Borscht with Beef & Orange

The theme this week is warming, fall-winter soups. Yesterday's soup was inspired by the French potato and leek classic, Vichyssoise.

Monday's soup, Carrot, Coconut and lime, was inspired by my favorite Thai dish. Today, Russian Borscht influenced the soup I created (pics to left and recipe below).

"Inspired and influenced," I use these terms because despite my classical training, I improvise in the kitchen, using whatever ingredients I have on hand to create something unique and seasonal.

Improvising in the kitchen is the basis of recipe-independence, I term I use often in this blog. I encourage experimentation and improvisation because so long as your cooking is bound by recipes, staying on-budget grocery shopping is a challenge.

All the produce, vegetables and fruit, I've used in my soups are in-season -- in other words, they're abundant and thus priced well. Shopping and cooking seasonally is nature's way of keeping us healthy and on-budget at the grocery store.

The challenge once home is to prepare seasonal produce purchased so that interesting and appetizing meals result. One rule of thumb that anyone can implement: make your meals colorful by including lots of colorful produce.

For example, the beauty of Borscht is its magnificent reddish-purple color, due, of course, to the beets and the purple cabbage. I added a big blob of tinned tomato paste toward the end of the cooking to enrich the flavor; the red paste naturally enriched the color too.

Halfway into the cooking, I also tossed one whole orange into the pot (pic above). Though not in season, the sweet-orange citrus flavor added zing in the same way lime added zing to Monday's soup. Orange and beets are great flavor pals and well, they're great color pals too!

Traditionally, Borscht might include carrots, so though I've not included them in my variation, if you have them on hand try adding them. Carrots and orange and beets and purple cabbage all compliment one another in color and flavor.

I've added beef to my soup. I had ground beef in my freezer and some Borscht recipes call for a beef-stock base. Because I intended eating the Borscht as a main dish, the addition of red meat created a substantial, highly nutritive, iron-rich bowl of soup so thick, it's almost a stew.

Borscht with Beef & Orange
Into a soup pot toss the following:
1) 2 medium-sized washed and scrubbed beets.
2) One quarter of a large purple cabbage, washed and chopped.
3) 1/2 lb ground beef, you could use pork or chicken, if you wish. (The addition of meat is optional.)
4) One large onion (optional).
5) Several washed, scrapped, & chopped carrots (optional).
6) If you have any dill or caraway seeds on hand, add a couple teaspoons.
7) Cover ingredients with water, put lid on pot and simmer for about 45 mins or until beets are tender.
8) At around the half-way mark, add one washed, scrubbed and chopped whole orange (skin included).
9) Once the soup is cooked, remove the pieces of orange, and add a heaped tablespoon of tomato paste. Stir well, and then season with salt and pepper.

To Serve: Ladle soup into a bowl. Top with a blob of sour cream or yogurt or sliced avocado or a mix of all three. Adhere several corn chips to the sour cream mix and sprinkle the lot with chopped chives and or the grated rind of an orange.

Celeriac, Pear, and Leek Soup

As I mentioned yesterday, creating seasonal soups is simple and potentially effortless.

All that is required is a sense of adventure in the kitchen and a sense for pairing flavors.

A blender is helpful too.

Today's soup has a strong celery flavor because it features celeriac or celery root.

As you can see in the pic to the left celeriac is a bulbous root vegetable with the appearance of a turnip.

It is light brown on the outside and white on the inside. And it has celery-like green tops that grow above the ground while the bulb grows below the ground.

When you cut open a celeriac bulb it has a distinct celery aroma. When you cook it, it's not fibrous like celery stalks, rather, once mashed, it's quite creamy, like mashed potato or turnip, and the flavor is a combination of a turnip, potato and celery.

Slightly earthy, slightly acrid, with mild bitter tones, celeriac pairs well with other root vegetables and it also pairs well with sweet juicy pears.

If you think about Waldorf Salad with its combination of celery, apples, and walnuts, you'll realize where I'm borrowing the flavor combination for this soup. Because of the mild bitter quality of celery, sweet and fleshy autumnal fruits like apples and pears are great texture and flavor pals to celery, and celeriac.

