Green Bean and Almond Soup and Notes on Vegetable Stock

This recipe was part of my "cook the pantry and the crisper" effort this week. After making two cakes with almond flour, I had a surplus. I also had a just-passed-prime, but still in great shape, pound of green beans. Searching "green beans" and almond meal". I found this recipe on Clotilde Dusoulier's "Chocolate & Zucchini" site. Ms. Dusoulier adapted this recipe from Rose Carrarini's (of Rose Bakery) book, "Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery".

Although not as pristine as when i bought them, these were super crunchy and fresh tasting.

It's a pureed soup of green beans, aromatics and vegetable stock thickened with ground almonds.  Green beans and almonds taste great together and using ground almonds as a thickener is a win for the gluten-intolerant. The resulting texture isn't silky smooth as most pureed soups, but the combination of flavors is very good. It's not a BIG! GIGANTIC! flavor-buster soup, but not everything has to be - just great ingredients and a lovely flavor. I ate this with salad and cheese toast.

In my version, I use leeks instead of onions and celery with no carrots (as there were none in the crisper). I prefer leeks over onions in a lot of soups and love the flavor. Leeks can take some cleaning, as there can be a lot of dirt in between the layers but I generally clean dirt of of the outside, trim off the ends, and the fibrous dark green parts (which I save for stock), cut them as called for and then wash them by soaking and swishing them around in cold water, letting them sit  for a couple of minutes to let the dirt drop to the bottom of the bowl then drying them off in a salad spinner. This method is easy and fast.

In most instances, I trim and cut up my leeks and then I wash them.
Just remember to clean your board and knife before moving on to the next vegetable.

Vegetable Stock: I cooked both wild rice and barley this week and used the left-over water as a basis for vegetable stock. Water in which I've cooked chickpeas also make a really tasty starter for stock. To that I added the green tops and trimmings from the leeks, some celery leaves, a bay leaf and a few stems of thyme. During the week I throw appropriate (where the veg isn't too strong-flavored or bitter and would overpower the taste) trimmings into a freezer bag and stuff it in the freezer. I don't use them if they've been in the freezer over two weeks.

The cooking water from many beans and grains - if you don't use it in the dish for which you cooked them - make a good base, too. White or light-colored beans - especially cannellini - tend to be good. I don't use bean cooking water when the resulting product is strongly colored or too cloudy. I let the left over water from the barley sit for about a half an hour and let the starch particles sink to the bottom while pouring off the less-cloudy water.

Vegetable Stock Guidelines: Heat up a big pot on the stove on medium-high. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Throw in the left-over vegetable trimmings that you have cut up roughly (the smaller the better) and a couple of pinches of salt. Depending on your preference, cook them without coloring them or caramelize them a little, adjusting the heat as necessary, along with 1 or two smashed cloves of garlic. Add a bay leaf, a few pepper corns, a tablespoon of tomato paste (if you have some) and cook for a few more minutes. Add half-dozen sprigs of parsley and a few sprigs of other herbs (if you have them). Add the left-over bean or grain cooking water, or just water to a ratio that works for the amount of vegetables and trimmings. Commonly, a pound of vegetables to a gallon of water, but adjust down (or up) depending on your vegetables.

Bring the pot to a boil, turn the heat down and cover so that the liquid comes to  a medium simmer. Let this cook, covered, for 45 minutes to 1 hour. It doesn't help this to cook it longer and by 1 hour, you've extracted the maximum flavor from the vegetables. Take off the heat and allow the stock to cool to lukewarm. Set a large strainer over a bowl and ladle the solids into the strainer (pushing down on them a little to extract so that you can pick up the pot and pour the remainder of the liquid through the strainer. Push down on the remaining solids a little to exact any extra liquid.  Allow this to sit for an hour or until completely cool. Pour this liquid, making sure that any sediment remains at the bottom of the bowl, through a double-layer of cheesecloth.  Cover and store in refrigerator for 2 days or in an airtight container (or multiple containers, in smaller quantities) in the freezer for a couple of months.

