Garden Soup

If you're a regular Monday's Soups reader you'll know there is nothing Alayna and I like more than discovering a new vegetable or ingredient. To the point that after our first "meeting" we often refer to it with a surname and sort of suggest that we have just made a new friend. (Ernst the Eggplant, Mr. Kale, Ms. Swiss Chard, etc.) So today, gang, it's time to say hello to little Ms. Dandelion Green.

We have been saying we should use dandelion greens for some time, Alayna even went as far to say they're trendy. I mean, that seems lofty, but they are healthy. Did you see that counter picture I took? That's like vegetable porn. Oh my gosh, SOUP QUIZ! From left to right list the greens on the counter, the winner will get a jar of soup.

Alayna was a little late coming to my apartment so I started making the soup. Taking a sip of it I discovered it was essentially like drinking garden water. Alayna even casually mentioned maybe I ought to clean the vegetables better. Let me just say I did scrub those guys, it's just that I bought it all at the farmer's market and they really have that just-pulled-out-of-the-ground feel. So you know, sometimes I miss a pocket of dirt and you get a little crunch in your bite. Big deal. Anyways, Alayna worked her magic by adding salt, lemon and a bunch of cheese, and suddenly our garden water tasted a little more like dinner.

Okay, enjoy friends. With a post like that, how aren't ya'll salivating at your desk?


Hello cross-promotional plug. Book Club meets this Sunday!

Garden Soup

• Heat olive oil in your soup bowl
• Add 2 leeks chopped, let them simmer for 5 minutes on medium to low heat
• Add 4 to 6 big cloves are garlic, heat until fragrant, about one minute
• Add handful of finger potatoes chopped
• Add a bay leaf
  
• Add greens. You can really add any greens, these are the greens we added: 3 heads of Dandelion greens, 1 bunch of beet greens, 1 bunch of yellow chard greens
• Add six or so cups of chicken broth (mine was homemade, what! what!)
• Let cook on low for 20 or so minutes
• Add the following to taste: 2 generous pinches of sea salt, 3 sprigs of thyme, a sprig of rosemary, 3 generous squeezes of lemon and 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese
  

A Light Leek Soup

First, lets start with a pretty picture of ingredients so that no one loses faith in me as a cook:

Rosemary, thyme and garlic

I'm not going to lie. Soup night was BIT of an adventure last night.

Mary is in Guatemala this week with some college friends (jealous!) so I decided to meet up with my partner from Amigos in 2000 (that's right, a DECADE ago) for a drink before soup night. But I also had some dried chickpeas and homemade chicken broth, so first a ran home and threw them into the dutch oven on low so they would be ready when I got home.

When I got back, I was greeted with this:

my apartment

Oh yeah, that's a smoke filled apartment.... and some really burned chickpeas.

The mystery is that I really DID leave the stove on very low. Dutch ovens don't need much heat, that's the whole beauty of them! So I'm blaming the cat. Although I probably shouldn't have left the apartment with the stove on. Safety first!

LUCKILY, I was still able to make a delicious soup.... just not as chickpea-y as I expected. And yes, I am that girl who rescued as many chickpeas as she good and likes the taste of lightly burned (or, in my mind, toasted!) things. You may want to stick to canned though.

separating the weak from strong

And yes, my apartment DOES still smell like burned chickpeas. So does my hair. And my hands. I had to scrub my dutch oven for about 45 minutes to get all the burnt parts off after soaking it overnight. Don't drink and dutch kids. Or don't dutch and then just step out for one drink because you might end up smelling like a Mediterranean market and not in a good way.

On the plus side, my mom always told me eating burned things would make my hair curly.... cheap perm, here I come!

Without further ado....

A Light Leek Soup

• saute 6-8 roughly chopped cloves of garlic in olive oil with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme

• add the roughly chopped white and light green parts of 3-4 leeks and cook until they're getting a little floppy

• add one bunch of broccoli (include the thin parts of the stem too, and if you want to blend, the whole stalk)chopped into small pieces/florets

• add one large zucchini, sliced and quartered, and about 3 tablespoons of butter, sliced around the pot and stirred in

• cook, stirring occasionally, until broccoli is bright green and zucchini is mostly soft

• add chicken (or veggie) broth, barely covering veggies and about 1.5 cups of cooked "toasted" chickpeas.... or just an unburned can of chickpeas

  • note: I used a broth that I'd already infused with lemon, which was GREAT, but you can also just squeeze the juice of 1-2 lemons in at this point

• simmer a little while until veggies are done all the way through and serve!

  
  

  
  

Friendly Fennel

(A cold soup made of fennel)

People often ask me how I come up with recipes for the soup blog. Honestly, it’s a hodgepodge. Sometimes Mary will send me something she wants to try (that’s how we discovered kale! And porcini mushrooms!), sometimes it’s something I ate in a restaurant (watermelon mint), and sometimes its opening my fridge and saying, “well, I have x, y, and z and am too lazy to go to the store (hello too many bbqs leading to a veggie detox). Although I follow recipes more closely when I’m working with a new ingredient (hey, fish sauce can be scary), they never make it through the cooking process untouched. This week, as Mary is still out of town, my sister agreed to soup with me and had an extra fennel bulb (who doesn’t?). She reeeeally wanted a cold soup that our mother makes (which I’m pretty sure I’ve never had).

This was her response to me asking for the recipe:

AMTRK:

hi alayna-

i will bring a fennel bulb and an onion tomorrow for cold fennel soup! other ingredients are chicken broth, lemon juice, and cream.