Add leeks to celeriac and you might be aware that I'm borrowing from the French classic, leek and potato soup or Vichyssoise.

Leeks have a mild onion flavor so they're suited to soups with fruit (they'll compliment rather than overwhelm the fruit) and to soups with a smooth, creamy texture (leeks love creaminess, think Creamed Leeks).

Leeks combined with fruit to create a smooth, creamy texture describe well the soup I'm sharing with you today.

Celeriac, Pear and Leek Soup
1) Cut the outer skin from the celeriac bulb. It's easier to cut the skin off rather than try and peel it off; the skin is too tough for peeling.
2) Chop the peeled bulb into small cubes and set aside.
3) Wash and chop several pieces of the celeriac stalks (optional, since usually the bulb is sold without the top stalks intact.) You can use regular celery instead of celeriac stalks, if you wish.
4) Top and tail 2 leeks; slice and then wash the pieces, removing any dirt caught in the leek.
5) Wash and peel 2 pears. Try either Bosc or Bartlett Pears. Bartletts are soft and very juicy and will disintegrate quickly upon cooking, whereas Bosc pears are firm and crunchy and hold their texture upon cooking. Either is fine, experiment. Or you could use apple instead, after all, it is the main ingredient in Waldorf Salad.
6) Melt butter and a bit of light oil in a soup pot on the stove. Add the leeks, sauteing over low heat until they're wilted; then add the chopped celeriac stalks (or celery), cubed celeriac, and finally the pears (or apple).
7) Gently saute over low heat until all ingredients are slightly wilted and then cover with either chicken stock or water. Place lid on pot and gently simmer for about 45 mins or until celeriac is tender.
8) Run soup through a blender, taste-test and add salt and pepper to your liking. Return soup to pot and keep on low heat until ready to serve.

To Serve: Ladle soup into bowls, swirl in either half-and-half, a blob of sour cream or yogurt and sprinkle with chopped chives or chopped parsley.

Carrot, Coconut & Lime Soup

I've had a week off -- while a new hard drive was being installed in my computer -- and during the week, I made healthful, seasonal soups.

Like cooling fruit smoothies in summer, fall / winter soups are choc full of nutritive and satisfying, warming seasonal vegetables.

Preparing soup can be quite effortless; you don't need a lot of time, nor complicated recipes to create something

original and delicious.

What you do need is a sense of adventure, and an active imagination and by that I mean the ability to imagine what flavors will go well together once cooked and blended.

If you're a smoothie fan, you'll know that soft summer fruits automatically taste great when blended together either with water or with juice or milk.

In-season fruits and vegetables have an uncanny knack of complimenting one another. It's nature's way of ensuring that we make the most of the variety of fresh produce available.

In fall and winter, root vegetables, like soft summer fruits, are great flavor pals to one another. In other words, toss lots of chopped root veggies into a pot with either water or stock, simmer gently for an hour, and voila, delicious soup! It's hard to go wrong.

I like to experiment with flavor and texture, and still I find it's hard to go wrong -- so long as I taste-test along the way to ensure that I'm not being too heavy-handed with one flavor over another.

For instance, the soup idea I'll share today is a variation on a red Thai curry but with apple added. Apple compliments carrot and celery, plus it smoothes the texture of the soup which might otherwise be quite chunky and fibrous due to the carrot and celery.

To finish, I added coconut milk to taste. It enriches the soup with its creaminess, plus it's a staple in Thai cooking, as is lime, which I squeezed into the soup at the very end to counteract the sweetness of the apple and carrot.

Do you see how easy it is to create a unique soup by simply matching flavors and textures?

Drawing on your taste memory also helps. When I decided on the ingredients for today's soup, I visualized the red Thai curry I enjoy at my favorite Thai restaurant, recalling the texture, flavors, the vegetables in the dish, and then I improvised with the ingredients in my fridge and pantry.

Here's the basic recipe; feel free to experiment, improvising according to the ingredients you have on hand.