(LEFT) take the pan off heat when the almond meal is about this color. Have a plate ready (to cool it down)
because it will continue to cook. (RIGHT) Toasted and un-toasted almond meal comparison.

RECIPE: GREEN BEAN and ALMOND SOUP

A Simple Soup of Sorrel, Leeks and Potato

Food bloggers photography dilemma: how do you photograph a VERY tasty soup that has the unfortunate hue of an army surplus tent? I think the color was due mostly to the color of my vegetable broth which rendered the soup not-so-green. So, before the beauty shot, why not dot the top with olive oil and float a perfectly formed quenelle of greek yogurt?

...that immediately sank to the bottom of the bowl. Oh, well.

Classically, a quenelle is a combination of fish combined with a white sauce, forced through a sieve, formed into the quenelle shape and poached. Now the use is broader, often just referring to the shape - basically a teardrop, where one of the two sides has a bit of a corner. So, I made this beautiful quenelle of greek yogurt and it sank. I should've swirled it in instead. Okay, I've moved on.

Leeks cooking with butter and a little stock.

This soup is dead easy. Except for the butter, salt and pepper, it takes four ingredients, all of which can be swapped out for others. If you have a small russet potato, a leek (or an onion, or shallots) and vegetable stock (or chicken stock, or even water) plus one other vegetable that is soup-appropriate, you can make this soup, or its cousin. If you're missing the "one other vegetable" and have another potato, you've got soup. Sure, you can tuck basil leaves into the blender with your roasted tomatoes when you purée it, or spike carrots with some harissa, but you can also just celebrate the taste of the ingredients, seasoned with just enough salt and pepper.

Sorrel leaves - pinch off the stem below the leaves.

Sorrel is a perennial used as an herb, cooking or salad green. Last week, Lynn and I used it with other herbs to stuff under the skin of a roasted chicken and it worked marvelously. I couldn't decide whether to use it in a sauce or make a soup - and decided on the latter. When I first tasted it raw, I thought, "Oh, okay another chard-ish, kale-ish cooking green." and then it tasted a little puckery (sour -like I had a mild lemon candy in my mouth - without the lemon taste or sweetness) and things got interesting. I really wanted to know what it tasted like without a lot of other competing flavors so I kept it simple: leek cooked in butter, vegetable stock, a small potato and sorrel, purréed after cooking.

After cooking, the puckery, slightly acidic finish in the taste of the raw sorrel goes away and it has a mild flavor that I don't think I can accurately describe or liken to something else - but it was very good.

The diced potato pieces should be completely tender, but should not break apart when you poke a fork into them.

You can make this without the potato and add previously cooked pasta, beans or other grain at the end. You can forego the purée-ing and keep it a little chunky - just chop up the greens as you would chard so that they are spoon up-able after cooking.

RECIPE: SIMPLE SOUP WITH SORREL, LEEKS AND POTATO

(Nearly) Last Minute Pozole Rojo Con Pollo

Back when I made these pan-seared chicken breasts, I saw the recipe on SFGATE for Nopalito's Posole Rojo. I made the adobo part of the dish and stuck it in the fridge thinking I'd use the leftover chicken for some posole on Cinco de Mayo. You can make this (nearly) at the last minute if you make the main components in advance: the meat, hominy and adobo can all be cooked in advance and refrigerated for a short period. If you do that, the bulk of the work you'll have to do is to assemble the posole components and prep the garnishes. This dish is wonderful.

Along came Thursday morning, May 5 - Cinco de Mayo and I hadn't cooked the hominy. No, not the canned hominy. I never understood why (generally) I didn't like dishes like posole, or others that included canned hominy -- and canned was the only hominy I knew about. I liked the corn-y taste and the texture but there was some off-flavor that I couldn't identify that ruined (for me) whatever dish it was in. One morning at the market, I stopped by Rancho Gordo's stand (I have a lot to say about beans and about Steve Sando and Rancho Gordo, but that will be another post) and there was a bag of dried hominy (White Corn Posole/Hominy). I thought that I couldn't hate it more than canned hominy so I took it home and stared at it for a while trying to figure out what I'd make.

