Hot Clear Vegetarian Borscht

I know! I know I have a soup problem, okay! I admit that I did make borscht. An entire pot full of delicious borscht. Wilfully, with full knowledge of the consequences and, as Lord Melchett so damningly said, with beastliness of forethought.

I HAVE NO REGRETS.

I used this recipe for clear, vegetarian borscht. I made a few modifications: I didn't have beet greens, which didn't seem to matter. I also didn't add sugar (I can almost never bring myself to add sugar to savoury dishes.) This soup is simple but beware underseasoning - beets love salt and pepper and they need a lot of both to shine in this soup.

I was nervous about it, but it turned out just like the version made by our polish family friends for christmas eve! Which is the ultimate benchmark, let me tell you. The polish christmas eve is traditionally vegetarian (though I'm even MORE vegetarian because apparently the polish consider fish a vegetable.) This borscht, to me, should always be served very hot with some kind of dumpling or pasta in it. I love uzka, the polish pig-ear-shaped mushroom dumplings, and so I had mine with some fresh mushroom ravioli from the market at Dupleix.

I served mine with some of the cut up beets still in it, to make it a more substantial meal and to get some of the nutrition and fibre left in the beets. I did not put any sour cream in it. It doesn't need it! Stop complicating your simple and delicious borscht with your sour cream ways. That's not how we roll on polish christmas eve, and that, as you know now, is the ultimate benchmark.

Cheating Noodle Soup

I know I make a lot of soup, but it's winter, so cut me some slack. I make this soup whenever I eat too much afternoon tea. This is often. Sometimes I go to Sadaharu Aoki for a lemon tart and then they're offering free tastings of chocolate coated macaroons, so I taste the three flavours, and then I get curious about the other flavours, and they're so reasonably priced, and then suddenly dinner seems pretty much unjustafiable.

And yet there is no protein in those macarons, and vitamins are thin on the ground. So a delicious, light, extremely healthy dinner is sometimes the only course of action.

This soup is so damn easy I hesitate to call it a recipe. I am of the Bittman school of soup recipes, which believes that soup is basically water and vegetables. All you do is boil up some vegetable stock with a few dashes of soy sauce, then throw in chopped carrots. After a few minutes add some buckwheat soba noodles and any other medium-cooking-time vegetable (this time I added the second-to-last serving I am likely to get out of my beloved butternut). When the noodles are almost done, throw in a big helping of broccoli florets. When they're cooked, the soup is ready. The carrots and broccoli are a must because they turn the boring stock base into a really rich broth, and this is a great way to eat these vegetables without chucking the water down the sink (and with it all the vitamins and half the flavour).

I like to top it with a boiled egg just so that it looks like some kind of effort went into preparing the soup. I'm not sure why I continue with this obvious charade, since I am the only witness to my culinary cheating, but frankly it makes me feel better about the whole thing.

Butternut soup with toasted pumpkin seeds and sage butter

I bought a butternut at Tang Freres this week. Never having dealt with an entire butternut before - I used to have my dad do this kind of scary stuff - I was a little nervous. But I dispatched it pretty well after a few minutes of hacking and cursing. So now I had all the butternut I could want, and the next step was obvious: soup.


I decided to work off Pim's recipe for Potimarron soup with sage butter but as I don't have an oven, and as I hate washing up, I decided to see if I could do it in one pot. This is roughly how it happened and it served one (me).

Sautee about half a very little yellow onion until it has caramelized, then put it on a plate and set it aside. Then in the same saucepan, boil about a cup and a half of chopped butternut in just enough water to cover it. A little while later throw in about 3/4 of a cup of white beans (if you use canned you can just throw them in here, if you used dried you need to precook them like I do. Use dried! They're infinitely better.) Leave that to boil for about ten minutes, then mash it up and let it stand.

While it is standing, turn your attention to the sage butter. I didn't have sage leaves, so I just melted some butter with some dried sage in it in a little saucepan (thus ending the one-pot dream). This was delicious in the soup in the end, although I can't say whether it measures up to proper sage butter because I have never had it. I left the sage butter to the side and went back to the soup.

Add some milk until it is the thickness you want, then added the onion back in. Puree the whole thing with an immersion blender (or in a traditional blender if you swing that way). When it goes back on the heat, add a tablespoon of greek yoghurt or creme fraiche. Now it needs to be stirred constantly otherwise the bottom will burn. When it comes back to the boil, it's done. You can put on as much sage butter as you like, I used about a teaspoon for my single serving, as well as some toasted pumpkin seeds.

