Soup's on

It's that time of year again. The time of year when Sundays are spent in the kitchen making everything from cookies to cabbage rolls. In other words, the best time of the year. I've missed being in the kitchen! Not that Summer wasn't wonderful. We had lots of new adventures in our household over the past four months. Some welcome (like flying to Banff and putting in a pool) some not (like breaking my foot). So with all of the 'new' going on around here, it's nice to know that my Sundays in the kitchen endure. They are the best way to wind down a weekend and start up a new week. Especially when I have soup on the menu.

Curried Parsnip Soup

Well, you can hardly be surprised that another dish featuring curry should appear after my entry on Curried Cauliflower and Apple soup. I've got a whole bottle of curry powder to use up. And this time, parsnips in the crisper. I love parsnips. I know they don't look like much, but cooked properly they are delicious. I really enjoyed them in this soup, which I adapted into 'cream of' curried parsnip soup.

Curried Cream of Cauliflower and Apple Soup

It's national soup month! It's really cold outside! I have half a cauliflower in my crisper calling out for attention! The perfect storm.

I wasn't sure I was going to like Curried Cream of Cauliflower and Apple Soup, since it involves curry. Curry is hit or miss for me; more frequently a miss. I think what swayed me to try this recipe was the inclusion of apple and the fact that the soup was the consistency of a thin cream rather than a thick porridge. I don't mind a thick soup but was in the mood for something lighter.

Clam Chowder

While it hasn't been a particularly cold Winter it is one of the dampest I can remember. Damp, wet cold is so much worse than it's-been-snowing-for-months-and-there's-an-arctic-chill-in-the-air cold. Damp cold feels colder than it actually is and makes you feel less than Canadian when you realize it's only -1 and yet you're complaining about how so, so cold it is.

But really I'm here to talk about chowder. Clam chowder to be precise, which is just as good on a cold, damp day as it is on a cold snowy one. Did you know that January is National Soup Month? Not sure when this was decided or by whom but I'm always up to make soup. It happens to be one of my favourite things to do on the weekend. (The excitement this breeds around the house, as you can imagine, is palpable.)

Can't Stop Making Soup!

Blame it on the snow. When the snowflakes begin dancing down from the sky my immediate reaction is to throw open the fridge and see what I have that can be turned into soup. After the excesses of Christmas and New Year's I knew I would find some potential soup ingredients lingering in my crisper drawer. What I found: a huge bulb of fennel that I had needed only sparingly for my ill-fated Chestnut Soup adventure and a bag of carrots. Quick as I could Google 'carrot and fennel soup' I wound up at One Perfect Bite.

Spicy Roasted Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup

Just before Christmas I made this amazing soup. I quite liked it despite the 'spicy' part. Normally I'm not so in to spicy. But this soup had enough sweet (from the potato and carrot) to win me over. At the time I thought it was very good and would be even better on a cold, snowy evening with some homemade biscuits. It snowed quite a bit today so tomorrow I plan on following through and making both soup and biscuits for a cozy lunch. This soup is easy - peel your veggies, toss them in olive oil and spices (red pepper flakes, paprika, cumin and ginger) and roast in the oven. Throw the roasted veggies into a blender with some chicken broth and milk (the original recipe calls for half and half) whiz it all together and enjoy.

spicy roasted sweet potato and carrot soup with ginger from sisters running the kitchen

4 carrots, peeled & cubed
2 sweet potatoes, cubed
Olive Oil
1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon paprika
2 teaspoons cumin
1 1/2 Tablespoons roughly chopped fresh ginger (I substituted 1/4 tsp dried)
1 1/4 cups Half-and-Half (I substituted an equal amount of 1% milk)
4 cups of chicken broth



Preheat the oven to 425F.  Chop the sweet potatoes and carrots into equal sizes.  Combine sweet potatoes, carrots, olive oil, red pepper flakes, cumin, paprika, and ginger on a baking sheet. Roast in single layer for about 40 minutes.

