(Sort of) Borscht

You've probably realised that I'm a pretty transparent, heart-on-my-sleeve sort of person. I'm no good at dissembling (and have no interest in acquiring the skill, either, come to that). So if you are connected to me in other spaces, you will know the brutal truth that the reason that I have not been posting many recipes here, lately, is that I simply can't afford the ingredients. It occurred to me that, if I was being so up-front about it on Facebook and Twitter, there was no reason to be coy about it here.

We are currently in a fairly difficult financial position that is set to get immeasurably worse within the next few months. Of course, we continue to hope for a miracle and to work hard at making sure we have left no stone unturned, but, for now, it is what it is. We have been blessed by friends who have given us food hampers, which has been wonderful and kept us all fed, but I have been uninspired recipe-wise. I hope you understand.

Be all that as it may, my local supermarket has a shelf where they sell fresh produce that has passed its best. I decided to pull my head out of my... erm... navel and get creative with what was on offer there. This is what I did yesterday, with a bag of no-longer-firm beetroot (beets, to you Americans) I found. Variations of beetroot soup (probably best known as borscht) are very popular in most East European countries.

The thing you need to know about this soup is that it is extremely low in fat (apart from the soured cream, that is, and you could always choose to leave that bit out) and highly nutritious.

Ingredients
15ml olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stick celery, sliced (optional - I leave this out because I have one son who loathes it)
3 or 4 beetroots, peeled and grated
1 large potato, peeled and grated
1 carrot, scraped and grated
1.25l stock - meat for omnivores, vegetable for veggies
Black pepper
Splash of red wine
Generous pinch of sugar
Soured cream

Method

• In a large saucepan, heat the oil and saute the onion and celery until the onion becomes slightly translucent.
• Add the carrot, beetroot and potato just briefly.
• Add the stock and bring to the boil.
• Reduce the heat and simmer for about 40 minutes.
• Season with black pepper (and salt if you feel compelled) to taste.
• Add the red wine and sugar. Stir until the sugar has dissolved.
• Serve, with a dollop of soured cream and crusty brown bread.

Some things you can try with this soup:

• Add a sprig or two of dill - it's surprising how well dill works with beetroot!
• Add about 15ml of freshly grated ginger root (instead of the dill, not as well as).
• Instead of either of the above, about 5ml horseradish will put hairs on your chest, if you like the stuff (I don't).

Carrot and lime soup

There's something I should confess to right here and now: I am a lime addict. I absolutely adore the taste of limes and am inclined to use them instead of lemons in pretty much any recipe. So, when I stumbled across this recipe, it was a have-to-have.

The recipe itself is one of those 'unknown origin' types, which I found somewhere when looking for ideas to use up a large quantity of carrots after I accidentally bought carrots twice in two days (as you do).

The taste of this soup is a little unusual. I would describe it as hot-and-sour, and I would advise against serving it to owners of conservative palates.

Ingredients

1 large onion, chopped
Little olive oil for frying
500g carrots, peeled and sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
75g uncooked brown rice
1 or 2 red chillies (to taste), seeded and chopped
1 litre vegetable or chicken stock
Juice of 1 lime
A little sugar and salt (if necessary, and to taste) - I use about 10ml sugar and no salt
Natural yoghurt for serving

Zhoozh it in the blender

Method

• Heat a little olive oil in a large pan and gently fry the onions. 
• Add the garlic and carrots, stir, cover and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.
• Stir in the raw rice, chillies and stock and simmer until the carrots are tender and the rice is soft.
• Add the lime juice. Taste and adjust with sugar and/or salt if necessary.
• Blend and serve with a swirl of natural yoghurt and crusty bread.

