La Recette du Jour

Our veggie box had two huge chunks of bright orange pumpkin in it this week. I don’t particularly like pumpkin, but one thing I do know about squash is that the first thing you should do with it is cut it into chunks and roast it to get rid of most of the water. So into a 200C oven it went, and I used FoodBlogSearch to search for “roasted squash”. Lots of ideas, but this recipe fitted perfectly with the ingredients I had to hand. “Almost vegetarian” is a good description of me too.

Wow! It tasted wonderful — on the basis of this recipe alone I might buy the book it came from, The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone in Between by Peter Berley, despite the stupid title. The flavour was warm, sweet and spicy, perfect for a chilly autumn evening, it was a lovely deep brick-red, and the blob of spiced cream added a nice contrast. It is one of the best soups I have ever made.

Assuming you have roasted squash on hand it’s easy to make, but even if you don’t, you can put the squash in the oven while you get on with other preparation; I cooked the onions and made an apple crumble for pudding while it was roasting.

I adjusted the recipe slightly; I’m not keen on sage or cloves, so I left them out and used a bay leaf and 4-épices instead. I had some excellent chicken stock from the weekend roast chicken, so I used that, but of course vegetable stock can be used instead.
Recipe for Roasted squash soup with spiced crème fraîche »

I had to take a break from Taste & Create over the summer, because I knew I just wouldn’t have time for it. Now I’m back, paired with Carol of No Reason Needed. Carol likes lemons, so is obviously a kindred spirit. But in the end, I decided to skip over the many lemon-based recipes and go for a simple, homely soup, in order to use some of the veg from our organic box. As the weather is getting a bit cooler, it made a nice supper with some good bread, followed by plum crumble and custard.

I made a few slight tweaks to Carol’s recipe. It makes a lot of soup — enough for at least 6-8 servings — so there’s plenty left to freeze for later in the winter. Thickening soup with rice is a first for me — it worked well, but actually I like the taste and texture of potato in soup so much that I think I’d go back to potato next time. I only used half the specified amount of rice, because I’d nearly run out of rice, but the soup was still quite thick. And I added some spices.
Recipe for Creamy vegetable soup and plum crumble »

Taste & Create beckons once more! This time I am paired with Sweatha of TastyCurryLeaf. I hastened directly to her blog hoping to find something I could cook for dinner that evening and was immediately rewarded.

Her blog is very interesting; it’s clear that her background is Indian (so lots of yummy-looking Indian recipes) but she lives in the US so the Indian food is interspersed with an eclectic mix of American, Italian, and other cuisines — she seems very adventurous in her cooking. In addition, although she doesn’t specifically mention it, she’s clearly vegetarian, so that made it attractive too. Even on a quick glance I could see there were plenty of good candidates. But for that evening I kept it simple: roasted red bell pepper soup, using easily available ingredients. I love the flavour of roasted red peppers so it looked worth a try.

I don’t make soup as often as I should, given how good home-made soup is, and this was a reminder of how quickly you can whip up something good. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly; Sweatha says to thicken it with cornstarch, but I felt this was unnecessary and would affect the fresh flavour, so I left it out. I also didn’t use coriander leaves, because a) I don’t like them, they taste of soap to me and b) they are nearly impossible to find here anyway. I used ground coriander seeds instead. For added spice I used my infamous Scotch Bonnet-infused chilli sherry. This lives in the larder, well away from the drinks cabinet and with a large warning notice affixed to it. A teaspoon is enough to add pizazz to anything. And finally I used crème fraîche instead of ordinary cream, because it tastes nice!

This is not the only recipe I’ll try from her blog, since this T&C runs for two months — I might even try some of her simple Indian dishes. I love good Indian food, and when I was a student in London I often cooked Indian meals — it was easy to get the ingredients there, and it lends itself to cheap but excellent vegetarian feasts. Now I never cook it, because I think you need to do it regularly to get it right, and it is more difficult to find the ingredients you need here. So I just have to wait for visits to the UK to pig out in Indian restaurants!
Recipe for Roasted red pepper soup »

From this:

to this:

This bold experiment is the result of a discussion about what to do with left-over dressed salad. Normally it just gets thrown away, but I remembered reading about someone using it to make gazpacho. I though this sounded disgusting. But last night we had 14 people for dinner, and we made a huge fattoush salad: lettuce, onions, yellow pepper, tomatoes, cucumber, and mint, with toasted diced pitta bread thrown in at the last minute.There was so much I didn’t have a bowl big enough, so I made it in my huge stockpot, and although we ate a lot there was a lot left over.

Given that it was in the stockpot, why not try it? So here is … left-over salad soup!

Recipe for Salad soup »

I love real Italian cooking and don’t do nearly enough of it. Many traditional Italian recipes not only taste good but have the benefit of being vegetarian or nearly so, and not too fattening.

I expect there are as many versions of the Tuscan soup ribollita (reheated soup) as there are cooks. This is based on Ursula Ferrigno’s recipe in Bringing Italy Home, and I like it because it’s vegetarian. If you are a confirmed carnivore, you could easily add a ham hock or some bacon. As the name suggests, it’s best reheated the day after you make it.

Vegetables can be varied according to taste and availability. I’m sure in Tuscany it always has cavolo nero in it, but you can’t get that here, so I always use dark green Savoy cabbage.

Oil: you must use the best you can get for drizzling over the top; you can get away with slightly less good for the cooking, but it should be extra-virgin.

Recipe for Ribollita »

A good warming soup that remedies the sometimes rather bland taste of pumpkin.

Recipe for Pumpkin and apple soup »

A classic French soup … delicious if carefully made.

Recipe for Potage Bonne Femme »

An Elizabeth David mushroom soup. It doesn’t sound terribly exciting but it preserves all the flavour of the mushrooms — whether they are humble champignons de Paris or rustic cèpes.

Recipe for Mushroom soup »

Here is a quick-to-make soup which sounds implausible but is actually very nice. It can be eaten hot, warm or cold. As a variation, you could use Boursin or similar instead of vache-qui-rit.

Recipe for La soupe de Myriam »

A summer recipe par excellence, and very quick to prepare. You might need to adjust quantities, according to taste and the size of the tomatoes.

Recipe for Gazpacho Express »