Potato-Leek Soup

Tonight’s dinner:

A double batch of dilled potato-leek soup from Tasteofhome.com

SERVINGS: 3

Ingredients:

• 1 cup sliced leeks (white portion only)
• 1 celery rib, chopped
• 1-1/2 teaspoons butter
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1-1/2 cups cubed peeled Yukon Gold potatoes
• 1 large carrot, finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1-1/2 teaspoons snipped fresh dill or 1/2 teaspoon dill weed
• Herb potato chips and finely shredded leeks, optional

Directions:

In a large saucepan, saute leeks and celery in butter until tender. Stir in the broth, potatoes, carrot, thyme, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 10-15 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Cool slightly.

Transfer to a blender; cover and process until smooth. Return to the pan. Whisk a small amount of soup into buttermilk; return all to the pan, stirring constantly. Add dill; heat through (do not boil). Garnish if desired. Yield: 3-3/4 cups.

Taco salad (lettuce, diced tomatoes, diced cucumber, chopped onion, corn, kidney beans, chopped green olives, chili powder)

Bosniak bread with light butter

Verdict: Good. The potato masher made a decent substitute for a blender in this application. The soup wasn’t totally smooth like in the picture, but it was pretty pulverized. Sort of like that Campbell’s Vegetable Soup-at-Hand, if you’ve ever tried that. I did cut all the veggies very small though to aid in smoothness.

Soup Showdown! Chicken with Curly Pasta

Though I was raised on canned soup, I’ve come to detest the stuff over the years. Can after can of mushy veggies, disintegrating noodles, and questionable meat, all soaked in a broth that tastes like nothing but liquefied salt, left me disappointed and disillusioned.

Today, soup is a weekly meal in our home, but with a key difference: It is always homemade. Once a week, I cook up a big pot of the stuff, which provides a low-cal but filling dinner and then stretches to fill several lunches throughout the week.

Of course, the soup companies are always coming out with new varieties that sound enticing. So why not take a bit of inspiration from their product lines and create some soups truly worth supping on?

And so here it is — our very first Soup Showdown!

In one corner, we have a contender from Campbell’s, the granddaddy of canned soup companies: Campbell’s Select Roasted Chicken with Rotini & Penne Pasta Soup.

From Campbells.com:

Roasted Chicken with Rotini & Penne Pasta Soup
A delightful twist on traditional chicken soup. Our chef created a memorable soup that is chock full of generous pieces of oven-roasted white-meat chicken, chunky-cut vegetables and a combination of whimsical pasta shapes, all simmered in a rich chicken broth aromatic with savory herbs that will soothe your soul and delight your taste buds!

Campbell’s entrant offers a mere 100 calories per one cup serving, but watch out — there’s 860 mg of sodium in that same one cup! No wonder the stuff tastes so salty. And to think I used to eat almost the whole can at once.

Checking the ingredients, it’s clear that this is your typical chicken noodle soup, albeit with pasta replacing the usual egg noodles. Chicken, celery, carrots, dehydrated onion, garlic, and herbs, broth, seasoning — pretty simple stuff, and easy to improve upon.

Now, I wouldn’t claim that my recipe for this is the ultimate version of chicken soup. I’m not simmering a whole chicken for hours or spending more to buy a bunch of herbs that will rot away in my crisper after I make the soup. I’m certainly not above using a few shortcuts, true, but I also need to think contextually. I’m limited by my time (which I don’t want to spend all of in our tiny, isolated kitchen), my grocery budget (which is small), and, for now, the availability of ingredients at Slovak grocery stores.

Still, following my guidelines here will definitely result in a soup that’s fresher and tastier than anything you can get out of a can. It will take more time and effort upfront, but not any more than you would normally spend on cooking dinner. Plus, this recipe will make a huge batch that, when cooked as a dinner for two, will provide a quick-as-canned and satisfying lunch later on.

Let’s get cooking!

I often start recipes here with some of this olive oil spray. I don’t know exactly if it’s purely oil, but it’s the closest thing we’ve found here to nonstick spray. I like nonstick spray for many reasons, but right now I’m mostly using it to save a handful of calories in everyday cooking. I coated the bottom of my soup pot with a quick spray before I turned the heat on to low.

I had to share the price of these four carrots. For those of you who do not make regular transactions in Slovak korunas, these cost 21 U.S. cents altogether.

Anyway, you should peel each carrot, trim off the yucky ends, and then cut them in half lengthwise so that you have a flat surface on the vegetable for nice, stable slicing. Next, chop them into half moons that are, oh, somewhere between 1/4 inch and 1/2 inch thick. Or between half a centimeter and a whole centimeter thick, if you prefer metric.

Drop all your carrots into the slowly heating pan as you chop them. They’ll start to soften and get a little color as you chop the rest of the vegetables, but they won’t burn as your heat here is very, very low.