Add roasted veggies to large pot.  Add chicken broth, half-and-half, [ and chopped fresh ginger, if you didn't use dried].  Using an immersion blender, puree the soup until smooth.  If you do not have an immersion blender, then use a regular blender or food processor.  Reheat the soup slowly and serve.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...

...sounds so inviting. However Jack Frost is not likely to be nipping at my nose this Christmas. Twill be a green Christmas around these parts. Which is really bumming out the kids. The adults, not so much. Kids don't have to worry about long commutes or rising heat costs. Where was I? Chestnuts roasting...right.

It might be my own reaction to a green Christmas, my recent obsession with roasting chestnuts. I bought a huge bag of chestnuts a couple of weeks ago and decided I was going to make chestnut soup. I found a recipe in The Essential New York Times Cookbook that sounded quick and easy, so I filed away 'make chestnut soup' on my to-do list for Christmas Eve day. As it turns out, I got to make chestnut soup the day before Christmas Eve. We all decided to take Friday off - from work, from school - from the hustle and bustle of the mall and the grocery store. And we all did whatever we wanted Friday. Wore our pajamas until 2:00 in the afternoon. Read every word of the newspaper. Made a huge mess of the kitchen making chestnut soup.

Corn Chowder

It's hotter than stink outside - anyone up for a nice steaming bowl of corn chowder? To be honest, I find the heat takes away my appetite altogether. I shouldn't admit that two nights this week I had a milkshake for dinner. Not one of those low calorie jobs in a can, either. A full-fat assault that you can feel going straight to your hips while you're drinking it.

Corn chowder happened at our house because I had a few ears of sweet corn left over from the weekend, the kids were in bed and David was in Chicago on a business trip. I wanted something fun and/or relaxing to do but didn't feel like reading and I just can't get interested in TV any more. So this is how I chose to amuse myself - by rustling through my fridge and pantry to try to figure out what I can make with ingredients I have on hand.

Carrot Soup

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen on Sundays. Some Sunday nights when I'm drying the last dish or wiping off the counter for the millionth time, and it feels like I've been in the kitchen literally all day, I wonder why I do it. Then, on a random Tuesday night I peek into the fridge looking for something easy for dinner, and there it is: carrot soup.

This carrot soup is a lovely recipe from Cooking Light. I made it a few weeks ago to use up some random carrots in my crisper and it was wonderful. Sweet but a bit spicy, thanks to a pinch of ginger. I only had enough carrots to make a half batch but this past weekend I set out to make enough soup to have on hand through the week. A word about preparing this soup: it doesn't say whether or not you should peel your carrots. I did the first time but did not the second. I prefer the carrots peeled; the second batch was still good but not quite as sweet, with more of an earthy flavour. With some white cheddar and crackers, a very respectable (and quick) weeknight dinner.

Canadian Cheddar Cheese Soup

I can't believe that despite being to Disney World a bajillion times I haven't got the picture I want to illustrate this post! Good thing we're going back this year. (Twice)

On Sunday I made Canadian Cheddar Cheese soup - a recipe featured at Le Cellier, the restaurant located at the Canada Pavilion at Epcot, in Walt Disney World. Once upon a time, before we had the boys, David and I went to Disney a few times on our own. One of the best trips we had was on our one year anniversary. It was October 1999, but Disney was already celebrating the Millennium. They had this terrific parade and fireworks show at Epcot that was amazing. It was called Illuminations, Reflections of Earth. I'm listening to the music as I type this because in a happy coincidence, tonight I found a box of old CDs I set aside to import into iTunes like, a year ago. One of the CDs is the soundtrack to the parade/show, which featured these amazing larger than life puppets that danced through the streets of Epcot...I can't begin to do it justice.

