Simple Comfort Food #324

Both of us are incredible phlegm factories this week, though the Boy has it worse with a deep chest cold that has him hacking like a consumptive Keats. Ironically, the weather is gorgeous and mild--and perfect for walking.

In the mean time, we've been subsisting on soups, tea and decongestants.

Here's a simple, cheap, and quick recipe for a delicious Greek soup: Avgolemono (or if, like me, and you pronounce it differently each time--lemon rice soup). Sadly, I never remember to write down amounts, so I'll estimate. This simple, meatless version of Avgolemono is really very flexible though, and hard to ruin.

Lemon Rice Soup

Ingredients:

3 eggs
several chicken bouillon cubes
cooked rice - leftover rice from Chinese takeout? Perfect!
lemon juice

The reason I use bouillon with this soup rather than a lovely homemade stock, or an organic thing out of a box is simple: Remember--the idea is that you're a snot zombie flailing around the kitchen for something warm and comfort foody. The easier the better. Also, for this soup, it has enough salt and flavor that it's not necessary to mess with spicing or salting the soup at all.

Put water in a pot and turn on medium high. Drop in bouillon cubes and dissolve them. Drop in the rice (I added about a cup, so there was some good substance to the soup). In a separate bowl, crack the eggs and whisk them together. When the soup is hot, but not quite boiling, pour in in the eggs and stir immediately. They'll cook right away, making the soup thicken. Add lemon juice to taste. Try a tablespoon, and work up from there. We like ours with a definite lemon tang to it.

You just made tasty soup in under 5 minutes! Take the bowl back to bed and read while eating it.

Just a Nip

It's that time of year again--drag out the slow cooker, and prepare for yummy meals that require pretty much no work.

Today's experiment in kitchen puttering involved two large parsnips and a bunch of carrots.

Appetizing, right? Not really. I admit it. However, the finished product was really satisfying and yummy.

As a result of my recent fascination with medieval cookery and the like, I determined to try using parsnips in a dish, since I'd never even bought one. Here's what went down:

Into my slow cooker, I dumped-
2 parsnips, cubed small
a bunch of baby carrots
chicken stock
a good chunk of ginger, grated into mush
a goodly amount of grated nutmeg
cream
salt & pepper

I turned the slow cooker on around noon and let things simmer away on low until I remembered them in the later afternoon, when I dumped it into the food processor and blended well. I served with these nice little wheat biscuits I got from IKEA.

The result was a hearty soup with lots of interesting flavors. It's got a very mild sweetness and tangyness to it, because of the parsnips and carrots respectively. You can smell the nutmeg. We agreed that it deserved a place on the "Will Cook Again" list. The soup itself was satisfying enough to be a meal unto itself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I realize this soup looks suspiciously like a certain butternut squash soup posted previously, but about the only resemblance is the color. Swear.

Sentimental Lentil

So many of the soups I muck about with don't have precise measurements, and are based only on the stuff I know ought to be in there.

I'm making a lentil soup today--that's the raw stuff in the picture. I just thought it was colorful and interesting to look at, so I snapped a photo.

I first became interested in trying a lentil soup after the Boy and I had an amazing batch of soup at a little Middle Eastern place near where we lived up north. It was incredibly fragrant--you could smell the nutmeg and cumin before you even took a bite. Sadly, I think that batch of soup was a mistake of some kind--maybe the lid had come off the nutmeg, and they'd dumped in more than they'd intended. We went back several times, but the soup was never as good.

The weekend we had the lentil soup at The Bronte Bistro (a novel idea!) attached to Joseph Beth Booksellers, and that reminded me I'd been wanting to try making it.

Into my trusty slow cooker, I threw the following:

Lots and lots of chicken stock, and a scoop of MSG-free chicken soup base for more flavor
about a pound (?) of red lentils, cumin, finely chopped ginger, about half a grated nutmeg (which would be maybe a little less than a teaspoon of powdered?) spring onions, chopped onion, chopped red potatoes, celery, sea salt... and that's it, I think. I may decide it needs something else later. Soups are fantastically easy in that they lend themselves so nicely to improvisation.

Makings

I have been making.

We got couple lovely couch cushions several months ago. Their covers were made of a soft woven brown fiber with a bit of a sheen to it--nice and nubbly. Unfortunately, they were sewn really shoddily, and since they were woven, they were just falling apart after only a few months. It was a shame to let the fabric go to waste, and since I lost my last pair of wrist warmers (Wrist dickies, as we refer to them. Remember turtleneck dickies from the eighties? It was just a neck and a bit of cloth, so you looked like you were wearing a turtleneck without bothering to actually put one on under your sweater. ) err... sorry about the detour. Since I lost my last pair, I thought I'd repurpose the fabric to make new ones.

I reused the zippers, and made use of the silk edging already on the inside of the cushion cover. I added some reinforcing ribbon, and a loop and button to close it at the top. I also had to add a long loop of thin ribbon on the inside at the elbow end, so I can hold that with my teeth as I zip them up. Otherwise I'd have to have the Boy zip them up, and that would just be lame. This one needs a little more stitching added to the ribbon, but it's basically done. Both of them took me about an evening.


Not a difficult project, and my sewing machine was lovely and behaved perfectly. I seem to have the tension issue well in hand.... Quite accidentally, of course, but I'm not touching it, since it seems to be a-ok. This is a machine the Boy got me a couple Christmases ago. I remember using my mother's machine, which required hours of squinting and threading needles and trying to readjust bobbins... All of which, doubtless, was my fault. But this new machine is fancy. The little design on the black ribbon is made by the machine sewing little patterns. Fancy. It is too fancy to be Amish. (link to a sweet children's book--check out the illustrations about halfway down the page.)

In other, more edible news, we made a butternut squash soup that turned out quite yummy.


I'd never made one, but we'd liked a few we'd tried various places, and it seemed easy enough. I wasn't quite into any of the recipes I found, so combined the parts I liked into a slow cooker recipe that turned out really nice. It's very simple, and very comfort-foody.

• 1 raw butternut squash
• a pat of butter
• nutmeg (I grated about a third of a "nut" of nutmeg--I think that would be about a half teaspoon of the ground stuff? I kind of wished I'd used more though.)
• hot madras curry powder - a decent amount. it's not that spicy, and the finished product is not at all spicy.
• cumin - a nice shake, but not too much, because it can overpower the taste of the squash
• chicken stock - I used enough to just come to the level of the cubed squash in the slowcooker.
• sour cream - a heaping tablespoon
• one dollop of cream or milk

Cut the squash in half, and then slice it so that you can cut off the rind. Once that's done, cube it, and throw it in the slow cooker with the stock, butter, nutmeg, curry powder, and cumin. Let it cook away on medium high for 2 hours, or you could put it on low for 8 hours while you're at work.

At this point, the squash may not be totally mushy, but will be soft enough to blend. Scoop the chunks out into a different bowl, then blend them several at a time, pouring them back into the slowcooker as you go. Add stock while you blend to keep things moist. Some people might like theirs silky smooth, but I found it was really pleasant with a little texture to it, so I didn't blend forever.

Once everything's blended, turn the heat to medium or a bit lower, and wisk in the sour cream and a blop of cream or milk. If you boil at this point, it'll curdle, so keep the heat down a bit.

You can serve right away, or let it simmer another while. We served it with a couple sage leaves, and a bit of sour cream. I have a feeling this soup is one of those ones that will be even better the second time around. The recipe makes quite a bit, so you can pack it up into the freezer or fridge to use another day like we did.