Love
your sister

…. And you wonder where I get it from

Friendly Fennel

• Chop 1.5 medium sized yellow onions (or one small) and sauté in olive oil
• And the 3 bulbs of fennel (only the white parts) roughly chopped, but small enough to cook quickly, and cover
• Add five medium-small red potatoes (you can skip this step if serving as an appetizer, but I like the weight it gives the soup if you’re having it as a full meal)
• Once the fennel and potatoes are cooked through, add room temperature vegetable broth, the juice of 1.5 lemons and salt and pepper to taste
• Blend and let sit in the fridge (or freezer) until cold

Notes:

• This soup is also delicious warm (as long as it’s not too hot out)
• I think it would be even more delicious if you added leeks with the onions
• For some reason I made a LOT more soup this week than normal… for a normal sized recipe, just use 2 fennel bulbs and 3 potatoes, one lemon

More happy soupers!

Thai Coconut

Sorry to all our fans who have been hungry for two days because this posting is late. I am a little scatter brained as I'm moving out of the apartment where Monday Soups was born. Luckily, Alayna already asked the girl subletting the third room in our apartment if she would think it was weird if I were given spare keys and came here every Monday with groceries after work even if Alayna wasn't home yet. The girl thought that Yes, it would be weird. But that's okay because we were planning on doing it no matter what she said.

The point you need to take away from this? Monday Soup will proceed as normal. Speaking of Monday Soup being in the headlines. I know, I actually wasn't speaking about that at all. Alayna and I are happy to report that a Friday's Dinners entree has been published in Craved Magazine. Yes, Craved Magazine, the English speaking magazine in Dubai. Obviously.

Fear not, when this whole things blows up and I'm never stressed out about my rent check again, we will remember where we came from... We also might get rid of the "blogspot" in the URL. But not quite yet...

So right, the soup. It's great! And different. Surprise a friend with this fancy treat from the Far East. It reminds me of my buddies in Thailand. What up Governor of Phang Nga? Remember when your driver picked me up every morning and then we ate ice cream cones together and that was my Peace Corps experience? I do. What up Christy? Remember how you are still in Thailand? I do.

P.S. Click on that Christy link and buy that shirt. Good cause! Then pgarut it on and make this soup!

Thai Loco-Nut!

Put a large packet of cellophane noodles (6-8 ounces) into a bowl of warm water and let soak for about 15 min

while preparing other parts of soup

Dice 6 cloves of garlic, and a good sized portion of peeled fresh garlic (I love garlic, so I put in about a hand's-width... some people might find that excessive)

and saute in olive oil with 4-5 chili peppers, broken into small pieces

Add the zest from 3 limes and 1 lemon to the pan and continue sauteing until fragrant

add one (large) box of shitake mushrooms, roughly chopped and saute some more (just a few minutes)

Add about 1/2 cup of lime juice and 1/4 cup of lemon juice,

and 2 cans of coconut milk (I used one regular and one light... vague attempt at healthiness after being mocked for my appreciation of butter),

fill pot up a little more than halfway with chicken broth and bring to a simmer.

Add fish sauce sauce to taste... it sounds gross, but is delicious and I used about 8 teaspoons (confession, I cook all the time and don't own measuring implements. Awkward.)

Drain and add cellophane noodles, trying to separate them as they go in (this will make serving easier later)

In a separate pan, cook 3-4 chicken breasts, chopped into bite-sized pieces.

Once cooked through, add to the soup pot

Once everything is in the soup pot, add a few big handfuls of spinach and stir in... once they are a little wilted, add a handful of cilantro and cook another 2-3 minutes

Eat up!

Saw-dee-kah!

Asparagus Squash Soup

aPoor sad and wonderful Harold Brodkey the dead author I discovered in the smallest used bookstore with the most books in Camden, Maine, concludes arguably his most famous story First Love and Other Sorrows with the love of soup.

I was reminded of this while I was re-reading this story on a walk to a friend's apartment in the East Village. I mastered the art of walking and reading long ago. Even after I arrived at the apartment's walk-up I stayed outside in the crisp early evening Saturday leaning on the railing to finish the story as couples and crazies passed me by.

The story is set in the late '50's. A daughter is about to get married to rich man she probably doesn't love. The father is long dead. And there is the pre-teen son observing it all.

"I'm hungry, too," she said. "I don't know why." She drifted over to the table, and bent over the chicken. "I guess emotion makes people hungry."

The mother pushed open the swinging door, from the dining-room side. "There you are," she said. She looked flustered. "Are you eating at this time of night?"

My sister said she was hungry, too.

"There's some soup," my mother said. "Why don't I heat it up." And suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and all at once we fell to kissing one another- to embracing and smiling and making cheerful predictions about one another- there in the white, brightly lighted kitchen. We had known each other for so long, and there were so many things we all three remembered... Our smiles, our approving glances, wandered from face to face. There was a feeling of politeness in the air. We were behaving the way we would in railway stations, at my sister's wedding, at the birth of her first child, at my graduation from college.

This was the first of our reunions.

Perhaps This Was Their Soup

In soup bowl saute

1/2 an onion chopped

2 leeks chopped

1 yellow squash chopped

1 bunch of asparagus cut into inch pieces or smaller

Add in olive oil and 1/2 a stick of butter

with a few sprigs of fresh thyme and rosemary

At the same time boil a handful and a half of red potatoes (with skins) in separate pot

When the veggies are crispy but mostly cooked through add the potatoes into the soup pot

Add a squeeze of one lemon

And add enough chicken broth to cover the veggies

Take off heat, puree in a blender.