Tip: If things do threaten to get smoky, just add maybe half a cup of water to the pot as needed to keep the veggies from sticking to the bottom.

I used a nice, big onion in my soup because I enjoy the sweet flavor of cooked onions. But like any of the ingredients, you can adjust the amount as needed to suit your taste. My chicken soup is kind of heavy on the vegetables because they are low-cal and nutritious filler.

Just dice the onion as small as you like. Cut off the root and tip of the onion, cut the whole thing in half top to bottom, then peel off the outer skin layer. Lay it flat and slice against the grain (but not through the root end — you want to keep it together for now) to divide the onion into . . . columns. Yeah. And then slice crosswise to produce a dice. Don’t worry, the layers come apart as you cook so you don’t end up with enormous chunks.

Looks better than dehydrated onion, no? Dump all the chopped bits in the pot and stir.

Take four cleaned and trimmed celery stalks and . . .

. . . magically turn them into eight by slicing them in half lengthwise! Then chop ‘em up and throw ‘em in the pot with a good stirring.

Mmm . . . mirepoix.

Now I really like garlic, so I used five cloves. The soup doesn’t get an overwhelming garlic flavor, but it does add good depth to the broth. If a bunch of little pieces of garlic floating around is going to disturb you, then just smash the cloves, pull off the skins, and dump them straight in without mincing. That way, you can easily pull them out at the end, once they’ve given their flavoring all.

But me?

I mince. Or sometimes use a garlic press.

Now that everybody’s in the soon-to-be bath, I season with salt . . .

. . . and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Use less if you don’t want it too spicy. Use more to really clear out that congestion.

Here we must accommodate to our circumstances. I have not yet found any canned soup in Bratislava, let alone packaged chicken broth. All soups seem to come in powdered form instead. But whatever. I doubt I’d be willing to carry home tons of broth cans in addition to everything else over public transit anyway. Two cubes here makes one liter of chicken broth, which is about four cups. I add them directly to the pot and turn the heat up to medium high.

Next comes one cup (or 250 ml) of water . . . and a steam bath.

I now get aggressive and scrape up the fond from the bottom of the pan. That’s all the browning stuff that’s stuck to the bottom that will help make your bouillon taste like real stock.

See what a nice, rich color the water is now? Go ahead and add three more cups of water. Or 750 ml, if you’re cooking in Slovakia.

Now, when it’s all wet like that, I toss in the dried herbs. Dried herbs are fine for anything you plan on cooking for a while. Can you guess what these are?

One teaspoon of dried dill, 1 tablespoon of dried chives, and 2 bay leaves enter the pot.

Here is the diced chicken I saved from the previous night’s stir fry. It’s disturbingly similar in color to my hand. I only had one spare breast pieces, so I cut it extra small to stretch it. You could always add more chicken if you’re not cheap like me.

The chicken will start to turn white as soon as it hits the hot tub. Let it soak in there for about five minutes before you add the macaroni. It may need more time if you used bigger pieces.

Ever since I arrived here, Tesco’s been getting on a Whole Foods kick. Organic beef and dry goods started showing up, and they promote the heck out of some reusable shopping bag that we’ve never seen outside of the pictures. Now, they’ve started carrying whole-wheat pasta. We like the taste, but if you don’t, well, I’ll never know that you used a less virtuous noodle.

Add about 1/4-1/3 a pound (or 125 grams here) of fusilli or whatever curly pasta you picked up.

I decided here that one liter of broth wasn’t going to cut it for cooking all that pasta. I added two cups (or 500 ml, whatever) more water for the fusilli to drink up. You could use broth instead.

Let the pot boil gently for as long as it takes for the macaroni to turn tender. Then . . .

. . . you’ll have this lovely pot of soup here. Mmm!

M’m, m’m, good, you might say.

Chicken with Curly Pasta Soup
Source: Colleen’s Cookbook
Yield: 7 to 8 one-cup servings

• Nonstick spray
• 4 medium-sized carrots, peeled, halved lengthwise, and sliced
• 1 large onion, diced
• 4 stalks celery, halved lengthwise and sliced
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• A few shakes of salt
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper (use less for less spice)
• 4 cups chicken bouillon, prepared
• 2 cups water
• 1 teaspoon dried dill
• 1 tablespoon dried chives
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 chicken breast, cut into a small dice
• 125 grams fusilli (or other macaroni)

Put a large soup pot or Dutch oven over very low heat. Add the vegetables to the pot as you chop them, stirring with each addition.

Once all the veggies are in the tub, season them with some salt and the 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Give the mix a good stir to distribute the seasonings, then turn up the heat to medium high. Add one cup of the bouillon and scrape the bottom of the pan firmly to bring up all the browned bits (this provides both depth of flavor and a cleaner pan for your significant other to wash!).

Add the rest of the bouillon and the water. To this, stir in the dill, chives, and bay leaves. Let the soup come up to a simmer, then add the chicken pieces. Allow the chicken to poach for about 5 minutes. Turn down the heat if the soup starts to boil rapidly.

