was a power cut. Not only did all the lights in the houses go out, the street lights and traffic lights also went out. It was really strange to look out in to the street and see complete black. A couple of stairwells had emergency lighting, but apart from that the only lights I could see were flickering candles or torches. As both the hob and the oven are electric, I just had to abandon the borscht until the power came back on an hour or so later.

I'm not sure if it was this enforced hiatus or the recipe that meant the soup was a little lacking. The initial stages of frying off onions and garlic with dill smelt fantastic, as did the roasted beetroot and adding the meat. I was less convinced about the apples and parsnip and I would skip this if I was making the soup again. Krysia Boo suggested on Twitter to add the juice from re-hydrating dried mushrooms, which I didn't get the chance to this time but will definitely bear in mind in future. I also think next time I would grate the beetroot instead of cubing it, as I didn't like the thin broth with massive chunks in. I prefer my borscht more texturally homogeneous.

Not Quite Up To Russian Standard

I won't bother posting the recipe, as it needs a lot of work before I'm happy with it. I think next time I'll make the meat stock as a stock rather than a broth, and add the dill and onions later on. However, the soup did tick a lot of boxes, and I enjoyed it for my lunch with a good piece of bread and loads of sour cream. It didn't have an overly earthy flavour, and the sweetness of the beetroot was highlighted. A definite starting point for further adventures in borscht.

St Petersburg

It's been quiet around here as I had a fun weekend in St Petersburg. The city was founded in 1703, but already it's racked up quite a bit of history. We saw the palace where Rasputin was murdered, the graves of the last Romanovs, and the battleship that fired the first shots of the Russian revolution.

We ate quite a lot of Russian food, with the highlight of the trip actually being a Georgian meal. It's more Mediterranean than you'd expect, with a starter of cheese flatbread, trout tartare and ratatouille style vegetables. For the main course I ended up with more trout, this time with delicious fried potatoes and a herby salad. I had ordered chicken kebabs, but the linguistic barrier got in the way!

Borscht

However, the real revelation was the borscht. While I've had it often at home, the Russian version was milder and often contained bits of meat too (Russian cuisine is NOT vegetarian friendly at all). I need to find this recipe as I could eat this all day! Practically every meal was served with soured cream, which was fine by me.

Normal service will return soon!

Dissertation woes

The dissertation is looming, and I haven’t had much time this week. I’ve even resorted to taking a packed lunch to uni so I don’t have to lose an hour of study time walking home for lunch!

I’ve still found the time to make a few things, mainly to cheer me up between the seemingly endless bouts of reading government strategy papers.
- Tea bread, mainly to use up loads of dried fruit that had been in the cupboard too long. I think next time I might soak the fruit in Lapsang Souchon to give it a different spin.
- Roasted vegetable and feta tart. I still don’t like feta cheese though.
- Lemon Buttermilk pie. My flatmates were having a chilli evening, and we wanted an authentically tex-mex dessert. Google told us buttermilk pie. It was a bit like an English egg custard tart, but lemony instead of flavoured with nutmeg.
- Canadian pancakes. We had vast quantities of buttermilk left over from the chilli night, and buttermilk is not an ingredient that crops up much in British food.
- Lentil, bacon and roasted winter vegetable stew. Took this in to uni in a thermos flask and looked like a total nerd.
- Raspberry and vanilla muffins. This was to use up some raspberries I had in the fridge, as well as the seemingly endless amount of buttermilk. They were a tad dry so I topped them with some sweetened cream cheese.
- Chicken, lemon and tarragon soup. One of the success stories for the NCG book of soup.
We still have some buttermilk left, so I might make some scones, or marinate some chicken drumsticks with herbs.

I also enrolled on a sugar-paste modelling class, partly with the idea of making some kind of topper for D’s wedding cake. At the moment we are learning to make carnations and lilies. I need to practice with icing too, although she hasn’t worked out what flavours she wants yet so I can’t choose which type of icing would go best.

I’ve only got 25 days of my dissertation left and I cannot wait!

Jerusalem Artichoke and Carrot Soup

I have become slightly addicted to the Oxfam bookshop, and frequently go in to the one by uni to check out the cookery book selection. The one in Morningside has a better selection of fancy books though, I guess because the people of Morningside have a bit more cash to splash and will give away books that are still pretty current and in good condition. The other day I nabbed the Green & Blacks' Chocolate book for £1.50!

About a year ago I got the New Covent Garden Soup book. My dad has it and I had been trying to decide whether to buy it or just steal my dad's copy, but it was in Oxfam for £2 so I went for it. I've been trying to work my way through but I've probably only done about 10% of the book so far.

I got some Jerusalem artichokes at the famers' market on Saturday, and I'd never eaten them before, so I didn't really know what to expect. As I was making the soup, I sneaked a piece out and tried it. It had the texture of a potato, but a nuttier taste. I still have a couple left so I might make them in to a mash or a mixed vegetable gratin.

I have had mixed results with the NCG book, with some being totally delicious (Chicken, lemon and tarragon) and some being quite disappointing (pappa al pomodoro). This one was quite successful, and I liked the flavour of the Jerusalem artichokes sweetened with the carrot. It also uses milk so it wasn't overwhelmingly creamy.

Recipe (adapted from New Covent Garden Soup Co's Book of Soups)

25g unsalted butter
1 small onion
1 clove of garlic
400g Jerusalem artichokes, peeled
240g carrots, sliced
50g carrots, finely grated
1l chicken stock
110ml milk
salt and pepper

Saute the onion and garlic in the butter on a low heat for 5 minutes until soft, but do not colour them. Add the chopped artichokes and carrots, and give it all a good stir.

After a couple of minutes, add the stock (I used the chicken stock I'd frozen earlier, I used 600ml stock and 400ml water as the stock was quite strong) and simmer for 20 minutes.

Blend it all up, and then add the milk. Stir in the grated carrot to add to the texture. Season the soup to taste.

Et voila!

I found this made about 5 smallish portions, but mine was quite thick, so you could probably water it down a bit if you prefer a thinner texture or need more portions.

Roasted Red Pepper Soup

For New Year's Eve, I made roasted red pepper and tomato soup. I based it on this recipe from BBC Food. As it was by the Diabetic Society I thought it would be a healthy dinner to help us get through that large amounts of alcohol we were planning to consume later that night!


I grilled the peppers until they were blackened, and then put them in a plastic bag to sweat. At first, I found them quite hard to peel, although once I got to the bottom of the bag they were much easier. Next time I think I will get them really black, and then sweat them for quite a while, and they should be really easy to peel. At this stage they were really soft and although the blackened parts had burned through to the flesh, it had only caramelized it instead of burning it. They were so soft I was able to tear them up instead of slicing them.


I then added them all to the pan, with 2 onions and 2 cloves of garlic. Next time I would probably use 4 cloves of garlic as 2 didn't seem to add that much taste. I also substituted the vegetable stock for half chicken stock, and half homemade vegetable stock. I liked that it was thickened by a potato, as I find that soups thickened with flour don't always work very well. I used tinned plum tomatoes, but next time I would go for passata instead. I also let it stew for about 30 mins while I cleaned up the kitchen to try and deepen the flavour before blending. Although the recipe says it serves 6, I got 8 portions out of this (4 are now in the freezer).

I served the finished product with a slice of toasted french bread spread with pesto. The pesto went really well with the red peppers, although the flavour wasn't as deep as I wanted. However it was pretty technically easy to make (although the skinning was time consuming), and looks quite impressive, so a win overall.

Dinner is served