More recipes to keep warm with

Cream of Thing Soup
Sounds very much like something from an episode of The Munsters from the late 1950s, but it tastes different from your run-of-the-mill "Cream of ..." soup, which is a major plus when you've been feeding people soup and stews for what probably seems like forever!

Thing
Can be Chicken, Mushroom, or Celery. Substitute whichever you like!

Ingredients

Half a medium onion, chopped	2 heaped teaspoons of chopped garlic
Heaped tsp Summer Savoury	Heaped tsp Nutmeg
1 Tsp Pepper	2 litres of Milk
Half stick of butter	2 cans of condensed Thing soup (e.g. Campbells)
Two or three slices of brown bread

You can use Herbes de Provence instead of Savoury.
You can use soy milk instead of cow's milk.

Method

1. Melt the butter in a pot that will comfortably hold all the milk.
2. Add the onions and garlic and gently fry until the onions are beginning to become soft and translucent.
3. Add the pepper and herbs, mix, and let cook in for maybe five minutes.
4. Add the soup and the milk and raise the heat to medium.
5. Use a whisk to stir up the mixture so that the soup completely dissolves in the milk.
6. Break up the bread into smallish pieces and add it to the soup.
7. Keep whisking gently to aerate the soup as it warms. 
8. When the soup is hot enough you'll see tiny bubbles around the edge of the pot - they're the hottest places and are beginning to boil.

This should provide a good portion of soup for four. Enjoy!!

TTFN

A Soup for Winter

Welcome to the home of the hungry programmer! After a long day of fighting my way through undocumented SSIS jobs to try to get them ready for a looming release I'm home to find the horror that that there are no leftovers left!!

Ok - what's in the fridge? a bag of carrots, celery, leek, and a red bell pepper. There's onions and dry lentils in the pantry, and half a dozen or so smoked sausages (kielbasa style). So there's hope, and I'll be fed for the next couple of lunches too!


Ingredients

2 litres Chicken Broth	Red Bell Pepper, chopped	500g dried lentils
20 baby carrots, chopped	6 sticks of celery, chopped	6-8 straight kielbasa, sliced
2 leeks, chopped	1 and a half onions, chopped	Salt, Papper, Basil

Method

• Put about a litre of chicken broth in a (very) large pot and add an onion (and another half, as I had a half waiting) and maybe half a kilo or so of bacon, chopped into little squares. Set it to boil for maybe 15 mins. 
• Add the lentils and simmer for about another 20-30 minutes. 
• The lentils should be swelling nicely by now, so add all the veg and mix it all well together.
• Add about a teaspoonful of basil, and salt and pepper to taste.
• Keep simmering for another 20 minutes.
• Add the kielbasa smoked sausage (sliced into coins) and mix well in. 
• Keep cooking for about another 20 minutes, so all is well boiled. 
• Serve with bread and enjoy the inner warmth!

So here's a close-up so you can see that it's quite a busy-looking soup - plenty of visual interest with the colours and textures.

TTFN

Soup !

This post is all about soup!

As almost everyone who lives in America will know, this last winter has been really bad, especially in the north and north-east of the country. Every week from before Christmas until late March brought one or more snow- or ice storms. Even just last week Maine got almost a foot of snow!

So, it's been weather for soup.

Potato Leek Soup
So far as we're concerned, there is no better that Alton Brown's Potato Leek Soup.This soup uses equal weights of leeks and potatoes, mixing them with cream, buttermilk, and white pepper, to make an ivory-coloured creamy-smooth soup.

We've also found that the cream-buttermilk mix doesn't affect my wife much, whereas she is very lactose-intolerant with milk - we drink soy milk with our cereal in the mornings!

I've used onions in place of the leeks (weight-for-weight) and found that the onions certainly don't overwhelm the mix, so Potato Onion Soup is a  good replacement at times when leeks aren't available.

Snert
Officially this is "day-old split-pea soup"; the name and recipe come from The Netherlands and this holds the award as "The Acceptable Face of Peas" for my son, who seriously hates peas!

Ingredients

• 1 lb bag of dry split peas.
• A chicken boullion cube.
• A medium-sized leek, chopped and then well washed (no sand please!).
• Two medium onions, chopped.
• A large pork chop or a pig hock or two.
• Two large smoked pork sausages (e.g. Kielbasa). Don't slice up!.
• Five rashers of thick-cut smoked bacon. Don't chop up!.
• Four sticks of celery, chopped.
• A handful of small carrots, chopped.
• A large potato, peeled and chopped.
• Two quarts of chicken broth.
• For a garnish when serving, the young fresh inner leaves of the celery, chopped, or else chopped parsley.

Method

1. Put the peas, the bouillon cube, the pork chop, and the broth into a large pot, put the lid on, and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for about tree-quarters of an hour to soften the peas (they'll probably look like a sludge by the end - that's good!). Stir the mix every few minutes to prevent the mix from "catching" (sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning).
2. Take out the chop. If you have used a chop with a bone, cut off all the meat and discard the bone (Don't give cooked bones to animals: the bones can easily splinter and cause serious damage!).
3. Add all the vegetables and the bacon. Cook for another 30 minutes, stirring at least every five minutes. If it looks like getting too thick then add some water periodically. 
4. For the last 15 minutes add the sausage.
   
5. Slice the cooked meat from the pork chop into thin pieces of a size convenient to eat.
6. When the vegetables are tender use tongs to pull out the sausage and bacon. Slice the bacon small and the sausage into rings.
7. Add all the meat back to the soup, saving a little sausage to use as garnish.

8.  Serve in bowls garnished with a few rings of the sausage and some chopped celery leaves.


General verdict: Lekker!!!







Sweet Corn Chowder

Ingredients

• 2.5 lb peeled-weight potatoes
• 1 cup frozen sweet corn
• 2 teaspoons chopped garlic
• 1 quart chicken broth (I use low-sodium)
• Half pound of grated cheddar (preferably sharp)
• A third of a cup of flour
• 1 cup of buttermilk
• A pinch of salt
• Half a teaspoon of ground black pepper

Method

1. Peel and chop the potatoes into about half-inch cubes
2. Put them into a large pot and just cover with water.
3. Bring to the boil and then simmer until soft - about 15 minutes
4. Drain water from potatoes and return them to the pot.
5. Remove 1 cup of the potatoes, mash them well, and return them to the pot.
6. Add the chicken broth, salt and pepper, and garlic, and bring to a boil.
7. Add the flour to the buttermilk and mix well.
8. Reduce the potato mix to a simmer.
9. Gently add the buttermilk/flour mixture, stirring well.
10. Add the cheese, in small amounts, stirring well all the while to mix in one batch of cheese before adding the next.
11. Add the sweet corn and stir in. 

General verdict: Surprisingly good. The buttermilk gives it a faint tang which contrasts well with the sweet of the corn.

All these soups taste as well if not better the next day, and can be frozen for later.

Eat well and keep warm!

TTFN