No Soup for You! "Cream" of Broccoli Soup (?) Take 1

With all the broccoli I bough when it was on sale I proceeded to go about making a bunch of broccoli foods. I also tried to make a batch of cream of broccoli soup. I must admit that broccoli soup is not something I have ever had the interest in personally. I love cream of spinach soup and cream of asparagus soup is on my short list of best foods ever...but somehow I have had zero interest in the broccoli version. This is most likely due to the general addition of cheddar to it. I have never been a fan of cheddar.

However i do not cook for myself only. I live with my sister and her husband and both of them enjoy broccoli soup so i decided that I would try my hand at making some. After all how hard can it be? Now, My sister is a Vegan (70% - so no Vegan Powers sadly), so I needed to make a soup that would not rely on chicken broth or dairy.

So here is a record of my first attempt...

You will need:

A Large pot
A Cutting Board

A Sharp Knife

A Blender or an Immersion Blender

A Measuring cup

A Tablespoon Measuring spoon

Ingredients needed (for ~5 servings - Give or Take):

 2 lbs Broccoli stalks, chopped (roughly 4 Cups) Florets reserved for other uses
1 Onion, diced
2 Leeks, halved and sliced
1 C Diced Celery
1-3 Tbsp Oil
2 Tbsp Flour
6 C Vegetarian Broth (I used Better than Bullion and water)
1 dash Salt (to taste)

Directions:

1. Chop the Broccoli, Leeks, Onions, and celery.

Already I was in trouble. I had no leeks on hand (it was kind of spur of the moment when i decided to make soup) and when I went for my celery it was all gross! - Eww!

So what to do? I decided to go ahead with it anyway. How much difference could those 2 ingredients make anyway. I have had ingredients go missing or whatever before, so I fifured in this instance it was no big deal to continue.

2. Place the vegetables and the oil in a soup pot and saute until the onions are translucent. Stirring to prevent burning.  Cook for about 10 minutes.

3. Add the flour to the pot once the vegetables are cooked. Still to coat. Continuing to cook briefly, until the flour begins to color slightly - 5 minutes or so.

4. Add the broth. Add it in batches, stirring between each to prevent the flour from clumping.

As i said, I used Better than Bullion. The jar lists the directions of taking one tsp of Bullion paste and dissolve into one cup of water for every cup of broth you want. Better than bullion is some pretty awesome stuff, but it is kind of hard to measure well. It is very thick (think molasses) so I find the best way to measure it is to either scoop out the spoon after each dip - ie scoop the bullion and then dump it into the bowl (pot etc) and while dumping it out take your (clean) finger and smoosh out the spoon. Or you can try the oily spoon method - where-in you dip the unused measuring spoon in an oil first then measure out the bullion (also works with other sticky thick substances). The Oil Method works pretty well, but adds extra oil to your recipe, which isn't always ok to do.

5. Bring the pot up to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer. Simmer for 45 minutes.

6. Remove the soup from heat and blend it to a smooth consistency.

You can use an immersion blender if you have one, or you can use a standard upright blender or ninja or whatever kind of blending tool you have. An immersion blender is the best kind of tool for this job. I didn't realize my sister had an immersion blender available so i used the regular blender for this.

Why is a stick blender better? Because the biggest problem you face when blending hot liquids is their risk of explosion. No, seriously! Its dangerous because the hot liquid will expand rapidly when agitated and you can get really hurt. So if you are using a standard blender be sure to only fill the vessel part way (like less than half) and blend in batches. If what you are blending is thick DO NOT attempt to pop the "bubble" that forms in the blender when mixing hot foods. It is still safe to blend, just be smart about it.

Using a stick blender will allow you to blend in the pot preventing the issues of rapid expansion and bubbles from being dangerous.

7. Tada! Soup! Eat and enjoy.

So yeah...I totally didn't have soup at the end of this. I had something that appeared to be gravy. I was perhaps a little heavy on the flour, or maybe I didn't put enough water in. Or maybe i walked away from it for too long (I forgot to set a timer) and too much evaporated. For whatever reason my end result was WAY thicker than soup is supposed to be.

With some trepidation I took a taste. Freaking Delicious! Holy Crap! My brother in law had arrived shortly after I finished the product and announced his intentions to make a batch of mashed potatoes and top them with the "Cream" of  Broccoli Non-Soup. So totally awesome. We ate it all.

Moral of the story....

Sometimes you really do need all the ingredients to make the dish.

Don't give up on a dish if it doesn't turn out the way you intended.

