EatLocal365 » Soups and Stews

Preparing for Baby with Soup

Lindsay — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:31:36 +0000

Good afternoon!

Now that I’m entering the home stretch of pregnancy, I’m hit with a double whammy. I’m too tired to cook many nights, but I also want to make sure we have a good store of freezer and pantry meals ready for the little one’s arrival in a month or so. This has resulted in a lot of boring, but nutritionally sound, meals that just aren’t that much fun to talk about. Mostly, a TON of soup. Since most soup recipes serve 6-8, one batch will yield enough for Erik and I to eat for two meals plus one or two quart jars of soup in the freezer. Not exciting, but very practical.

We finally did hit on a meal that is both. This wild rice soup is based on a recipe from the very “ladies who lunch” River Room at Dayton’s in St. Paul. Yep, Dayton’s. It was hard enough to call it Marshall Fields, although I finally got used to it, but I am NOT calling it Macy’s. Anyway…I digress. We’d sometimes meet my dad there for lunch on special occasions when we didn’t have school, but he had to work. I always felt pretty special and grown up. This is, hands-down, the best wild rice soup out there. It’s not overly rich, but is nonetheless silky and delicious. If you’re feeling very indulgent, make some popovers and have a real River Room experience.

Note I: I’ve tweaked the recipe to use a very unattractive leftover roast chicken.

If you don’t happen to have one sitting in your refrigerator, you can use homemade or canned chicken stock and some sort of pre-cooked chicken – grilled or poached breasts or thighs would work well. You could also pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner and then make this the next day. The possibilities abound!

Note II: You’ll need to pre-cook the wild rice. My favorite way to do this is to mix 1 cup of wild rice with 3 cups of water in a covered baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour to an hour-and-a-half or until the rice has absorbed the water and is nice and fluffy. This will give you WAY more rice than you need for this dish, but I happen to like having extra in the refrigerator. It makes a quick side dish or an interesting addition to oatmeal in the morning.

Minnesota Wild Rice Soup

Makes about 6 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
1 leftover	Roast chicken	Or 6 cups of chicken broth and about 1-1/2 cups of chopped meat (see Note I)	Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm
6 TBsp	Butter	Substitute chicken fat, if you’ve got some handy from that leftover roast chicken	Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm
1 cup	Onion	Chopped	Red Fire Farm
1 large	Scallion	Thinly sliced	Hutchins Farm
10 ounces	Button mushrooms	Sliced	Whole Foods from Pennsylvania
3/4 cup	Carrots	Diced	Red Fire Farm
1/2 cups	Flour
1-1/2 cups	Wild rice	Cooked (see Note II)	Care package from my parents in Minnesota
1 cup	Cream		Highlawn Farm
5 TBsp	Dry sherry
2 tsp	Kosher salt
1-1/2 tsp	Black pepper	Freshly ground
2 TBsp	Parsley	Finely chopped	Drumlin Farm
1 tsp	Thyme leaves		Red Fire Farm

Directions

Pull the remaining meat off of your roast chicken. Aim for about 1-1/2 cups, but more or less won’t ruin anything. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Combine the chicken bones and 8 cups of water in a pot or slow cooker and simmer for as long as you can. In the slow cooker, I aim for 8 hours on low. On the stove, I let it go for at least a couple of hours, but it depends on when I have to leave the house or go to bed.

Strain the chicken broth through a colander to remove the large bits and then a lint-free towel to catch the smaller pieces. You should end up with about 6 cups of broth. If you have more, hurray! Save it for later. If you have less, just add a bit of water to make up the difference. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Chop up all your vegetables.

In a large pot, melt the butter and add the onions. Saute over medium heat until the onions have started to soften, 5 minutes or so.

Add the scallion, mushrooms, and carrots to the onions and cook until softened, about another 5 minutes.

Sprinkle the flour over the veggies and stir until the flour and butter form a paste coating the vegetables, about a minute.

While whisking, pour the chicken broth into the pot. The flour will help thicken the broth, but could also make it chunky. Whisking and slow pouring help to create a smooth soup. Simmer for 20 minutes (more or less…this is soup, after all, not wedding cake).

Add the remaining ingredients and simmer until warmed through, another 5 minutes or so. Enjoy!

How to Make Ratatouille: The Late Summer CSA Leftover Disposal

Erik — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 14:08:29 +0000

We’ve posted before about how a frittata is our go-to dish for getting vegetables out of the refrigerator. In the late summer we have a second play out of that same playbook to use up vegetables that, quite frankly, aren’t our favorites.

I’m talking about eggplants, summer squash, and those bitter purple peppers. We have good recipes for all of them (maybe not the purple peppers), but sometimes out CSA just drops too many on us at one time, and by the end of the week the squash are getting rubbery and the eggplant feels leathery… you get the picture. Take a look at the picture about to see all that this recipe used up!

This ratatouille uses them up in quantity and although it doesn’t look like much that you’d be dying to eat (I asked Lindsay “are you sure you want me to take pictures?”), it’s actually pretty delicious and incredibly healthy to boot. Did I mention that it’s also easy?

There are a million variations on ratatouille, since it’s a common peasant stew that everybody’s mother makes in France. This one is very stew-like, and because the veggies are cut in thin strips, they take on a noodly quality. Other variations call for cubes, etc. Use your imagination. You can also control how watery you make it by adding fewer or more tomatoes. They provide most of the juice.

