Even though I must say, in the south, it's kind of hard to have a winter soup when it's warm all the time...unless of course, the weather is going haywire like it has been lately.
For the second week of 2010, soup was on my mind, and I found a very simple one in this cookbook:
This book is a recent purchase from Williams-Sonoma, and I am so far loving the contents of this book, mostly geared towards not only cooking for your family, but cooking with your family. Lots of kid-friendly encouragement and tons of photos of the food and the process, a lot of them with kids actually making most of the recipes in the book. This is definitely something I will share with my kids one day.
Kids learn to cook best by watching as I have watched my parents when one of them was in the kitchen. I said before, my Dad started me off by showing me how to cook a pot of rice. The authors of this book are shown with their kids, kneading dough, handling freshly caught fish, adding apple slices to a tart or topping a custard pie with blackberries, pinching pieces of pasta into farfalle shapes, and even cutting up vegetables (with adult supervision!).
What really caught my eye was the processes of making stuff that we city-dwellers take so much for granted: gathering eggs, getting milk from the cows (or goats), and from that milk making a variety of stuff that we find in the grocery store: cheese, cream, butter. Rather than list the chapters according to the type of dishes, they list the chapters according to the most common ingredients that we use in cooking all the time: flour, milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, seafood, meat, the cupboard, sugar & honey, chocolate.
It all falls together quite nicely and I love recipes that give you background to what it entails, and how the author dealt with this particular recipe. The photos, especially are important, because I like to see what the dish is supposed to look like.
The first recipe that I decided to make all while we were experiencing a Chicago-style cold snap for the second week of 2010, is called White Winter Soup which is called such because most of the veggies added to the soup is white. And the recipe is as simple as it comes, but I found that you can add any veggie to this soup and the results would be fantastic.
White Winter Soup
1 onion
3 medium leeks
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon sunflower or canola oil (I used Canola)
1 large or 2 medium potatoes (I used russet)
1 cauliflower
1/2 head of celery root (I could not find celery root at the store, so I just used celery)
3 1/2 cups of vegetable or chicken stock (I used a mixture of both actually)
Salt and black pepper
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1. Peel and chop the onion. Clean the leeks and sliced them about 1/8 inch thick.
2. Put the butter and oil in the saucepan and turn the heat on low. Add the onion and leeks, cover, and cook the vegetables gently for a few minutes so that they soften.
3. Peel the potatoes and cut into small cubes. Cut the thick stem out of the cauliflower and discard it. Break the cauliflower into florets.
4. At the last minute, peel the celery root thickly so that you're left with just the white flesh (like a banana, celeriac turns brown very quickly once it's been cut). Chop this into cubes and add to the pan, with the cauliflower and potatoes--as well as the stock, a pinch of salt, and a twist of pepper. Stir well and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer gently until all the vegetables are tender; 15 minutes should be enough.**
**Follow this step if you can actually find celeriac...otherwise, I just used celery.
5. Stir in the cold milk, then turn off the heat and let the soup cool for at least 15 minutes. Puree the soup in the blender a few ladlefuls at a time.** You can either reheat it now, to serve immediately, or chill it in the fridge and use within 5 days.
**To make your life easier, use an immersion blender...it's much faster!
6. Return the blended soup to the pan, stir in the cream, and reheat gently but thoroughly. It doesn't need to boil again, but it should be piping hot. Check the seasoning and add more if necessary.
Serves 6-8.
This soup can actually take on more veggies if you so desire. I'm all for eating healthy. We added some organic carrots to this soup.
How do we eat our soup? This way:
Garnished with green onions. Heavenly!
For the third week of 2010 (which is this week), it's actually birthday week for my hubby, and he specifically said: I want a Rick Bayless meal. Ah, if only I had that darn tortilla press! So the recipes will definitely fill this week's "New recipe" bill.