Frittata: First Draft

Cooking is a lot like writing/reading a novel. The ingredients are like the characters and the steps are the story lines. When you don’t have a recipe you are writing your own stories. When you have a recipe to follow you are reading someone else’s finished product.

I think one of the reasons that people don’t cook something new is perhaps they think that the recipes that they have used sprouted fully formed from some master chef’s imagination. Well, somehow I doubt that that is the case. It takes many drafts before the recipe is ready to be published.

I didn’t want to put any recipes on this blog for people to read that I myself had not put through a stringent drafting process, and had several very tasty and consistent final drafts. However I realize that this is the wrong way to think about this. I would be habitualizing the same problem that I am railing against if I did that.

Since I’ve decided that you all deserve to see the whole processes I will walk through the steps I took last night to make a frittata. The end resulting dinner was fine tasting but not nothing special and the visual appearance was less wonderful than I was hoping for.

So without further ado…Spring Vegetable Frittata – Take One:

Frittata is kind of like a quiche, kind of like an omelet, and kind of like a German pancake. It is also one of the easier foods to make...in my opinion. It is certainly easier than all of the afore mentioned food items that it is similar to.

One of the great things about frittatas is that you don’t really need to plan them into your week. As long as you have eggs you have everything you need to make a frittata…guaranteed. This is true because you can put basically anything into a frittata. Some good combinations are: Bacon pieces-green onions-Swiss cheese, Pees-cooked chicken-cheddar, spaghetti noodles-cooked hamburger-peppers-mozzarella, Feta-Black Olives-Capers-Diced cooked potatoes. Just open your fridge and look to see what you have available. Any starch veggie and cooked meat will work fine. All cheeses are good, though some are better than others.

For this frittata I decided to use some angel hair noodles, Asparagus spears, diced ham, chopped onion, artichoke hearts, mozzarella, feta cheese, garlic, oil, and some spices. And of course, eggs.

I turned my oven on to 250 degrees because I figured that eggs are pretty easy to cook and didn’t need to have a high temp.

I did not have any leftover noodles in my fridge, so I made some to start off. While I was waiting for the noodle water to boil in my large pasta pot, I chopped up an Onion and then sautéed it in a small frying pan/sauté pan with some Garlic in Olive Oil.

Then I added the Noodles to the boiling water and cooked them until they were fully cooked. And then I drained them fully and added some Olive Oil to the drained noodles to keep them from caking together.

Then I cracked 6 Eggs and scrambled them in a bowl. To the eggs I added some leftover Artichoke Hearts, some leftover Diced Ham, some fresh Asparagus Spears snapped into 2 inch pieces, and the sautéed onion/garlic mixture. I also added some spices and herbs to the egg mixture: Marjoram, Paprika, Salt, Pepper, Oregano.

Note: You don’t need a knife to prepare asparagus for the dinner pot. If you hold the asparagus in both hands near the cut –off end you can break off the woody end and the remaining spear should be fairly tender. For this meal I just snapped the remaining stalks into bite sized pieces using the same technique all the way up the spears.

The oven is ready and now so are all of the ingredients. I took out my cast iron skillet and placed the noodles in the bottom of it to act as a kind of base. Then I poured the egg mix over the noodles and finally I added the Cheeses to the top. At this point I realized that there was not enough egg as the whole thing looked fairly dry so I quickly scrambled 2 more Eggs and poured those on top and placed the whole thing in the oven.

After 25 minutes I checked the frittata and it really wasn’t cooking to I turned up the oven to 350. After an additional 20 minutes the frittata still wasn’t done so I put the oven put to 400. Then it cooked. It was done about 10 minutes later.

The result was stuck in the pan, when it should be easily plated as you turn the pan upside down with a plate on the top like a lid. It did eventually come out with only a little that stuck into my skillet – this may have only been because my skillet is not well seasoned.

Joe and I ate the frittata. It was good but as I said earlier not great and required some condiments. Joe added hot sauce and I used mayo – my favorite condiment.

I will work on this until I think it is just how I would serve it to the people on the Food Network's: Nest Food network Star.

The frittata servings have:

P.S. Food journal for yesterday: Breakfast-Banana and Red Bull. Lunch-Chicken Pot Pie from Pinkus and Pepsi. After work Snack- BLT from the Library. Dinner-1 Serving for Frittata and Red Bull.

Exercise: Nope-missed my workout time and had to get to the grocery store. I promise to go today.

Kitchen Techniques: Ingredients: Onions

Onions are one of my favorite ingredients. I use them in nearly everything. I enjoy them both raw and cooked.

