Baked Potato Soup with the Works

I think I am seasonally confused.  While my temparament and dreams thrive in the lazy heat of summer, and I have visions of us living somewhere untouched by seasons, my cooking and my palate are drawn to the cooler months.  I definitely find it harder to get excited about pared-down, cooler dishes than I do about unctuous, slow-cooked stews, big flavours, candle-accented nights with a bottle of red in front of the crackling fire heatpump.

Take this soup, for example.  It tastes exactly like a fully-loaded baked potato, but without having to plan what seems like hours ahead and heating the oven to full whack just to cook a couple of potatoes, which does always seem quite wasteful.  If I was better organised, or just better, I would cook them alongside something else, but I came to terms a long time ago with the fact that I am just Not That Person.  So, if I want to eat the buttery, indulgent loveliness that is a jacket spud, I had to come up with an alternative way.

This is a great way for feeding lots of people for a lunch, and always sells out when I do it at my market stall.  With the different toppings it's got a great DIY aspect that, I find, always gets people on board even before they take a bite.  It's a fairly uninspiring colour, but wow, it tastes good.  Sets you up for winter.

Baked Potato Soup with the Works

4 rashers of streaky bacon, chopped

1 large onion

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

4 sprigs of thyme

1 heaped teaspoon smoked paprika

1 kg potatoes, peeled and chopped

1.5 litres chicken stock

few drops Tabasco sauce

salt and pepper

To serve:

Sour cream

Grated cheddar

2 spring onions, sliced

smoked paprika

In a large, heavy bottomed pan fry the bacon over a medium high heat until crispy.  Remove with a slotted spoon and set to one side on a sheet of kitchen paper to use as one of the toppings.

In the bacon fat, fry the onion until it starts to soften.  Add the garlic and thyme, stir for a minute or so, then add the paprika.  Give it a good stir.

Add the potatoes, stirring well so they get coated in the paprika, then add the chicken stock, scraping the pan well so all the bits from the bottom get stirred through.

Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer.  Cook for about 15 minutes, until the potatoes are tender and the point of a knife finds no resistance.  Blend in a processor, blender, or with a stick blender, until smooth and velvety.  If you find it is too thick, add more stock to thin it out, though this is a soup that really suits being stick-to-your-ribs thick.

Add tabasco, salt and pepper to taste.

Add your own toppings - personally I go for the full whack of sour cream, cheese, bacon and spring onions; the mix of textures and flavours is wonderful.  Sprinkle over a small amount of smoked paprika at the end.

Serves 4

Random Recipe Challenge

Okay, so here we go with my first ever blogging challenge.  I feel like the new girl in school!  As I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere, I am an obsessive consumer of anything whatsoever to do with food, from eating it (ahem), to watching the Food Network at every given opportunity (Andy works a LOT of night shifts), to my overflowing files filled with recipes ripped out from wherever I can find them (truth time: I found an old, circa 1995, copy of Cuisine Magazine at the bus stop the other day and felt no shame whatsoever in taking a recipe from that), to my earthquake-risk tower of cookbooks.  This also includes reading other food blogs.  I love them.  I drool over them.  And, like the new girl in school, I get major food and lifestyle crushes on them.

One such lovely blog is Belleau Kitchen in which Dom talks about his life and his food in beautiful Lincolnshire.  A year ago, he had the wonderful idea to host a Random Recipe Challenge, with, as I talked about in my last post, the fantastic idea of using one of those many, many, cookbooks to cook a random recipe.  I knew instantly I wanted in; to my shame, out of my hundreds of cookbooks, a figure-too-embarassing-to-say have never been used.  On our trip to Dunedin last year, University capital of NZ, we stumbled on a Dickens-esque dusty second hand bookshop days before it was closing down - everything was being sold off for mere cents, and I bought out pretty much its entire range of cookbooks in two fell swoops (couldn't carry everything at once; had to come back the next day).  I tell you this not as the exception for me, but the rule. 