'Orange' Soup

I guess I really set myself up for this post when I challenged Karyn for the 'Queen of soups' title in January. I started making soups back when I was buying my first home and had so little money left after paying my mortgage, that my weekly diet was determined by what was left on the stalls at the local market at 4pm on Saturday - whatever they couldn't sell and wouldn't keep till Monday was the basis for that week's meals...and would need to be cooked pdq too. So I became famed for my coloured soups...as in "This is nice. What is it?" Me "Hmm, this is...(after looking closely at what was in the pan)...green soup." (or brown, or orange or whatever!) I do have enough cash to choose what soups I make these days, but still make lots where I have no hope of reproducing the recipe because I make it up as I go along. That's really the basis of much of my cooking; play with tastes and flavours until whatever you're making tastes right for today. Baking is really chemistry, so you have to follow the recipe for the magic to work, but any other sort of food? Just try it out till it works for you. Anyway... here's my 'Orange' soup recipe (note: it contains no oranges!)

1 average sized butternut squash
Sweet potatoes (as many as give the same quantity of flesh as the squash)
2 large red (bell) peppers
2 onions
2 garlic cloves
500ml vegetable stock
500ml milk (I use goat's milk, but I'm sure it would be as nice with cow's milk for those of you who can eat it!)
100ml (ish) olive oil

Peel and chunk the sweet potato and peel, chunk and deseed the squash. Chunks about 4-5cm cubes is about right. Chuck them onto a baking tray and put into the oven on about 190 degrees C for about 30 minutes. (Actually the temperature and timings don't really matter; just bung them in the oven till they're both soft and starting to brown - I always do this when I have the oven on for something else as they'll keep for a couple of days in the fridge once cool)

Peel and roughly chop the onions and peppers. And here's another 'doesn't really matter'; some people will always remove the skin from peppers, and if that's your thing, then do it, but I never bother for this recipe. Peel the garlic cloves.


Put the oil into a largish pan, and once it's warmed add the onions, and after a few minutes the garlic. You need enough oil to almost cover the onions so they kind of stew in the oil rather than fry, so the exact quantity depends on the size of your pan and onions... When both are soft add the peppers. When the peppers are soft add the roasted squash and sweet potato. Mix it all up and pause to look and smell....soooo gooood! See?

Now you need to add the stock and start to blitz the soup. I use a hand held blender, but if you only have a jug type blender, then that'll do too. Keep going till it's as smooth as you can make it (will probably look like porridge!) Now add the milk gradually and continue blending until really smooth. If it's not thin enough when you've added all the liquid, then add more, still blending till it's right for you.

Reheat slowly till hot, stirring to stop it sticking on the bottom of the pan. Serve with a swirl of yoghurt (this is goat's yoghurt) and home made croutons. How to do these? Cube some slightly stale bread (it tends to be the crusts from sliced wholemeal bread in this house) and toss them in a bowl with about a tablespoon of olive oil until they're all nicely oily. Then just chuck them onto a baking sheet and stick in the oven with the squash and sweet potato till they're brown enough for you. Or even a little too brown, like these ones! Enjoy!

Brown bean soup (with bacon)

We're coming to the end of our winter, here. When the warmer weather comes along, I will share all manner of recipes for salads and fridge tarts. But, for now, it's definitely the weather for soups, casseroles and stews.

The story behind this recipe is one of those culturally revealing moments. I was working for a small town council (the same one mentioned in yesterday's recipe) and we had an end-of-year staff-and-families braai (barbecue). I should point out that it is the norm in South Africa for each person/family to bring their own meat to a barbecue, and for the man of the family to cook it on the communal fire. Since I was single, this presented a problem. There was no way on earth that a woman could join the men at the fire. Our job was to sit inside and gossip... and keep the beers coming. So several men offered to cook my meat for me. This presented another problem. I was 23 and not unattractive. None of the wives wanted their husbands cooking for me - that was grounds for suspicion of an affair (I did say that it was a small town).

But I had to eat. Inevitably, somebody grilled my steak for me, and inevitably his wife got the sulks.

In a pathetic attempt to make peace, I offered to share my marinade recipe with her (which I will share with you, too, at some point). B I G mistake! She snapped at me that she had plenty of recipes of her own, thank you very much, and several of the hatchet-faced wives nearby assured me that she was a brilliant cook. So I asked her to share some of her recipes with me.

