What's cooking? part 4

my nasal passages are congested so i am attempting doro wat, with collards

tastes fine but even though i followed the directions closely enough, the sauce was very watery at the end so it's more like chicken boiled in spicy broth + hard-boiled eggs. in the berbere paste i substituted dried ancho chiles for dried piquin peppers because those are too hot and you can't buy them anywhere anyway.

Have been pretty happy that we live across the st from a reasonable supermarket, and it turns out it's good for "what's for dinner?" moments, but I just got back from grocery marathon and they didn't have curry powder, basil, frozen blueberries, and a few other "no brainer" things.

bought a thing of garlic powder at cvs because we forgot to get it on grocery trip and you can't just go to the store here, you need a car. sigh.

Watercress soup, then roast chicken and potatoes boulangere.

that sounds delicious. what else is in the watercress soup?

Onion, butter, cooked with the cress for five mins, then add a little flour, then bit by bit the water (or veal stock - I ain't got any, but I might put in whatever chicken stock I don't need for the potatoes). Simmer for an hour, blend, add some cress leaves you've left aside, whisk cream and a couple of egg yolks together, add. Can also be eaten chilled. Pretty certain my mum used to make it with dill as well, but I'm not. The recipe, such as it is, is from Jane Grigson's vegetable book.

Wanted something light, not a full roast, and these seemed like a good combination

Amazing! I am going to c/p this into my little recipe archives.

Ok, in which case -

330g/10oz watercress
1 medium onion, chopped
1 heaped tablespoon flour
1 litre/2pt water or light (veal) stock
salt, pepper
250 single cream
2 egg yolks

Thanks! I hardly ever measure stuff very precisely but it's good to know proportions. Not sure what a 250 single cream is though?

Yeah, I know what you mean about the measures - apart from cakes, I don't measure much myself. In this case, it's more for the quantity of cress, to avoid anything too insipid.

It is, of course, 250 teaspoons of cream. Ah no, wait (*peers at book*)
millilitres. Make it half a pint.

Would you consider making this soup without the cream? I don't really like heavily creamy soups very much. I imagined it as sort of clear and green, but this sounds more creamy and green, which is totally different.

In other news, I was thinking of making vegetable soup tonight. Yesterday I finally organized all of my paper recipes/notes/pictures into a binder instead of a decade-old folder and was reminded how much I like vegetable soup.

Hmm, well it's kind of cream of watercress soup, not really a clear one - but I'm sure you can add cream to taste. It's useful because it kind of carries the flavour. It doesn't really come across as creamy or rich as such, for me anyway (a bit like pea soup - one of my favourites). If you don't want to use cream, I'd definitely use a stock (veg stock fine), to give the soup some body. I'm sure that'd be great, but in a different way.

I notice that in the potato and cress soup recipe J Grigon gives, she suggests using the water from haricot beans (I assume she means the stuff you get in a tin of haricot beans) to add flavour, and it's not the first time I've seen this suggested. So if you've got any tinned beans in the house you might want to try that.

Vegetable soups utterly rock - both chunky ones and smooth ones. Pea, as I say, is one of my favourites, but chunky ones with pearl barley and potatoes and aubergine and stuff, and a strong herb like sage or thyme + bay, amazing.

I made a clear beef soup last night with two browned soup bones and the usual garni, excluding rosemary (which I would have used but was told it didn't belong in a "European" recipe). Added barley (for me) and egg noodles (for dining partner) at the end.

Result was an almost-clear soup thanks to my repeated surface skimming, plus another whole pot of leftover beef broth to freeze!

Love rosemary, to hell with the purists, I say. V nice sounding that, Laurel.

Thx! I threw out the carrots, onions, garlic, and parsley that were boiled with the stock because they were all depleted and mush, and replaced them with fresh diced carrot & parsley for the re-heat.

When I make stock (or more properly, broth) is one of the few times I wonder if I really should have cheesecloth in my arsenal. Seems like the quickest way to clear out all those mystery solids without standing over the steaming pot for 30 mins with a large spoon.

Cheesecloth + egg white clarification gets my vote for quick, perfectly clear broth.

Another thing we were missing was some parsnip? You boil it with the broth and then throw it out, apparently you Do Not Eat It. Previous to cooking with a peanut gallery, I'd never purchased or used a parsnip in my life; what's their effect on soup?

xpost

I got muslin for that sort of thing. It's cheap enough, and great for making consomees or stocks of any sort really. Thoroughly recommend, if you're going to freeze, not initially straining it (though obviously sieve/colander the main bits out), but freezing it as it is, then leaving it to defrost over some muslin - because the fat is frozen at the top, it doesn't go through, and you end up with a crystal clear stock.

Laurel, thoroughly recommend making a parsnip gratin dauphinoise, just incredible. Parsnip is comparatively sweet but adds decent body to the stock.

They have a lovely lightly carroty flavor. I'm the sort of disgusting savage that would eat them though (roasted especially delish). xp

Jaq, you would despair if you saw my "kitchen" -- it's a hallway on the way to the bathroom, and I'm using my half-sized sheet pan as a dish drainer because it doesn't fit into the (electric) oven. Linear inches of counter space, total: 12.

