Pumpkin bean soup

At some point in my life I became able to concoct what I call random acts of soup. Basically taking whatever is in the house, follow standard soup recipe procedures and pairings, and come up with lunch. This is one of those, loosed basely on a couple of soup recipes that involved overnight soaking of beans, roasting fresh pumpkin and hours of prep time. This one comes together in less than 40 minutes, and it works just fine with whatever I've got on hand. So since it's Halloween, random acts of soup with pumpkin it is.

Pumpkin bean soup

Ingredients
2 celery stalks, diced
1/4 cup chopped shallots (or onions, or leeks)
1 medium carrot, peeled and diced
2 tablespoons butter
1 can pumpkin (the size that yields one pie, not the bigger kind that yield two)
1 can cannellini beans
2 cups or more of broth
1 large sage sprig, leaves thinly sliced, plus more for garnish (optional)
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
Smidge of nutmeg
Parmesan cheese rind (optional)
Shredded Parmesan cheese for garnish

Method
Melt butter in medium saucepan. Add celery, shallots and carrots and saute until tender. Stir in pumpkin, beans, enough broth to make desired consistency of soup, sage, pepper, nutmeg and salt to taste. Add in Parmesan rind if you're using one. (It adds more of its flavor to the soup the longer you let it set, and softens up to become cheese candy.) Simmer for a half hour. Garnish with additional sage leaves and shredded Parmesan if desired. Can be made ahead and reheated.

Obviously, if you have leftover roasted squash lying around, by all means use that instead of the pumpkin. And if you've got crockpot cooked beans instead of canned, even better. But this is cheater's soup, so whatever you've got that works is fine.

Note: Once the tail ends of Parmesan wedges harden up, I put then in a bag in the freezer I can take out and toss into soups. It adds that umami element to a variety of soups without changing the consistency in any way.

Apple beet chutney

Apple-beet chutney

An appropriately fall-ish recipe adapted from “Ad Hoc at Home” by Thomas Keller.

Ingredients

1 pound small to medium beets (use a mix of colors if available)

4 medium apples

½ cup apple juice

¼ cup cider vinegar

½ teaspoon whole-grain mustard

½ teaspoon honey Dijon

1 large tarragon sprig, leaves chopped

Sea salt or other coarse, flaky salt

Method

Scrub beets. Place in roasting pan. Drizzle with some olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Pour water to a depth of at least ¼ inch in the bottom of the pan. Cover with tin foil. Roast at 400 degrees for anywhere from 50 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes depending on beet size, or until a fork can be inserted. When beets are cool enough to handle, take off the skins. Cut into ½-inch dice.

Peel and core apples. Cut into ½-inch dice. Combine apples, juice and vinegar in a saucepan. Simmer until apples are crisp-tender, probably less than 10 minutes. (It’s OK to have some liquid left, so don’t try to boil it off.)

Combine beets, apple mixture, mustards and tarragon. You can use it right away or let the flavors blend for up to a week, although the beets may discolor the apples the longer it sets. Serve sprinkled with sea salt flakes.

Rating: This goes well with pork or chicken, and it’s a fast enough fix if you roast the beets in advance.

Broccoli quinoa with cheese

One of the staple casseroles I grew up with was broccoli rice casserole. It involved frozen broccoli, Velveeta cheese, instant rice and cream of something or another soup. This happens in Iowa.

This recipe reminds me of that, only perhaps without quite the cardiac-arrest quotient.

 

Cheesy broccoli quinoa

Adapted from Closet Cooking via the weekly Yummly report that I somehow accidentally signed up for.

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa

1½ cups water

2 cups chopped broccoli

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

Method

Bring quinoa, water and broccoli to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, and cooked covered until broth is absorbed and quinoa is tender, about 15 minutes. Mix in cheese. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Rating: Tasty, and super fast and easy. Good weeknight side dish.

Oh, and today I ran across what Dave really would like for Christmas, if we had a spare half mil:http://discussions.probrewer.com/showthread.php?41986-Authentic-Farmhouse-Brewery-in-Western-WI-For-Sale

Cherry tomato gratin

Gratin sounds so much genteel than casserole, doesn't it? You feel more sophisticated eating it, even though in some cases it amounts to the same thing. Both often wind up with crumb toppings, but these are definitely better crumbs than adorned the potlucks my youth, where garlic was never in any recipe not followed by the word salt.

Provencal cherry tomato gratin

Adapted from “Barefoot Contessa Foolproof” by Ina Garten. In case you can't tell, this is turning out to be my favorite new cookbook of last holiday's crop of gifts.

Ingredients

3 pints cherry or grape tomatoes

4½ tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 teaspoon dried thyme or 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

1½ teaspoon salt

3 large garlic cloves, peeled

1/3 cup chopped parsley

2 cups fresh bread cubes

Method

In a ceramic baking dish (9 by 13 works, basically anything that gives you some depth), toss tomatoes with 1½ tablespoon olive oil, thyme, 1 teaspoon salt and several grinds of pepper.

In food processor, whirr together garlic, parsley and ½ teaspoon salt. Toss in bread crumbs and pulse until crumbly. Drizzle in 3 tablespoons of olive oil to blend. Toss crumbs over tomatoes and bake at 400 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes until crumbs are golden and tomatoes are bubbling.

Rating: Tasty. Easy, fast fix, especially if you mixed up the bread crumbs in advance. The pretty color makes it a nice option on the plate when rounding out a menu that might otherwise be too pale or drab, like fish or pork.