Oddly enough, she did. This was one of them.

Ingredients

1 pkt sugar beans (or kidney beans if you can't get sugar beans where you are), soaked for several hours or overnight
250g rindless bacon, chopped
2 large onions, chopped
3 carrots, peeled and grated
3 litres water
10ml salt
Lemon pepper to taste
Marrow bones (if you struggle to come by these, use a small bit of neck of lamb or something with a bone)
125ml 4-in-1 soup mix or a combination of red lentils, pearl barley and split peas
2 bay leaves

Method

• Saute the onions and bacon until just done.
• Discard the water from the beans and add the beans to the saucepan.
• Add water and all other ingredients and simmer for about 2 hours - stirring occasionally - until the beans are soft. If you're using a pressure cooker, 40 minutes at pressure should do the trick.
• Serve with crusty bread.

Pea and hock soup

This recipe comes from my BFF, Lynda Choice. Our two families spent a lot of time together when we were living in Cape Town. We also often wound up spontaneously eating together about once a week. Lynda and I would be working on something together, and get totally caught up in what we were doing. We would fetch the kids from school and go back to her house to carry on with whatever-it-was. At some point, I would phone John and tell him not to bother going home after work, but to come to the Choice's house instead. We would eat together, bath our kids together and then put our kids in Mark and Lynda's bed until we were ready to leave, at which point, we would carry two sleeping boys to the car and take them home.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I miss the easy fellowship of that relationship!

Watching Mark and Lynda in the kitchen together was most entertaining. They cooked as a tag team. Their kitchen was tiny, and neither of them is sylph-like, but they moved around each other like Morecambe and Wise in that most famous sketch. Lynda would get things going and Mark taste this, check on that, and make suggestions all the while ("Babe, this needs some X"; "Lyndie, are you going to put some Y in the such-and-such?"), which Lynda took completely in her stride. If John had tried that, I'd have probably whacked him over the head with a 'paplepel' (it translates as 'porridge spoon', but that does it no justice whatsoever).

Anyhoo, this is Lynda's pea and hock soup recipe (more or less), it makes a large quantity!

Ingredients

1 whole (small) smoked pork hock or eisbein - these are difficult to come by in the UK, and quite expensive, so I tend to have to make do with a bacon roast (about 1kg), but it is a poor substitute
Whole bag of green split peas (about 500g)
1 can peas (optional - I tend to leave these out)
125ml pearl barley
1 onion, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
1litre chicken stock
2 bay leaves

Method

• Basically, it's a case of just bung everything in a large saucepan and cover generously with water - the peas will absorb a lot of water as they cook. You don't need any salt, because the meat is full of the stuff.
• Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally. If you have a pressure cooker, about half an hour to 45 minutes at pressure will do the trick.
• Remove the meat joint, chop it up into bite-sized pieces and return them to the saucepan.
• Serve with crusty bread - preferably one of those tear-n-share loaves with bits of onion or sundried tomatoes in them.

Korvsoppa (Swedish sausage soup)

 

There is a bit of a story behind this recipe, and I hope I can tell it without sounding bitchy. Bear with me:

Some years ago, my friend Arla introduced me to this 'traditional Swedish soup' recipe. By this time, I had been married to a Swede for well over a decade, and had been introduced to several Swedish recipes by his family. I had never even heard of korvsoppa, however, and was delighted to add it to my portfolio, because it was quick, easy, tasty, cheap and nutritious.

Shortly thereafter, my mother-in-law came to stay. It should be noted that, although she is Swedish, she has lived in Cape Town for many years, and often longs for a taste of home. I could hardly contain my excitement as I told her that I was going to prepare a traditional dish in her honour. Oh? And what dish was this, she wanted to know. "Korvsoppa!" quoth I, with much aplomb.