Carrot, Coconut & Lime Soup

1) Wash several organic carrots, scraping them with a knife to sloth off any dirt or debris.

2) Wash several stalks of celery, leaving the leaves on for extra celery flavor (the bitterness of the celery leaves will compliment the sweetness of the apple and carrot).

3) Wash and chop one or two apples. I leave on the skin, but you can peel them if you wish.

4) Wash and chop either a leek or white onion, toss into a pot with a little oil, and saute on med heat.

5) Add a teaspoon of Thai Red Curry Paste or if you use Thai Kitchen Original Pad Thai sauce, add a tablespoon (it's not hot like the paste).

6) Toss in chopped carrot, celery and finally the apple. Use a wooden spoon to gently stir ingredients over a med-low heat.

7) Add either water or chicken stock, enough to cover vegetables, cover pot with lid and cook contents gently for about 45 mins or until vegetables are soft.

8) Blend soup in a food processor or blender, pouring blended ingredients back into soup pot.

9) Taste-test and add salt if you wish. Pour in coconut milk to your liking while soup pot is on low heat.

To Serve: Squeeze lime into soup, taste-test to ensure the flavor is to your liking. This is a fairly sweet soup so it can withstand a good amount of lime juice. Ladle soup into individual bowls and serve with a chunk of lime on the side, and a sprig of green in the center, i.e. basil, Thai basil, parsley, lemon grass, or chives.

Broccoli Timbales

I'm not a big fan of broccoli. It's a member of the cabbage family, and to me it can sometimes taste too much like cabbage.

However, I eat it because it's green, full of phytonutrients, and therefore good for me.

In the effort to enjoy broccoli, I like to prepare it with other vegetables and ingredients so that it's anything but plain and cabbage-tasting.

That's the beauty of vegetable timbales or mini vegetable egg custards; they disguise disagreeable vegetables.

The name "timbale"comes from the thimble-shaped individual molds in which the vegetable custard is cooked in the oven in a Bain Marie (water bath).

As you can see in the picture, the ingredients needed to make broccoli timbales are basic:

1. broccoli
2. leeks
3. half and half or regular milk
4. grated cheese
5. nutmeg
6. salt and pepper
   

• The portion of broccoli in the pic above is in equal portion to the amount of leek, in total it's about 1.5 cups of vegetables per two eggs.
• Saute the broccoli and leeks in some butter until they're wilted and soft, but don't let them overcook. Now turn them into a food processor and blend the veggies to a pulp. Using a rubber spatula, scrape the veggies into a mixing bowl.
• Separate the eggs, adding the yolks to the mixing bowl with the veggies, beat gently with a wooden spoon. Add 1 cup half-and-half, half a cup grated cheese, a dash of nutmeg, salt and pepper.
• Whip egg whites till they're stiff and fold them into the ingredients in the mixing bowl.
• Meanwhile, grease individual timbale containers with butter. If you don't have timbale containers, use a muffin tray or cupcake containers. Pour the egg and vegetable mix into your container(s), leaving a little space at the top for the timbale mix to rise slightly.
• Heat oven to 325 degrees. Place filled timbale container(s) into a baking tray and add enough water to the tray so that it comes part-way up the timbale containers.
• Cover the baking tray with foil and place it in the oven for about 35-40 mins.
• Remove the foil at around the 30-min mark if you'd like the top of the timbales to brown slightly.

Allow timbales to cool before running a knife around the inside edge of each container, loosening the timbale so that you can turn it out onto a plate or cookie tray.

Once you've upturned each timbale onto a plate, cover them with foil and reheat in a 325-degree oven (or you can serve them warm or cold).

To Serve: Since they present so well, timbales can be the focus of a main meal with a side of fish or chicken, and a salad. Or they can be served as a starter with a generous dollop of hollandaise and a sprig of fresh tarragon.

I fancy them as a side to fish or white meat since the flavor of custard-infused broccoli timbales is delicate, not at all cabbage-like, and thus a delicious way to eat a green that I might otherwise avoid altogether.