Next, stir in the fusilli. Cook this at a gentle boil for as long as the package instructions say, until the pasta is tender. Fish out the bay leaves and serve.

Notes:
You can shift around the proportions as you see fit. This produces a very chunky soup. If you prefer a thinner soup, add another pint of chicken broth.

Download Chicken with Curly Pasta Soup into MacGourmet.

Slate’s Canned Soup Taste-Off

The article’s a bit old, but the soups are still out there. If you need evidence for why homemade soup is immensely superior to canned, go no further.

Testing canned soup

Spicy Lentil Soup

As you might note from yesterday’s entry, I’m trying to incorporate more beans into my cooking. Beans have lots fiber (including the kind that lowers cholesterol) and protein, and as an added bonus, they’re cheap.

 

Right now, living in Europe, cheap is especially meritorious.

 

For anyone interested in learning about them for Weekend Herb Blogging at The Well-Seasoned Cook, lentils are an itty-bitty bean that, as I learned from Alton Brown on Good Eats, come in a number of colorful varieties — green, red, brown, black, etc. Like all beans, it’s part of the nutritious legume family, and if they showed up in your elementary school’s food pyramid, they’d be up with the Meats and Other Proteins. In the kitchen, lentils have a distinct advantage over most other dried beans as they do not need to be soaked for hours before cooking; just toss them right into the pot and simmer them for about 30-40 minutes to turn them tender.

 

I initially picked up the half-kilo bag of green lentils in order to make a lentil-chorizo soup, as it sounded like the most promising chorizo recipe not involving rice or eggs on the Food Network site. That soup was okay — if I were to make it again, I would add the chorizo back in at the last second to keep it from going mushy on me.

 

Of course, the recipe didn’t use up all those lentils. Because I hate to let good food go to waste (I lose enough to mold in my tiny fridge), I needed to plan a use for those lentils before they became like much of the canned goods in my Vegas pantry — forgotten space-wasters.

 

My old tendency to buy something and never use it was why I started meal planning in the first place, after all.

 

I searched for another recipe for lentils. I favored soup again, as we are trying to drop pounds. On Food Network Canada’s site, I found Christine Cushing’s recipe for Spicy Lentil Soup.

 

Because I have limited access to ingredients here in Slovakia, every recipe has to be made my own by necessity. In this case, the dried chile had to go — I don’t think they sell chiles here, period. Hot ketchup, yes. Anchos, no. I used some Asian chili paste I picked up in the ethnic aisle instead.

 

I haven’t seen cumin seeds, either. I don’t think I’ve seen them in my American grocery store, actually. Besides, even if they did sell them here, I wouldn’t be able to read the name on the package to know it. I left them out.

 

Also, the only lentils at the store are green, so the red ones had to go.

 

I reduced the olive oil in the recipe as well. Three tablespoons just seems excessive to me in general, but right now it seems especially egregious since I was making soup as a filling diet meal. One teaspoon is enough, especially in a nonstick pan. If I find the food is sticking or cooking too fast, I start adding in a little water to compensate.

 

And then there’s convenience. I had a bag of shredded carrots already. As it turned out, they created a nice textural contrast. I had a celery heart that needed to be used up, so I added more than double the amount of celery called for. This alteration heavily perfumed the soup with that distinct celery aroma, which intensified the dish’s flavor and made our apartment smell delicious all night.

 

As for the vinegar . . . well, I forgot about it. The soup was fine without it. I wouldn’t have had the right sort of vinegar, anyway, as I only get apple cider and balsamic. Same with broth — I only stock chicken.

 

So here it is — changed so much that I consider my own specialty now. It’s a delicious dish, good enough that I actually enjoy eating soup again.

 

Spicy Lentil Soup
Source: Colleen Fischer (with inspiration from Christine Cushing)
Yield: 7 one-cup servings

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
  
• 2 medium onions, chopped
  
• pinch salt
  
• 4 cloves garlic, sliced
  
• 6 cups chicken broth
  
• 1 cup lentils
  
• 4 stalks celery, chopped
  
• ¾ cup shredded carrots
  
• 1 teaspoon sambal oelek (Asian; like chili-garlic paste)
  
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
  
• 2 bay leaves
  

Heat the olive oil in a soup pot. Add the onions and salt, and sauté until translucent and lightly golden. Add the sliced garlic and sauté for about a minute.

Stir in the chicken broth, scraping the bottom of the pan to deglaze.

Add the remaining ingredients. Stir. Bring the pot to a boil, then cover and turn down the heat to low. Simmer for 30 minutes.

Remove the lid and simmer for about 10-15 minutes more, until the lentils are tender. Remove the bay leaves and serve hot.

Nutritional notes:
Per serving:
144 calories
2 g fat
9 g protein
23 g carbohydrates
9.5 g fiber

Download Spicy Lentil Soup into MacGourmet.