I have an old gradeschool-yellow typing table on casters that holds the dish rack and ingredients, gets rolled back and forth depending on use. I hate our electric cooktop but at least the perfectly flat surface can double as counter space if you're not cooking anything. O_o

Landlords promising a kitchen remodel will begin in three weeks but a) I'll believe it when I see it, and b) there's just not much to work with.

oh man, that's hardship conditions.

I won't tell you about my next kitchen, it will make you cry.

If we don't get into a biblically amazing apartment next time with a luxury kitchen, I may have to say "I love my boyfriend but he has chosen Manhattan" and get my ass back to Crown Heights.

For real. I could not work in those conditions.

Just got back from the store, where I bought tons of veggies for my soup. I also got a baguette, which I intend to eat with some super nutty gruyere I got over the weekend. Cannot wait.

Previous tenant had turned the breaker for the stove completely off, that's how much he REALLY DIDN'T COOK.

Sounds so nice, Amanda! I put havarti on a baguette with my soup last night.

Previous tenant is crazy!

Questione!!! I'm in a blueberry muffin mood, but I HATE commercial & bakery ones because they use cakey batters that are v v sweet. I like a good salty baking-powder biscuit-ish dough instead.

The only problem is mixing in fruit without smooshing it. My solution has been frozen blueberries, folding them in carefully at last min. (Incidentally I'm going to use raspberries tonight because frozen fruit selection was lacking yesterday.)

Favorite blueberry muffin variants or tips & tricks?

For muffins I use the Joy of Cooking yogurt recipe and use plain kefir. It does produce a moist, cakey dough but it's only as sweet as you want it to be. Maybe I would recommend making scones instead of muffins? I like the JoC cream scones recipe.

La Lechera - I just tasted the soup before I added the cream - very nice indeed, tho I did end up using almost half pint of stock and half a pint of water in there. Simmer for half an hour, not an hour btw.

Will do! Got some watercress at the store just now. Going to eat a little in a salad w/fennel and oranges for lunch and the rest in my soup tonight. Watercress-only soup will have to wait til I get through this soup.

today is my day off btw, hence the shopping/cooking.
sun/mon are like sat/sun for me.

I have my mom's recipe which is from either JoC or BH&G, and it's a baking powder-version, but it never quite tastes like hers?! Afraid the problem might be that she uses local fresh berries. ;_;

I hope it's cooler wherever you guys are! I was a fool to make soup on a 90-degree day, which is what NY had yest.

it's 70 and sunny, quite nice!

Just made glazed baby turnips for the first time -- delicious. I'm definitely going to plant some turnips in my fall garden, pull them at golf-ball sized.

now in oven: enchiladas of chicken, black bean, onion, yellow pepper, jalapeno, wilted spinach, lots of spices, corn tortillas, sauce. basically throwing together stuff that i think will be delicious because there were tortillas in the fridge that needed to be used. it's so weird being in someone else's kitchen, but at least my sister has amazing cookware. way nicer than mine (also made smoothie with bro-in-law's vitamix this morning!!!).

I have the blandest taste in food sometimes – my mom made a pot of unsalted pinto beans when I visited her & I couldn't get enough. Making beans for myself today. Hopefully the addition of some bacon, garlic, onions & Hatch green chiles don't ruin it.

Those sound like perfect things to add to them.

Made a corned beef w onion, pot, carrot, thyme, etc in the slow cooker yest with Irish soda bread to go with.

Was roundly scolded for taking the meat out of the broth to slice it, because no one in Europe or probably the rest of the world would ever take salted meat out of the broth to dry off on the counter, it's just WRONG.

Also, soda bread needs more salt.

Would mess up your blade if you sliced it in the pot.

Abbott, yr bean additions sound delicious.

SOMEONE needs to go eat in Europe if someone cares so much.

I cooked up all the veg in the bacon grease before adding them top the beans (my dad used to praise his father's cooking of food in bacon grease, but refused to do it for us bcz his dad died of a heart attack – I'm sure its fine if you only do it a few times a year). I doubt the beans'll be gross, but I just hope I don't eat them & think "man, I wish these were as flavorless as my mom's."

Those are the perfect ingreds for beans, Abbott! You can't go wrong. Will you be eating these with stove top-scorched flour tortillas, perchance?

Probably gonna make some cornbread & serve 'em over that.

I go outside every morning to my Anaheim chile plants and say "come on, come ONNNN".

Near as I can tell, Anaheims are close to Hatch chilies, if not the same thing.

Anaheims are not as spicy as some Hatch chiles (which come in a variety of spiciness but around here you can pretty much only get the spicy ones). My old anatomy & physiology prof constantly associated them with death and murder: "...if you want to poison someone, you know, feed them the chile from Hatch." The Hatch chile, I swear, makes me kind of high in a weird way! The Hatch chile fest, otoh, is kind of a disappointment.

Anaheims are tasty, too, though. I have given up pretty much on using green bell peppers, & I always use Anaheims when they're called for. They have such a tasty flavor!