Soup « (y)our food choices™

Tell your kids that Shrek eats this for dinner, maybe then they’ll try it.

Steve’s very kind. He tells me almost every night that whatever I have cooked is the most delicious thing I’ve ever made. Rarely does he say anything negative, and even if he doesn’t like something, the worst thing he’ll say is, “It’s good.” The other night I could sense his displeasure in the soup I made for dinner. I got the, “It’s good” response and could see Steve was having problems choking it down. I wasn’t pleased with the outcome, either. The recipe, “Creamy Fennel and Greens soup” is on epicurious.com, with a 3 1/2 out of 4 star rating. I thought that, at the very least, I would be able to use up some of the veggies in our fridge by adding them to what looked like a delicious vegetable soup. It wasn’t!

With recipe in hand, I went to work chopping and sautéing the onion and fennel, cleaning the collard greens and spinach, adding water, cooking the collards, then the spinach, and finally blending everything together. I blended, and blended, and blended some more but it still wasn’t the smooth puree I was striving for. As I tasted the soup I realized it was missing something. It needed more salt, more spice, more pepper, and more fat. I added more salt, pepper, and whole milk to the mix (the recipe called for cream, which we didn’t have in the house) but it still wasn’t smooth or tasty. The consolation was that I knew it was healthy thanks to all those green veggies. A small consolation indeed.

Usually, the food we eat has to meet three criteria: it has to be healthy, it has to taste great and it has to look like something we’d want to eat.

The taste and looks were lacking with this one. The soup looked like something scooped out of a swamp and tasted like it looked too, very very green. One of the fibrous veggies simply would not break apart in the blender and we found ourselves chocking back fibers that were so fine they reminded us of one of our cat’s furballs. Not the best soup I’ve made, but not the worst (very close).

The next day I tried my best to doctor-up the swamp soup in an effort to turn it into something palatable. After straining the solids from the liquid I pureed the solids again. After 10 minutes of blending it still was not completely smooth. I then added more salt and reheated. I put half the soup back in the blender one more time and, with the blender running, added 4 tablespoons of cold butter to the warm soup. It helped enrich the soup but still didn’t help smooth it. Whoever gave this recipe a 3 or 4 star rating on epicurious.com seriously needs to reevaluate their culinary tastes. And the recipe writer needs to take a good, hard look at this one. We think it could use some work.

Alas, I think this batch will just have to be eaten as a “nutritious” soup and not anything that looks or tastes good. I’m freezing the rest of it for one of those rainy days (I hope summer comes soon) because I just can’t stand the thought of wasting all those nutritious greens. If you do make this recipe, try eating the soup along with a grilled cheese sandwich to make it more palatable. After all, everything tastes better with grilled cheese!

Creamy Fennel and Greens Soup AKA Swamp Soup

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 fennel bulb, trimmed and chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 pound mixed dark leafy greens such as collard and beet, coarse stems and center ribs discarded and leaves chopped
6 cups water
3 cups baby spinach (2 ounces)
4 tablespoons cold butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Garnish: fennel fronds or chopped dill

Preparation

Heat oil and butter in a 6-quart heavy pot over medium heat until foam subsides. Add fennel, onion, 3/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/8 teaspoon pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and lightly browned, 7 to 8 minutes.

Add leafy greens (but not spinach) and water to pot and simmer, covered, until greens are tender, about 30 minutes. Stir in spinach and cook, uncovered, just until wilted, about 1 minute.

Purée soup in batches in a blender (use caution when blending hot liquids) until smooth adding chunks of butter to the running blender, then return to pot. Stir in cream and lemon juice and reheat over low heat. Season with salt.

Cooks’ note: Look through your spice rack to add some flavor to this soup, maybe crumbled bacon or blue cheese on top would help. Also try adding a potato or two to the soup when cooking the collard greens. This will give the texture a more velvet feel.

Soup can be made 2 days ahead and chilled. Reheat or serve cold.

All the makings of gazpacho.

