Creamy Tomato Soup

I have a few backlogged recipes to catch up on, unsurprisingly, but this most recent meal is crying out to be blogged as soon as possible. I've made tomato soup from this BBC Good Food recipe before as a pasta bake sauce and as a soup, and it's worked really well. Unfortunately I don't have any baking soda, although the milk trick works really well, so substituted with cream. A really great easy soup, even better with grilled cheese on toast.

Creamy Tomato Soup

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 small or 1 large portions

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

2 cloves garlic

1.5 teaspoons basil, fresh or dried, divided

3 cups tomato sauce/passata

1/2 teaspoon parmesan dust (optional)

1 tablespoon cream

(OR 1 tablespoon milk with 1 pinch baking soda)

Seasoning

Apple and Blue Cheese Soup

When my parents were at university, they made stilton and cider soup. When I was at university, I also made stilton and cider soup. It was rich and decadent and the kind of soup that you could spread on toast. Out here in Korea, after buying Blue Cheese! in Seoul, it was the first thing I wanted to make - with, of course, substitutions. I mentioned earlier how we are in a cider-free country (except for the fact that Sprite is known as 'cider', which I swear was only done to annoy me). So, apple it was.

I made this soup alcohol-free, because I did make it just after getting out of bed this morning, but feel free to use cider yourself, or use white wine to deglaze the pan after the onion has softened. Adding a potato will thicken it, and be careful not to over-salt - just keep tasting it until it's right. The blue cheese will make the back of your throat burn slightly as you eat it, which I like, but will make you wary of eating too much.

Apple and Blue Cheese Soup

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 3-4 servings

1 tablespoon oil

Half an onion

1 clove garlic

1 tablespoon flour

200ml milk

250ml apple juice
1 apple

1 teaspoon chicken stock powder

60g blue cheese

Seasoning

Low GI stew with 'bread'

After a week of minimal experimentation in the kitchen, I was really missing the whole 'trying new things' experience. On Monday I made gnocchi - I've made it many times before, true, but never that particular way, and never with sweet potato - and yesterday I decided I would make bread. The problem was that I would only be able to start the bread at around 9.30, and we didn't want to leave it for hours to rise or anything. I ended up using this recipe, which promised far more than it delivered. During cooking, the bread stank. Although it was edible, and some of the crusty bits were quite good, the bread was really heavy. Even picking up a slice made you think 'god, this bread's heavy.' This morning, I went to cut a slice, and no knife could penetrate its stone-like exterior. Tom christened it 'It's Bread, But Not As We Know It.' I'm not going to record the recipe as I followed the original instructions exactly.

Luckily the stew was good. Not mindblowingly brilliant, sadly, but still good. And also good reheated the next day.

Bacon and Bean Stew
Serves 3

8 rashers of bacon
2 onions
1 tin red kidney beans
3 chicken stock icecubes
700ml boiling water
2 teaspoons tomato sauce
75g fusilli pasta
1 teaspoon each of rosemary and parsley
1 tablespoon each of soy sauce and gravy powder
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 tablespoon of milk
Seasoning

Roughly chop the bacon and dry-fry over a medium heat. Cut each onion in half and each half into sixths, and add to the pan once most of the bacon fat has been released. When the onion is soft, add the kidney beans, chicken stock, water, tomato sauce and pasta. Cook over a low heat until the pasta is cooked. Add the rosemary and parsley. I felt my stew was too thin, so made a paste of soy sauce and gravy powder and added it to the pan. I also wanted it to be creamier, so put baking powder in a bowl and poured the milk over it, stirred them together, and added that to the pan as well. This will make it foam on top, but keep cooking it and the foam will disappear. After 20 minutes of simmering the pasta should be cooked. Serve with 'It's Bread, But Not As We Know It,' or just normal bread.

Vegetable Stew/Soup

This morning, after making the stock and filling both of our little ice cube trays, there was probably about 100ml of chicken stock left over. I decided to make a massive vegetable stew for dinner, so I could purée the rest into soup. After having soup a couple of times recently, I've been wanting it more and more, so cooking a meal specifically for the purpose of having leftovers soup doesn't seem too crazy. Does it?