Recipe Note: When I say onion, I am generally referring to the common yellow storage onion. There are many other onions in the world that are available at your well supplied grocery store like Green onions – scallions, Sweet onions, Leeks, Shallots, Ramps, Red Onions, White Onions, and Pearl Onions. I use these in recipes but I will always specify which variety when I am not using standard yellow storage onions.

Why use them? They provide a flavor punch with very few calories. In about ½ a cup of chopped onion (3.5 ounces) you only have 38 calories. They also provide 10% of the Vitamin C and Folacin you need.

Shopping for Onions: Onions should be heavy for their size. This means if you have two onions that are about the same size the one that feels heavier is the better onion. The difference in weight is due to water content. The outer skins should be papery. You can select your onions individually or you can just go ahead and buy the orange mesh bag of them (that's what I do). The mesh bag offers a fast way to get a bunch of onions.

Availability of Onions (Seasonality): Onions are available year round but are most common March to September when they are fresh to most markets. Onions store well given the right conditions so stocking up on them when you have a good price at market is not a bad idea.

Storage of Onions: Onions can last several months in ideal conditions and can go bad in a couple of weeks in crappy conditions. What, pray tell, are ideal and crappy conditions you may ask? Onions want a cool dry place with lots of circulating air. If it is too humid you will get sprouting onions or rotting onions. The mesh bag is ok for storage if you are going to eat up the onions in about a month (I go through a mesh bag every other week if I'm cooking 2 times a week), or if you hang the bag so it is exposed to a lot of air. If you are going to hold on to your onions for longer you might want to try to store them in pantyhose hung from the ceiling. (To store them in pantyhose place them - one at a time - into a clean pair of hose and tie a not between each so that they have their own little nylon sack.) As you need them you can cut off the onion(s) you need and leave the rest hanging. (This is a great use of nylons with runs. You can also use this with thigh-highs too.) Do Not store them in the fridge!! Storing them in the fridge causes them to rot – The exception to this is an onion that has been cut but not used entirely. If you have a half-used onion you can store it for about a week in the fridge before it will go bad.

Preparing Onions: Onions can present somewhat of a problem for cooks in that they are round and not easily chopped into regular pieces. Be sure you have a sharp knife. A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one as they tend to slip off what you are cutting and cut you instead. Also onions can make people cry so the faster you can get them cut the better off you are likely to be. Here is the technique I use to more easily deal with onions:

Cut off the stem end first, leaving the root end intact. Discard the stem end into the scrap bowl.

Then you peel off the papery outer layers and the first thin inner layer and discard into the scrap bowl. Then you turn the onion onto the cut stem end and slice off one side of the onion the thickness of the chop you are looking for.

Then turn the onion onto the freshly cut side and again slice off an un-cut edge at the same thickness.

Now make parallel cuts across the width of the onion making sure not to slice through the root end.

Now turn the onion over onto the second of the side cuts and make cuts parallel to it making certain not to slice through the root end.

Now you cut across the length of the onion getting the exact size pieces you want. Discard the root end into the scrap bowl. Chop the two remaining side pieces and move all the cut onion into a prep bowl.

Hints and Tips for Onions: Onions can make your hands smell funny after you've been handling them – try rinsing your hands with lemon juice to rid yourself of the smelly fingers (also works for garlic-fingers). Onions can make you cry – lots of old wives tales for solving this (and just like cures for hiccups) some work for some people others don't. Try a few until you find one that works for you (Light a candle next to your cutting board, hold matches in your mouth – heads out- to block the smell, put bread under your tongue, etc) Raw yellow onions are bitter – after cutting them, soak them in ice water. Change the water several times over the course of up to 2 hours before serving they will be oniony with out being bitter. Onion Breath? - Chew fennel seeds, Parsley leaves, gargle vinegar, or drink some coffee.

History: Onions have a long and distinguished career as a domesticated food-stuff. There is evidence from the Bible and other sources both literary and archaeological that the onion has been cultivated since about 3000 BCE. It is believed that onions were part of the diet of the slaves who built the pyramids.

Myths and Legends: It is said in early cultures that onions were linked to the afterlife or eternal life because of the concentric circles you see when you slice an onion across its middle. Onions are also believed to have medicinal qualities. I don't know if I believe that they can cure any diseases but I eat them and enjoy a decent level of health. (Then again my sister won't touch them and she is as healthy, and perhaps more healthy than I am)

Food Journal-

Breakfast – 2 doughnuts – Red Bull

Lunch – Lasagna (my own) and a bowl of wild mushroom and rice soup (also my own) – Mellow Yellow

Dinner – Spicy shrimp over rice noodles (my own) – Mellow yellow

Exercise? - Sort of, I walked home instead of hitting the gym.