It also works well at room temperature as leftovers. Speaking of which, if you haven't already heard, science has finally made the case for leftovers: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761

Ready or not: prepping the larder for winter

This six-shelf orchard rack holds a super ton of potatoes, onions, squash and such at basement temperatures.

This was the last weekend for the Midtown farmers market, so it was stock-up time. Two big bags of meat from the Hilltop Pastures people, our requisite lamb for New Year's Day from the lamb lady, and all the fresh produce we could stuff in bags from Pflaum Farms and other favorites. It's hard to say goodbye until next spring, especially since that means there's something nasty going to happen in the meantime.

Luckily, this weekend's weather belied the calendar, and we got in some all important riding time so I didn't spend all the time in the kitchen. And when the inevitable does happen, at least my freezer is filled with vats of comforting soups, summer tomatoes preserved in silky sauces and little jars of pesto to evoke summer memories when that's all summer is reduced to. And well, the wine helps.

This is my version of winter whites, stashed in our inelegant below-the-stairs cellar.

Chicken with onions and kale

Oh, Google. How we rely on you, both for entertainment, a substitution for memory, and recipes that use up stuff like kale. If you google chicken and kale, it will, oddly enough, return a hit for this recipe, which comes from the cafeteria at Google via Bon Appetit. Clearly this is a different experience from the cafeteria at work, where confusion reigned supreme this morning when the cook didn't show up. Clearly we're not in the same kind of league.

Google's Braised Chicken and Kale
Adapted from Bon Appetit, March 2013

Ingredients
4 chicken thighs
4 chicken drumsticks
Paprika
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced
6 cloves garlic, sliced
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup dry white wine
2 sprigs rosemary, plus more for optional garnish
2 sprigs thyme
1 large bunch kale, center stalks removed, and sliced into narrow ribbons

Method
Heat large pot over medium heat. Add olive oil. Sprinkle chicken pieces with salt and pepper, and generously with paprika. Brown, starting skin-side down, until well brown on all sides. Remove to a plate.

Add onion and cook until almost softened. Add garlic and cook for about a minute. Return chicken to pot. Add broth, wine, herb and kale. Bring to a boil, cover and cook about 30 minutes. Uncover, turn heat to high and boil down the liquid to make a sauce, about 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish with rosemary if desired.

Rating: Fine. The chicken was quite nice by itself, but you definitely need to boil down the sauce or it's just runny and not as tasty a sauce to help disguise all that kale.

Kale bacon gratin

Really, is there anything bacon, butter, garlic and rich dairy products can’t make tasty? Apparently it works for kale, at any rate.  

Baked Kale Gratin

Adapted from “Country Living” magazine, November 2014. The magazine says the recipe is inspired by spinach dip, and the flavors are reminiscent of that, only much, much richer.

Ingredients

1¾ pounds curly leaf kale, torn into chunks no bigger than 2 inches (about 7 long stems)

4 slices bacon

3 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons chopped shallots

½ cup finely chopped red pepper

3 garlic cloves, minced

¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3 tablespoons flour

2 ¾ cup half and half

1 ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided

1 ½ cups coarse fresh bread crumbs

2 tablespoons olive oil

Method

Steam kale for 5 to 8 minutes until wilted. Drain well.

Cook bacon in large deep skillet or saucepan until crisp. Remove and crumble into largish pieces when cool enough to handle. Keep a tablespoon of bacon fat in pan; add butter. Saute shallots, red pepper, garlic and crushed pepper until tender. Whisk in flour, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Whisk in half and half. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 3 minutes until mixture thickens slightly.

Remove from heat and stir in kale, bacon and 1 cup Parmesan.

Bake in a greased 2-quart casserole for 35 to 40 minutes at 375 until golden. Let stand 5 minutes.

Rating: Yum. I probably wouldn’t serve this to the vegetable-phobes of the world, but anyone with half an ounce of food adventuresomeness is likely to go for it. This was designed to be part of a Thanksgiving menu, and that’s probably appropriate given the amount of richness involved in this dish. They allege it serves 8, but probably only if it’s part of a holiday meal where there are a lot of other dishes vying for a spot on the plate. I ate some of the leftovers for lunch as nicely filling main dish. The recipe doesn't call for salt, and it doesn't seem to need it with all that bacon.

Italian sausage and kale soup

Vincenza’s Italian Sausage and Kale Soup

Adapted from some now unknown point on the Internet. I can find multiple instances of the recipe, although none that credit the original source, so I don’t know which Vincenza’s we’re taking about, whether the Colorado bakery or other hits for restaurants with that name elsewhere from Cleveland to Maine. Or some other soul named Vincenza who makes a very hearty, tasty soup. Break out a really good size pot for this one.

Ingredients

1½ pounds Italian sausage

1 medium onion, peeled and chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and chopped

6 garlic cloves, peeled and minced

1 pound small potatoes, cut into quarters

8 cups chicken broth

2 cups well-chopped kale leaves, about four large leaves

2 15.5-ounce cans diced tomatoes (or 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped)

1 16-ounce can kidney beans

Method

In a very large pan over medium heat, brown the Italian sausage. Remove from pan and set aside. Reduce heat. Add olive oil or butter to pan if your sausage was lean. Add onion, carrot and garlic and cook until tender. Add broth and potatoes. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, until potatoes are just tender, about 15 minutes. Add kale, tomatoes and beans. Simmer for 30 minutes, adding sausage back to pot with 5 minutes to go to heat through. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Make ahead: Freezes very well. Another good depth-of-winter reviver.

Note: This is one recipe I’ve decided doesn’t really benefit that much from fresh tomatoes, so I substitute canned and spare myself the trouble.