She looked at me blankly. She declared flatly that she had never heard of it. Oh dear. Ah well. I duly made the dish anyway (because it had quickly become a Romeis family regular), and we duly ate it.

A few of years later, my mother in law came to stay again. I was travelling a lot on business, so she was doing much of the cooking. She presented my elder son with a bowl of soup, which he refused to eat because it contained celery, which he despises almost as much as he despises vinegar. She was totally non-plussed. "But I thought you liked korvsoppa!" I explained that I don't put celery in my korvsoppa, to which she responded that she had always made it that way, as had her mother before her and her mother before that.

Presumably this was a different korvsoppa from the one she'd never heard of a few years previously. Sometimes you just have to shake your head!

Anyhoo, here is my version of korvsoppa. It no longer looks exactly like Arla's... and it doesn't have celery in it. Like most soups, the quantities are not exact. Feel free to experiment.

Ingredients

1 litre stock (see note below)
1 small-to-medium sized onion, finely chopped
250ml frozen peas
250ml frozen corn (Arla doesn't include this ingredient)
1 or 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped into cubes (about 1cm or so)
2 or 3 carrots, peeled and chopped into cubes (about 1cm or so)
About 6 Frankfurters (or similar sausage of your choice) sliced
Salt to taste if necessary (I don't use any)
Pinch of mixed herbs

Method

• Place the veg into a large-ish saucepan and add stock. 
• Add more water so that you almost have the amount of soup you want to end up with. 
• Cover and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally. 
• Boil for about 5-10 minutes until the onion is translucent and the carrots and potatoes are beginning to soften. 
• Add the sausage and boil until done, stirring occasionally.
• Serve with crusty bread and far too much butter.

A note about stock:

I am not one of those diligent housewives that always has a home-made stock of stock (if you follow me) to hand. If you do, go ahead and use that, with my blessing and admiration. I use shop-bought stock. I have never found a cube version that I like enough to use in a soup. In recent years, Knorr has come up with a jellified version that you can pick up in the supermarket, which is far nicer, so you might want to try the chicken and/or veg varieties of that.

Always on standby

However, if you're prepared to take a trip to a health shop, I swear by Vecon (and I'm not being paid to say so, nor do I have any interests in the company). A generous, heaped teaspoonful will be enough for a tasty pot of soup. I am working on a post of my standby ingredients - the things that I always have in my cupboard. This is probably close to the top of the list.

Bacon and bean soup

Since I promised to do a soup that doesn't require a blender, I thought I'd better get right on it. We had this for supper last night.

First a note about bacon. If you're a bacon lover, it adds a delicious something extra to a wide range of soups. And you don't always need a lot of it, either - nor do you need the expensive, aesthetically pleasing rashers. Bear in mind, though, that bacon contains a lot of salt. So if you do add some to an existing recipe on a whim, adjust the salt levels accordingly. This recipe uses no salt at all, apart from what is already in the bacon.

I'm afraid the quantities in this recipe (as with most soups) are pretty inexact. I tend to use whatever I have in the house. I recommend you do the same.

Ingredients
1 pack of bacon, chopped if you like
1 onion, finely chopped
2 or 3 large carrots peeled and chopped or sliced (or hacked up willy-nilly)
250ml dried beans of your choice (see note about beans below)
250ml pearl barley
250ml green or brown lentils
125ml red lentils
2 bay leaves
1l chicken or vegetable stock
Water

Method
Rinse the beans and then place them in a large bowl full of water for several hours or overnight (or see note below). Pour off the water.

Then, hoick all the ingredients into a pressure cooker or saucepan. Make sure you add enough water, though, because the pulses will absorb a lot as they cook, and beans have a nasty tendency to stick to the bottom of the pot. This is particularly important if you're using an ordinary saucepan, because evaporation is a much bigger factor. Boil until all the pulses are soft. In my pressure cooker, this usually takes about 30 minutes at pressure.

If you're a more considerate cook than I am, you will remove the bay leaves before serving the soup. If not, you will simply serve it with a warning to 'watch out for extraneous plant matter' (I think my kids new the meaning of the word 'extraneous' before they went to nursery school).