Sweet Potato Soup with Apple

It's been a cold weekend (-15) so a pot of soup seemed an appropriate addition to Sunday lunch today. After throwing together Sweet Potato soup based on ingredients I had at hand, I thought it would be nice to make a more thoughtful soup. Thoughtful as in: "I thought ahead of time so have everything I need to make this soup rather than just picking stuff out of my crisper and hoping for the best.". Although that kind of soup can be good too.

Tomato Soup

Growing up, I can't think of a time when I didn't like tomato soup. One of the first soups I tried to give D. when he was a toddler was Alphabet Tomato Soup. I'm still bummed that he won't eat it anymore and keep thinking I'll try to reintroduce it. The recipe uses pureed alphabet pasta to thicken the soup, which, come to think of it was what got D. eating pasta. One of his favourite meals to this day is a bowl of alphabet pasta drowned in V8. I'm sure that when he is grown up and living on his own, one of his comfort foods will be alphabet pasta with V8.

Battery Exhausted

The nose/ear/throat issue that I've been ignoring for about a month now finally walloped me hard yesterday. I gave up mid-afternoon and headed home, then decided to follow the advice of the nice doctor I saw last night in the after-hours clinic and rest today. Or at least attempt to rest.

Being sick when you have kids is nothing like being sick when you don't. You can call in sick to the office but you can't call in sick to your kids, who generally require breakfast, a packed lunch and transportation to and from school. At the point that I have to get up to accomplish the aforementioned tasks I figure I may as well suck it up and just go to work. Otherwise I come home from the school drop-off, look around my untidy house and think, 'I'll just clean up 'x' then I'll go back to bed'. But 'x' leads to 'y' leads to 'z' and before I know it, I've spent my sick day re-arranging the linen cupboard. Today I made an effort to actually be sick. I still got up and got the kids moving but when I came home I crashed right back into bed. I finally got up mid-afternoon and decided I wanted some soup.

I've had a recipe for Parsnip Carrot Soup hanging on my fridge door for literally two months. I like parnips (remember parsnip crumble?) and happened to have some on hand in the fridge along with carrots, so decided to do one productive thing with my sick day - make good soup. And it was good soup. I had it with some camembert cheese and crackers. Even in my hazy state I thought to take a picture of my soup in progress:


I know. This is a horrible food shot. It's obviously a pile of discarded parsnip/carrot peel, slightly out of focus. It looks how I feel. But I love this picture, because after I took it my camera beeped at me, then showed the message: 'battery exhausted' before conking out. Yeah, I totally get that, Mr. Nikon Coolpix P90. Sometimes the battery is just too exhausted.

Sweet Potato Carrot Soup

For the last week I've had one sad, lonely sweet potato sitting forlornly in my crisper. It was left over from when I made spiced sweet potato fries. Now, the spiced sweet potato fries may have underwhelmed but they didn't put me off sweet potatoes. So I felt guilty looking at it every day when I opened the fridge to get milk or cheese or some fruit. It looked so vulnerable, since it was already peeled. So exposed. I knew where this relationship was heading. Sure, I'd put it off this weekend, and maybe even next, but slowly, slowly, the sweet potato would shrivel and rot until I finally removed it from the fridge to the greater indignity of the garbage during our weekly apres grocery shop fridge-purge.

Cuddling up next to the sad sweet potato was a half bag of carrots, also languishing in my crisper. See, this happens in my fridge. A lot. I buy an ingredient with a dish in mind and then, if/when I buy too much, I let the leftovers languish, unloved, in my fridge until they get thrown out. I hate being so wasteful and I'm appalled at my general lack of creativity when it comes to using ingredients I bought for one dish in another....so Monday night I threw down the gauntlet and vowed to make dinner using the contents of my crisper.

