Cooking

Cauliflower, potato, and pea soup!!

It's been Souptober at my house for the weekends this month. Started with a beef barley stew. Then chicken noodle. Then a chilli. Next I'm trying to make a crab soup or french onion soup. Gonna finish it off with chicken and dumplings. I just need a tomato based soup to squeeze in there during the week.

I like vegetable soup as a way to use up any veg that's about to go out of date. Fresh vegetable stock, roasting some veg beforehand, and adding a hint of curry powder helps make a lovely blended soup.

Funnel chanterelle soup is my all-time favorite. Funnel chanterelles are pretty easy to forage where I live, so I always have a bunch of them in the freezer. It's a cream-based soup with blue cheese in it, an absolute blast of a meal.

There's a soup season? I eat soup practically everyday.

Anyway, my favorites are: Caldo Verde and Sopa de Feijão. As I'm sure most people don't know them heres a short description:

Caldo Verde

Lots and lots of finelly cut dark green cabbage on a smooth purée base of potatoes and onion. Traditional version also takes several slidces of blood sausage (chouriço).

Sopa de Feijão (Bean Soul)

Chopped up cabbage and carrots on a smooth base of beans and onion. Beans are usualy brown or butter beans bought dry, soaked overnight and then cooked.

I love a good chicken wild rice.

Tomato soup although personally I would love a coddle stew with some tiger bread

It's sure not traditional French, but I just bought supplies for a few blender soups, lol. Carrot, broccoli, and cauliflower.

mushroom soup, Adam Ragusea made a video a while, it was amazing! Very hearthy.

I made Georgian Kharcho few times. Its a beef soup with rice and spices.

Theres one that i have an addiction for. Ita a cold beet soup called Šaltibarščiai its basically buttermilk with cucumbers and beets, but its soo refreshing. And it takes no time to prepare. I eat it during the summer

For some inexplicable reason, all my soups turn into stews. It’s a mystery, really.

In any case I’ve been experimenting with chili- cooking off andouille sausage for its fond, starting with a sofrito sort of thing using fine chopped onion and celery, garlic towards the end, ginger. deglaze with booze- I’ve been settling to burbon, but white wine was fairly neutral. Enough water for the sofrito to cook down into almost nothingness, followed by the pepper purée.

That’s been a mix of sweet peppers, serano and smoked red chili’s that I’ve grown fresh, mostly aiming for a more mild heat.

Once that’s hot and simmering and cohesive, it’s the beef, I use rump cut into smallish pieces, that I first marinate with fish sauce and some extra booze. (Don’t worry the fish sauce only smells awful until you cook it.) some lime and orange zest, and lime juice. simmer until heavenly.

Other stews are chicken stew (lemon and white wine stock cooks down wonderfully. Add what ever vegetables you’d like- carrots, celery, onion, maybe green beans.). This finds its way into pot pie as often as not;

the GF’s go to is mushrooms soup. I’ll also go to town with a creamy pea soup if I can get my hands on a ham hock.