Ultimately I used it in a bean dish (that I cannot quite reproduce as I cooked it, damn it, because it was delicious) that I adapted from Heidi Swanson (who adapted it from a Nopa recipe by Laurence Jossel). I combined Christmas limas, some chickpeas and the dried hominy from Rancho Gordo. I cooked the hominy in advance and when it was tender took one and ate it hoping that I would like it (it smells pretty freaking amazing while it's cooking)...

Yes, yes and YES! It tastes intensely corny and has a chewy-tender texture. This is good stuff. Also it's important to cook them until (as I refer to it) they 'bloom', kind of like the way that popcorn opens up. I was thrilled that I could love something I'd previously given up on. I'm pretty sure it was mostly the canned taste. If you have to use canned hominy, I recommend that you rinse and drain it very thoroughly. 

So, back to the last minute Cinco de Mayo posole and the hominy I hadn't cooked. It was a busy work day (I was working from home) and I didn't have any time to tend anything in the kitchen so I dumped them in the slow cooker with a lot of water and a thin-sliced medium onion, set it on high and went back to work checking on them every couple of hours. I don't know how long it took, but by 4:00 pm, I had beautiful hominy ready for my posole. At that point I had a little time and cooked-down the left-over hominy water and reduced it in a sauce pan on the stove - I used this as part of the liquid in the posole, but it's not necessary.

RECIPE: POSOLE ROJO CON POLLO

Tunip and Beet Soup - Pink Food! With Bacon!

...taken with my cell phone - the battery contact problem well known to Canon for years before I bought my Powershot got me.

I am so far behind with posts it's not funny.  Very soon, we'll be celebrating Cinco de Mayo with a Posole post - see? In the mean time, since we've been having a (very) cool, cloudy and rainy spring (for us - I don't want to hear any bitchin' from the NW or wherever your weather's crappy, okay?) a root vegetable soup seemed like a good idea.

I made this soup because I had a bunch of leftover beet scraps from my failed baked beet chip experiment. Failed because while I have awesome knife skills (it's true), I am not (yet) a human mandoline able to cut identical, perfect even slices and the chips were either leathery (too thick), too crispy (too thin - read: burned on the edges) or uneven (leathery on one side, burned on the other). I also had the scraps from three turnips I cubed and roasted - in total about 3/4 cup of leftover diced beets and 1 1/2 to 2 cups of diced turnip. What to do? Make soup.

Oh - I think the golden turnips are referred to as rutabagas. The purple and white turnips are, turnips.

I like beets, but a huge bowl of exclusively beet soup can be a little overwhelming as much as I admire the earthy taste. The turnips do a nice job of mellowing that out a little. Oh and I garnished it with bacon and two of the too-leathery but perfectly good tasting beet chips.  This is very simple but it was very satisfying.

Recipe: Turnip and Beet Soup Garnished with Bacon

Chickpea, Butternut Squash and Sausage Soup

It is cold and rainy in San Francisco.  I know that statement might deserve a big-fat raspberry from my Northwest, Midwest and Eastern seaboard friends but hey - for us it's miserable weather.
There I was with 2 quarts of celery root stock in my fridge, a desire to cook some chickpeas (not from a can - although I won't dis' you if you use canned but you're missing out on so much!  Who am I kidding? I'm definitely going to judge you if you don't cook your own chickpeas at least once.), a need use up a couple of sweet Italian sausage and a couple of chorizo sausages, a little butternut squash and some of the sauteed kale, onion and roasted lemon dish I made a few days ago. Oh - and leeks.

Back to the chickpeas.  Just as I was very pleasantly surprised when I made the celery root stock, the pot liquor from the first time I cooked chickpeas was a delicious revelation! I generally soak mine overnight and then simmer them with a couple of bay leaves until they are tender - not completely mushy - add a little salt to the water, stir then turn off the heat and leave the cover on until they cool down. I started with two cups (dried) chickpeas.  Those I didn't use for the soup will be roasted for a snack.