Two days in San Francisco – is that really all we can get out of you? You didn’t give us any time to prepare and enjoy the first truly summery soup and ice cream we made especially for your visit. Rude! It was all too brief, but I guess we’ll just have to enjoy our cold soup and accompanying creamy frozen concoction with our old reliable friend – Fog. It’s not that we don’t enjoy Fog, but all he does is hang around, sometimes letting a few rays of blue sky through, only to envelop the skies again in his moody grey cloak. Not that we’re complaining or anything like that. No, don’t worry about us. We’ll just sit in our little kitchen listening to the mood music on KFOG. Oh listen, it’s Annie Lenox singing “Here comes the rain…again,” while the rest of the country is dancing to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” Yeah, well, our CA gals are in sweatshirts, not bikinis, thank you very much! (Sorry for the outburst.)

Getting ready to blend

Summer, we know you said you’d be back soon, but you’re unreliable. You show up when you want and leave without saying good-bye. How can that be any good for us? We know you’ve hosted a pool party for the rest of the country, setting high temperature records everywhere while we have to stay in the cold comfort of San Francisco. Again, we’re not complaining. But really, Summer, couldn’t you have hung around at least one more night? Just long enough to enjoy dinner with its menu of gazpacho with grilled cheese sandwiches and bourbon peach ice cream? Is that really too much to ask? We could have drank all night and danced until the wee hours of morning, but no, you had to leave.

All along, the weather people have been telling us you’d be around at least a few weeks. And just when the bounty of this year’s tomato harvest is coming to us in our CSA box. We really thought this would last until at least the end of September, but now you’ve just upped and split on us again. That’s no way to live. So, Summer, if you’re out there: please come back for another visit. Even with all the complaining we do while you’re here, we really do enjoy you’re company at least for 3-4 days in a row. Oh, by the way Summer, since we miss your heat so much we’ve added a roasted jalapeño pepper to the gazpacho, a lingering zippy sensation to signify how we wished you had stayed around just a little longer.

XOXO

Jason and Steve

The finished product with grilled cheese.

Gazpacho Soup

2 sweet peppers

½ onion

½ cup of milk (or enough to cover the onion)

4 tomatoes

2 small cucumbers

3 garlic cloves

¼ – ½ cup olive oil

small handful of basil leaves

2 slices bread

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar (or more to taste)

Tabasco – to taste

salt & pepper – to taste

Roast and skin the peppers. Mince onion and soak in milk for about a half an hour. Peel tomato skins and rough chop. Peel cucumber and rough chop. Chop garlic into large pieces, add to sauté pan with olive oil and let sear for a few minutes, don’t brown, allow to cool. Tear the bread and soak in water for about half an hour.

Drain the milk from the onions, add onions to a blender. Squeeze the water from the bread and the bread to the blender. Add the tomatoes, cucumbers, chopped roasted peppers, basil, sherry vinegar, Tabasco, salt, pepper and olive oil to the blender. Puree until smooth. Chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours, or overnight, before serving.

Bourbon Peach Ice Cream

2 cups cream

2 cups whole milk

2 cinnamon sticks

6 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

pinch of salt

2 tablespoons reserved bourbon from peaches (or from the bottle)

½ – 1 cup chopped bourbon peaches (or fresh peaches)

Add the cream and milk to a medium saucepan with cinnamon sticks over medium heat to warm. Leave the milk on the back of the stove with the heat off for about 20-30 minutes. Reheat the milk and cream before continuing.

In a separate pan add the egg yolks, sugar and salt and whisk together. Slowly add the milk, about ¼ to ½ cup at a time to temper the egg yolks. After you have added about 2 cups milk pour the mixture back in the saucepan over medium low heat and cook until slightly thick. At this point you are making a light custard. You don’t want the custard to be too thick, nor do you want to scramble the eggs. Once the custard is made add the bourbon and allow to cool to room temperature. Refrigerate for 4-6 hours or overnight. Add to your ice cream maker and process for 25-30 minutes, or according to your ice cream machine. Add the chopped bourbon peaches to the ice cream in the last 5 minutes.

Freezer for another two hours and enjoy on a hot summer day, or a cold winter one (like most July days in San Francisco).

Bourbon Peaches

We preserved some peaches in Bulliett bourbon by skinning, removing the pit, and cutting the peaches in half. Pouring enough bourbon over the peaches to cover. You can add some ginger pieces to the jar, if you wish. Refrigerate overnight or up to two months. Use the bourbon in cocktails, desert, ice cream, etc.