Enter Google. You can learn a lot about how people cook from an innocent Google search for sweet potato soup. For example, most recipes for sweet potato soup tend to involve curry. Which I don't really like all that much, so I don't have any on hand. And a lot of recipes want you to have more than one sweet potato to make your soup. Fair enough. Finally, after modifying my search to 'make sweet potato soup with one potato' I landed on a promising recipe here.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well this soup turned out. I didn't bother with adding milk or cream. It was nice and light and went well with some aged white cheddar and crackers. The boys, of course, declined the soup. My kids are not big soup eaters, which frustrates me because when they were smaller and didn't know any better, they ate soup quite happily. Since I can't put soup on a stick or disguise it as chicken, I'm not sure when soup might become part of our regular repertoire.

Sweet Potato Carrot Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 Tbsp. butter
• 2 small onions or leeks, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped (optional)
• 2 lbs. sweet potatoes (2 medium or one large), peeled and chopped
• 1/2 lb. carrots (3 to 4 medium), peeled and chopped
• 6 cups homemade chicken or vegetable broth OR 4 cups commercial broth and 2 cups water
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup cream, half-and-half, or sour cream (optional)

1. In a large pot over medium high heat melt butter or heat oil. Add onions or leeks and garlic. Cook, stirring, until vegetables are soft, about 3 minutes.
2. Add sweet potatoes, carrots, and broth (or broth and water). Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until all vegetables are very soft.
3. Puree with an immersion blender or in batches in a blender. Taste and add salt to taste. Stir in cream, if using.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

Thankful

Last week was pretty awful around here. I have a miserable cold, and I am not a good sick person. So it made the week feel pretty long, likely for everyone at my house, although the prospect of a long weekend was some comfort. When I'm sick I tend to cook what I think of as 'comfort food' dishes. Often, particularly in the Fall/Winter, that means soup.

Last weekend I made pumpkin cookies for the boys and was left with a half can of pureed pumpkin. I thought about making another batch of cookies, or some pumpkin bread, but decided instead to see if I could make pumpkin soup. Not finding any pumpkin soup recipes in my print cookbook collection I turned to the web and found what seemed like a winner on Allrecipes.com.

I like community-based recipe sites like AllRecipes. They remind me of community cookbooks, which aren't entirely extinct but probably less popular than years past, when family favourites were typed up and spiral bound and sold as fundraisers for hockey teams and Girl Guide troops. The Internet take on community cooking is of course, not a passive experience, because people can comment on your recipe, recommending variations that can lighten, sweeten or flat out change (for better or worse, depending on your perspective) the original. Take the recipe I found for Cream of Pumpkin Soup. It had a high overall rating (4 and 1/2 stars) but when I went in to read some of the reader reviews of the recipe the comments showed that those who made the soup tweaked it to their own taste, then appeared to rank the soup based not on the original recipe but on their adapted version. Those who did not tweak the soup ranked it quite low - the 2-3 star range. So I had to puzzle together, based on the numerous suggested tweaks, what would be my recipe for Cream of Pumpkin Soup. Here is what I ended up making:

Cream of Pumpkin Soup

1 cup chopped onion
2 tbsp butter, melted
30 ounces chicken broth
15 ounces pumpkin puree
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ginger
2 pinches nutmeg
1 shake cayenne pepper
1 cup skim milk

Saute onion in butter in medium saucepan until softened. Add half of chicken broth, stir, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Transfer broth to blender, process until smooth. Return mixture to saucepan. Add remaining broth, pumpkin, brown sugar and spices. Stir well, bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add milk, stir and simmer 5 minutes. Serve.

A simple but effective soup. I served it at our Thanksgiving Saturday and those who tasted it (no one under the age of 9 was interested) liked it a lot. Some of the less adventurous in the crowd (you know who you are) thought the soup would taste too much like pumpkin pie, so refrained. I'll admit to being curious if that would be the case but it wasn't. The soup tasted very similar to squash soups that I have made/tasted in the past. No pie-ish taste at all. Being dulled by a cold didn't lessen the taste of this great soup which I will definitely make again. Being dulled by a cold did make me forget to photograph this particular creation so here is a shot of our Thanksgiving table instead.