Vegetable Stew
Makes 2 servings with leftovers for 2 or 3 soup meals

1 pumpkin
2 onions
4 garlic cloves
1 large carrot
3 potatoes
2 leeks
100ml concentrated chicken stock
1/2 bottle white wine (I used Korean plum wine)
Herbs and spices: 3 bay leaves, oregano, rosemary, thyme, basil, parsley, cinnamon, and freshly grated ginger
Handful dried cranberries
1/2 head broccoli
Seasoning

Cut the pumpkin in half, drizzle a little oil on top, and put in the oven at 125 degrees C (face up) for about twenty minutes.

In the meantime, cut the onions into eighths, mince the garlic, dice the carrot and put into an oiled pan over a low heat. Peel and chop the carrot and add to the pan. Peel and chop the potatoes into thirds (mine were small anyway), and add to the pan. At this point it's a good idea to boil a kettleful of water.

Chop the leeks into discs and add to the pan. By now the pumpkin should be ready - the point is to enhance some of the flavours and make it easier to chop, rather than actually cooking it. Remove the skin, chop into bite-sized portions, and add to the pan. Stir everything together and add the chicken stock, along with enough boiling water to generously cover all the vegetables. Boil everything for ten minutes before adding the herbs and spices. Allow to simmer for another ten minutes before adding the chopped broccoli and dried cranberries.

Scoop out a couple of cups of the cooked vegetables in the broth and blend. Return to the pan, making the sauce thicker. Cook for a further five minutes and serve with rice, bread, or anything else.

Thanksgiving: The Leftovers

The leftovers have lasted us for three meals so far, with very little sign of running out in the near future. Last night we sliced and fried the roast potatoes and ate them with cold meat; for lunch today I made a leftovers soup; for mid-work-snack there are sandwiches and wraps - and still we have half a tupperware of meat, another one of sweet potato mash, and a couple of the biscuits left.

As I write this I am eating my second portion of leftovers soup - it gets better with age. This soup is actually brilliant, as my usual problem with soup is its thinness. Last week's sweet potato soup was delicious, and I had two servings of it for lunch at 1.30, but by 4.30 I was faint and dizzy with hunger. This soup is much chunkier and feels like you're actually eating something - I was full for hours.

I'm considering using the rest of the sweet potato to make a version of butternut squash macaroni cheese. I've seen about a hundred recipes for that over the last couple of weeks, but this is the only example I can pull up now. So that will make a fourth leftovers meal!

Oh: also, I can now report that persimmon chutney does taste great with poultry.

Thick, Tasty Leftovers Soup
Makes 4 small servings

Note: everything starred (*) was already cooked in my version.

1 onion
2 handfuls broccoli*
2 handfuls chard with garlic chips*
2 cups mashed sweet potato*
1 1/2 cups of Thai chicken soup (from a 'cup a soup' sachet like last time)
1 cup cream
1 glug red wine (I would have used white but the red was open)
1 teaspoon garlic sauce
1 handful of shredded chicken or duck*
Seasoning

If you are not using leftovers, you will have to do this following: boil the broccoli, sauté the chard with garlic chips, boil and roughly mash the sweet potato with some cream, butter and seasoning, and fry, bake or roast some kind of poultry before pulling it to pieces. It'll be worth it.

I chopped the onion and threw it into an oiled pot with the broccoli, chard and garlic to fry for a while. Added the sweet potato and stirred for a minute before adding the stock. Added some cream, wine and garlic sauce and allowed the sauce to simmer for about ten minutes, using the spoon to break up larger clumps of broccoli and sweet potato. Turned off the heat for a minute and then ladled about half of the soup into the blender, in batches, to purée before replacing back in the pan - you could do more or less depending on how chunky you like soup to be. Mine had no large lumps as I'd focused on getting all the broccoli and chard into the blender, so I still had small bites of, for example, garlic and onion. I reheated the soup and added a handful of small pieces of meat from the chicken and duck. Served with buttered bread but was just as brilliant without.