So with my trusty assistant Andy fully prepped and primed as to his duties, I turned my back, closed my eyes, waited for half a minute or so, and yelled stop.  And boy, did I pick a goodie.  Can I take any pride in that random selection?  Please say yes, I'll take it where I can get it these days.  bills sydney food is one of those books that shamefully glowers at me every time I cook an easy old favourite.  Very appropriately, it was bought for me as a Christmas present in 2009 by Andy, after we'd eaten at bills in Sydney when we stayed there with my brother and his wife.  Even more appropriately, Andy and I first met in Sydney, both of us on a solo round-the-world trip, both of us going in opposite directions, but we met, and that was that.  Done deal.  We were the backpacking holiday romance that stuck.  Although, I will just say this one time about the book and the restaurant - the punctuation KILLS me.  But, it is what it is, and what it is is bills.  The flavours look lovely and fresh, the very best of antipodean life, and even on a rainy day elsewhere, I imagine they could transport you to a sunny, cosmopolitan city far, far away where life is good, beer is cold, and people are happy.

The recipe picked at random was absolutely right up my culinary street.  Chicken Noodle Soup with Lemon.  Bill Granger describes it as Vietnamese pho meets Jewish chicken soup.  Right there, right in the title and the description, are all my favourite things in food.  What could be more wonderful, soothing and jolting at the same time, as a chicken soup with Asian flavours?  And yet, and yet.  I was mildly disappointed in this soup, and felt that the depth of flavour that is usually there with a lovingly-made chicken stock, was missing.  The recipe had me make a chicken stock to start, but the only aromatics were 4 slices of ginger, 2 spring onions, and black peppercorns.  The spring onions weren't oomphy enough - in the future I would use regular brown onions, and probably some garlic as well, which would give more flavour without clashing with the other tones in the dish.  Before serving, you put lemon juice (technically 3 teaspoons, but who will measure that out? I used half a lemon), the same of fish sauce, and a sliced red chilli in a bowl, before adding the stock, shredded chicken, and fresh lasagne, cut up in place of noodles.  It was these flavours that dominated and, though they definitely improved the soup and made it fresher, they were all top-notes and no depth.  All mouth and no trousers.

You know when I would make this soup again, actually? When I have a cold.  When your taste buds are dulled and deadened, so those top notes would sing their way through the murk, and we all know the famously healing properties of chicken soup.  Then, it would be perfect, and I predict that I'll be all over this soup in June and July (still strange to me that those months are winter, I'm such a Brit), but in the summer, not so much.  The other change I would make is to replace the fresh lasagne with regular noodles; I didn't feel it added anything to the dish other than expense.

Still, not a bad way at all for me to dip my new girl toes into the water, and I know Andy was very relieved that we didn't get anything involving offal or tomatoes.  I'm looking forward to next month already.

Chicken Noodle Soup with Lemon
From bills sydney food

1 1.5kg chicken
4 slices fresh ginger
2 spring onions, cut into 10cm lengths
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
9 ears baby corn, sliced in half lengthways
1.5 cups bok choi
3 sheets fresh lasagne, torn into 5cm squares
3 teaspoons lemon juice
3 teaspoons fish sauce
1 red chilli, sliced
12 mint leaves
.75 cup of coriander leaves
thin slices of lemon

Make the chicken stock by putting the chicken, ginger, spring onions and peppercorns in a large pan with lots of water to cover - the book suggests 4 litres, my pan couldn't take that much so I used 3 litres instead.  Bring to a boil, skim off the scum that gathers on the top, and reduce to a simmer for 3 hours.

When the stock is ready, remove the chicken and shred it, and strain the stock, discarding the ginger, spring onions, and peppercorns.

Cook the squares of lasagne in salted water until cooked, which with fresh pasta takes, what, 2 minutes? Drain well, and put in a large serving bowl along with the lemon juice, fish sauce, and chillies.  

Put the chicken stock in a pan over a high heat, add the shredded chicken, corn and bok choi, and cook for another minute or so, until the vegetables are only just tender.  Add this to the serving bowl, and serve, with a scattering of mint, coriander, and fresh lemon slices on the top (the eagle-eyed amongst you might notice the lack of coriander; I try to grow it but realised minutes before I made this recipe that it had succumbed to the lurgy so our soup was coriander-less).