You can serve with bread if you like, but I find this soup so filling, that I usually don't bother.

About those beans
I tend to use kidney beans, because it's what I grew up with, and because I like the colour. But, as you can see from today's picture, I might decide to try something different... or a combination of several different somethings. If you're in a hurry, you can use canned beans, but don't tell the purists I said so, okay? Opt for the 'no salt added' types. Oh, and not baked beans - just beans in water. If you're going this route, I would suggest at least two cans. Remember the '1 cup' of dried beans will turn into several cups of soaked beans, so you have to compensate.

This can be frozen. In fact, the soup we ate last night was prepared some weeks ago and then frozen. But you can only do that once. Once you have defrosted and reheated the soup, don't be tempted to re-freeze any left overs. If you have a large quantity to freeze, try splitting it up into smaller portions that you are more likely to use up on reheating.

Butternut soup

I am the queen of soups. Or so I like to think, anyway! But that wasn't always the case. I used to think that soups were about the scariest things imaginable to try to make. Looking back, now, I don't know what all the fuss was about - it's as easy as... in fact, considerably easier than pie.

I love a nice warming soup on a cold winter's night, and am quite happy to have it as a meal, not just a starter. Although, as a concession to the hefty appetites of my sons, soup for main course always means that there will be dessert.

Unusually for England, I have no qualms about inviting people over for 'soup and rolls'. Granted, these evenings usually involve a choice of three soups, fresh baked rolls, dessert, a few games of Chüngel, a lot of chatter, and almost as much laughter, but dinner invitations in the UK usually involve rather more upscale fare.

As you can see, the picture accompanying this post is well over three years old. It was taken when my elder son was studying food technology at school and chose to make this dish for one of his practicals. Perhaps the fact that it was made single-handedly by a teenage boy will embolden you to try it, even if you've never made a soup in your life.

One small inconvenience about this recipe is that it works best if you have a blender. But I promise to share other recipes that don't need extraneous electrical equipment.

Ingredients
1 large butternut squash
1 or 2 onions (this is a taste issue - why not experiment until you get the balance you prefer?)
Chicken and/or vegetable stock - enough to cover the vegetables when peeled and chopped
Salt
Coriander leaves
Plain pouring yoghurt
Mild curry powder

Method

• Peel, de-seed and cube the butternut into chunks of about 2.5cm
• Finely chop the onion
• Pop all of these into a saucepan/pressure cooker and cover with stock
• Add about 5-10mls of salt (see note below)
• Boil until the butternut is very soft and the onions absolutely done.
• Finely chop about a loose handful of coriander leaves and add at this point
• Blend the mixture (including the liquid) until completely smooth - if you have a food processor type blender and have to blend the soup in shifts, this might take a while, so you might need to reheat the soup afterwards. Do this gently.
• You might need to add liquid (water, stock, milk, cream - your choice) if the soup is too thick, but you are aiming for a fairly thick consistency, here.
• When you serve, pour a little plain yoghurt into the centre of each bowl and give it one little swirl. It tastes great and looks attractive. Sprinkle a little mild curry powder in the centre of the swirl and add a bit more fresh, chopped coriander (and/or a sprig)
• Serve with warm bread rolls

Variations

• Try adding carrots and/or parsnips before cooking
• Stir in the grated zest of an orange or a lime before blending

A note about salt:
These days, we are all being warned about excessive salt intake. I have a fairly light hand when it comes to salt, but I find I add more salt to soups than to anything else I make.

Remember: It's easier to fix an undersalted dish than an oversalted one. You can always add more salt after cooking if you need to. If you oversalt, one trick is to throw a whole potato into the dish and cook it for a little longer. The potato absorbs some of the salt, but this won't work very well with a blended soup recipe like today's.

If you are a salt lover, and you're conscious that you should try to cut down, try some of the low sodium options, or use herbs to add flavour.