Toasted pumpkin seeds are very easy to do in a skillet or pan, since they announce when they are done by popping and cracking and generally being a nuisance. Then it's just a matter of throwing some fleur de sel or kosher salt on them and drizzling them with olive oil.

I think the caramelised onion goes so well with the butternut, and the sage butter is so much nicer than just adding sage right to the soup. This is really outstandingly delicious, and I had it with Poujauran's delicious sourdough bread.

Coconut Ginger Sweet Potato Soup

Once again, this is a recipe which is my riff on several that I saw around the internet. The internet seems to think this is a "Thai" sweet potato soup. I'm not so confident. The extent of its Thai-ness is probably just that it uses thai red curry paste, ginger and coconut milk, all of which are abundant in Thailand.

This recipe is so easy it borders on the biblical sin of sloth. All you need is sweet potato, coconut milk, thai red curry paste, vegetable stock, chopped ginger and toasted sesame seeds. How much you use of each of these ingredients is up to you. In general half a large sweet potato serves one person. I like about a 1 cm cube of ginger and 2 teaspoons of red curry for each half sweet potato, but I like it hot, if I can say so without inducing snickering.

Chop the sweet potato up into very small cubes - the smaller the better, since they cook faster and are easier to blend later. Put them in a pot and just cover them with stock, then add the curry paste and chopped ginger and boil it until it's very tender. You should be able to squash the peices into a pulp with a wooden spoon on the side of the pot.

Take it off the heat and let it cool. Mash it up as much as you can before you blend it, so you can see if you should drain off or add some stock now. This step is doubly important if you use a hand-held blender like I do, because they get tired and grumpy after about a minute of use. I tend to add more stock as I blend since I invariably get my amounts wrong in stage one.

Once it's smooth, put it back on the heat and add coconut milk to taste. If I feel greedy I add 1/4 cup to my single serving, though, sometimes just a splash is enough. It's the interaction between the coconut and the heat of the ginger and chilli in the paste that makes this great. Bring it to the boil again and then serve it hot with toasted sesame seeds on top.

I always add bean sprouts and some cubes of firm tofu, which makes this soup a meal. I generally pan fry the tofu beforehand in some sesame oil to give it a little more personality. This time I also added puff tofu and udon noodles, which need to cook in the soup for a little while, so add them when you add the coconut milk. Fresh coriander also works wonders in there.

Pea, Mint and White Bean Soup

I love pea and mint soup, and white beans add not only protein but also a subtle, brothy flavour, so I thought combining them might work well. This is my recipe, which I formulated after reading about twelve different recipes for pea and mint soup until I had the general idea, and then forging ahead on my own.

Ingredients
2-3 cups of cooked white beans
3 cups frozen peas
Vegetable stock as needed
Chopped mint to taste - at least half a cup
1/2 a cup of greek yoghurt
Salt
Pepper

1. The white beans need to be boiled until tender. In the pot and water in which you cooked the white beans, add the frozen peas and enough stock to cover. It's important to conserve the white bean water because it has a lovely subtle flavour. Add a little mint now just to get it going. Bring to the boil and simmer until the peas are tender but not mushy.

2. Remove from heat and let cool for a while, so that you don't overheat your blender when you blend it. Puree with a hand blender until smooth, adding more stock if you want it to be thinner. Obviously this will work in a traditional blender too.

3. Return the soup to the stove, and add the yoghurt, salt and pepper and mint to taste. In my opinion this much soup needs at least half a cup of chopped mint. I probably put in more like a cup. Similarly the seasoning here is extremely important. Peas are a vegetable that make their objections known if you underseason them, and they will make these objections known on your palate. If you taste the soup and it tastes anything short of incredible, add more salt and pepper.

4. Now that the soup tastes incredible, bring it back to a simmer, and then serve it hot in winter or cold in summer.

I don't think this kind of soup should be eaten with bread, because it clouds what should otherwise be a really clean flavour. But that's just me, I'm sure the rest of you aren't so bizaare in your soup beliefs.

(This recipe is my entry for this month's Legume Love Affair. Check out the details here, at this month's host blog When My Soup Came Alive.)