 So that's my first ever entry in Random Recipe Challenge - thanks for the smashing idea Dom, I and my trusty tester both enjoyed it and will be back for more next month.  Who knows where it will take us?

 

A soup to nourish at any time

Before we came to live in New Zealand, I was averagely interested in rugby - I followed major internationals, I watched Six Nations matches.  Nothing, though, could ever prepare me for the rugby-obsessed universe that is New Zealand.  The zenith of this was last year's World Cup - living here in NZ and having a Welsh husband gave me legitimate reason to support two of the star teams of the tournament, even when England missed the mark by a long shot - but even this doesn't compare to the weekend-long, city-wide fancy dress party that is the Rugby Sevens Tournament.  If you're unfamiliar with Rugby Sevens, it's an abbreviated, turbo-charged version of rugby; a young man's game without a doubt, these guys are both strong and very, very fast.  The Wellington Sevens (the tournament takes place in various locations round the world, a weekend at a time - nice work if you can get it) is less about the rugby - the stadium only really fills up for the Final at the end of Day Two, even though tickets sold out in four minutes - and more about the party.  And this is one party that really should be yelled "paaaaaaaaartay".  Every single spectator goes in fancy dress, many impressive in their imagination.  The party goes on for two days, Friday and Saturday, so downtown Wellington can be either fun central or carnage, depending on whether you've got tickets or not.

This year, we didn't have tickets.  Actually, we've never had tickets yet - the first year tickets had sold out long before we arrived in the country, last year we were up in Auckland meeting Andy's parents off the plane from the UK, and this year - well, let's just say that I tried to get tickets, but apparently my UK credit card people used this one opportunity to take exception to me buying tickets to an event in Wellington ("Were you trying to buy tickets?" "Yes" "Oh.  Our bad") and by the time I'd grabbed another card, tickets had sold out.  Ah well, next year.

The knock-on from this, to use a rugby term, is that Andy, who works at the Welsh Dragon Bar in central Wellington, has been on call close to round-the-clock for three or four days.  Not seeing him much isn't great, but hey, it's only for a short while and people have to put up with much worse.  For my part, I've been trying to help out as much as I can, not only by boosting the bar profits on Friday (whoops - I was planning a quiet night), but by taxi-ing him to and from the bar in our trusty campervan, and also by having lots of hearty, energy-giving food that he loves around so he can eat well as and when.  He isn't the biggest fan of pasta generally, with two main exceptions - he adores lasagne, and he loves minestrone soup.  It was to this latter meal that I turned, knowing there is one version in particular that he can't seem to stop eating.  This was originally a Rachael Ray recipe that I have tweaked to use ingredients I can buy here - I know she gets some flack but every single one of her recipes that I have tried always work out well.  The original calls for Italian Sweet Sausage and a bulb of fennel; I could get neither in my local supermarket (I could have got both if I'd have gone further afield, but - really, I wasn't in the mood for running all over town for some soup ingredients), so I just used good quality pork sausages and threw in some fennel seeds.  It was still delicious - fresh and warming at the same time, the kind of soup you can eat for lunch, after too much wine on a Friday night, or at 8am after completing a 12 hour hard work shift in party central.

White Minestrone with Sausage and Fennel
Adapted from Rachael Ray

2 tablespoons olive oil
400g good quality pork sausages, skins removed
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 bundle Swiss Chard (Silverbeet in NZ), chopped
Freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper
1 bay leaf
1 can cannellini beans
1.4 litres chicken stock
140g fusilli
2 handfuls frozen peas
Handful of chopped parsley

Heat the olive oil in a large pan on a medium heat (I used my Le Creuset casserole), brown the sausage and break it up into small pieces.  Add the fennel seeds, onion, garlic, chard, and season with nutmeg.  Add the bay leaf, put the lid on, and sweat the veg for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the cannellini beans, stock, and 500ml water, bring to a boil and add the pasta.  When the pasta is cooked, add the peas, turn off the heat, and let it sit for five minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste, stir in the chopped parsley.

Serve in big bowls, with parmesan grated over the top.

Serves 4-6