Sweet Potato Soup

Yesterday, after the rat debacle, we went to the butcher's and spent a while negotiating our way to buying a piece of meat. Sometimes not speaking Korean can be so much fun. We bought a 1.1kg chunk of pork, spit-roasted it on the rotisserie in our new oven (which was wonderful - self-basting!), and had it for dinner with roast potatoes, mashed sweet potato, broccoli, and the gravy from weeks ago jazzed up with roasted onions, garlic, and red wine. It was amazing. And we had a lot of leftovers.

Today I needed something comforting for lunch, and used some of the leftovers along with other ingredients to make a sweet potato soup. When the bus driver - our boss's brother-in-law - came to get rid of the rat yesterday, he brought with him a huge bag of home-grown sweet potatoes that he wanted to get rid of! Brilliant. The garlic sauce from Saturday came into play again in this dish. I don't really know what to say about the soup, except that it was delicious, warming, filling, and just perfect for today. The previous tenant of this flat had left a million cup-a-soup type things in the pantry so I used one of those instead of stock.

Sweet Potato Soup
Makes 4 servings

1 onion
2 garlic cloves
1 medium-sized sweet potato
500ml stock (I used a 'spinach and bacon soup' mix)
1 tablespoon garlic sauce
Leftovers: 2 tablespoons of mashed sweet potato, 2 broccoli florets
Seasoning

I peeled and very roughly chopped the onion, garlic and sweet potato, and fried them in hot oil for about five minutes. I added the hot stock and simmered for about ten minutes. I added the leftovers and garlic sauce and kept stirring until the sweet potatoes had gone very soft - perhaps another ten minutes, it didn't seem to take long. I poured the soup carefully, in batches, into the blender and blended until smooth. Returned the soup to the pan and reheated before serving with a slice of bread and butter.

Tomato Soup

Used the real tomato soup recipe (used before for a pasta bake) to make myself a comforting lunch yesterday. Followed the recipe, although used ketchup instead of tomato puree, and obviously did only about a quarter of the recipe. Served with two slices of toast, buttered, one with cheese.

Now all I have to do is plan tonight's dinner for 10. Unfortunately there is none of the following: meat of any sort, potatoes, vegetables, cheese. And not enough pasta or passata. Should be a challenge...

Pasta Bake

Pasta bake was a firm favourite for Tom and I when we lived alone. (Sigh. Not too long to go now.) It started with uncooked pasta + pasta sauce from a jar + LOTS OF CHEESE in the oven. And was delicious. It developed into cooked pasta + homemade pasta sauce + fried/grilled sausage chunks + LOTS OF CHEESE in the oven. And was even more delicious. In our second year of university we cooked it at least twice a week, which meant I ate it at least four times a week. There were a hell of a lot of leftovers.

So, yesterday I made it for eight with a sauce that was basically this tomato soup, but doubled, of course.

1.5 packets of short pasta, each 500g. Boiled for about fifteen minutes on a medium-high temperature without salt. Several handfuls of broccoli were added after about ten minutes.
Sauce: 2 chopped onions, 2 minced garlic cloves, fried and mixed with as much tomato puree as I could squeeze out of the tube, and a big sprinkling of an Italian herb mix. 1200g of passata plus some water added and stirred on a medium-low heat until simmering. Salt + pepper. The baking soda & milk mix was added as the pasta and broccoli were drained, and stirred on a medium-high heat until the foam dissipated. (Someone commented that it smelt like Heinz tomato soup! Yay!)
Pasta broccoli mix divided into one full and one half-full glass bowl. Sauce divided accordingly. Hell of a lot of cheese sprinkled on each.

The full pasta bowl served very slightly under-average sized portions to all 8. 6 went back for seconds, leaving a portion that would feed my sister (not much) as leftovers.

Delicious, but needed a tiny bit of extra flavouring. Sausages would also not have gone amiss!