Rataouille

Makes 4 servings as a main or more as as side

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
1 clove	Garlic	Crushed into a paste	Red Fire Farm CSA
1	Onion	Diced or minced (your call for texture)	Red Fire Farm CSA
1 TBsp / 1 Sprig	Fresh thyme	We were out or thyme, so we used fresh Oregano (any aromatic herb will do)	Red Fire Farm CSA
1	Eggplant	Sliced thin	Red Fire Farm CSA
1-2	Summery squash or zucchini	Sliced thin	Red Fire Farm CSA
2-3	Peppers	Sliced thin (no seeds), whatever color you have	Red Fire Farm CSA
3-6	Tomatoes	Cut into chunks (~eighths)	Red Fire Farm CSA
3 TBsp	Olive oil
1 pinch	Sugar
To taste	Kosher Salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Mash the garlic into a paste if you like (it distributes better throughout the dish), or just mince it. I used a mortar and pestle so that I didn’t have to clean the food processor for a single clove. Chop the onion and slice the eggplant. For this dish we don’t peel anything in order to make it as easy as possible.
Heat 2 TBsp of olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, and thyme. Once the onions are translucent, add the eggplant and cook for about 5-8 minutes until the eggplant has thoroughly changed color.
As the eggplant cooks in the pan, start slicing the rest of the vegetables. It’s OK if you have to turn off the burner and let the eggplant sit for a bit; it will be cooked more. I you like it watery, add more tomatoes. If you want it dryer, add fewer.
Add everything to a large roasting pan and mix around with 1 TBsp of olive oil. We usually use a big Pyrex (pictured), but it’s probably best to use something ceramic because at the end it needs to go under the broiler and Pyrex is not rated for that and could fracture. We always forge tab out the broiler with this one until it’s already almost done. Don’t be like us!
Cover the roasting pan with tented tin foil or a sheet of parchment paper. Try to prevent it from sitting directly on the vegetables. Bake for 1 hour.
Remove it from the oven. Turn on the broiler (to high, if your oven has the option). Remove the foil / parchment paper. Add the pinch of sugar and salt to your tasting. Stir thoroughly. Place it directly under the broiler, uncovered, for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, check to see if the top is starting to singe. If so, you’re done. If not, put it back for 2 minutes at a time until the top is as caramelized as you can get it without burning.

Unmundane Lentil Soup

Lindsay — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:44:31 +0000

My brother was in a band in high school called The Unmundane. They were pretty good and had a nice little following. I have a couple of their CDs and a t-shirt I wear running. I also have the word “unmundane” in my vocabulary now. It snuck in there at a time in my life when I used either “random” or “sketchy” to describe just about everything.

I probably also used “wicked” a little too much, as in “lentil soup is wicked boring”. Because of that narrow mindset, I almost didn’t make this one from Art of the Slow Cooker, probably because the combination of spices seemed random. But, I was trying to eat less meat and this seemed to fit the bill. I was prepared to choke down a bowl in the name of self-righteous healthiness, but I was surprised on the first bite by its unmundaneness. It wasn’t common, ordinary, banal, OR unimaginative. Instead, it was thick and full of spices and lemon.

Now that we’re definitely entering winter in Boston, it’s time to pull out the slow cooker and some tasty soup recipes. I think the smell of soup cooking all day warms up the house. Can a smell make you feel warmer? Why not? So this afternoon, I’m sitting on the couch covered with a blanket recuperating from a cold and watching The Usual Suspects, smelling the onions browning, because my awesome husband is making dinner for me. I’m counting the hours until I can dig in with a spoon and a big piece of crusty bread. It’s supposed to warm up on Sunday, which is good, because we’ll be out of soup by then.

Unmundane Lentil Soup

Makes 6 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
2 TBsp	Sunflower oil		Stolor Organics
2 large	Onions	Diced as finely as you want.	Red Fire Farm
2 cloves	Garlic		Keith’s Farm
2 tsp	Ground coriander
1 tsp	Ground cumin
1 tsp	Ground turmeric
1/2 tsp	Paprika	Use smoked paprika, if you want to mix things up.
1/4 tsp	Ground cinnamon
1-1/2 tsp	Kosher salt
1/2 tsp	Black pepper	Freshly ground
6-8 cups	Vegetable broth	See below for notes	Homemade, if you have it. We were out, so we used an organic boxed variety.
1 quart	Whole tomatoes with juice		Homemade
2 cups	Lentils	We used a mix of red and French green lentils.	Bulk (red) and Baer’s Best (French green)
1/8 tsp	Red pepper flakes	More if you like it spicy
1/4 cup	Lemon juice	Fresh if you’ve got it
3 TBsp	Parsley	Optional, but great; roughly chopped
1 TBsp	Cilantro	Optional, but great; roughly chopped	Red Fire Farm

Directions

If you want to get fancy, use whole coriander and cumin seeds. Toast them in a hot skillet for a couple of minutes, until slightly browned and fragrant, then grind. I don’t usually get fancy and the soup is still great.

Chop the onions.

Heat the sunflower oil in a large skillet and cook the onions over medium-high heat until starting to brown. This is the foundation for your soup, so take a little time, maybe 5-8 minutes.

In another pot, heat the broth until boiling.

While the onions are browning, measure out and combine all the spices except for the red pepper flakes.
Add the garlic and spices (except for the red pepper flakes) to the onions and cook until you can smell the garlic.

Add the tomatoes and juice to the onion mixture. Break up the tomatoes and cook until the juices boil.
Once the onions and broth are boiling, dump both into the slow cooker. Heating the ingredients to boiling speeds the cooking time and keeps the food away from the Danger Zone, e.g. the temperature range in which nasties thrive. Cook on high for 4-5 hours or low for 8-10.
When you’re ready to serve the soup, stir in the red pepper flakes, lemon juice, and fresh herbs. Top with a dollop of yogurt, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Regarding the amount of stock: Red lentils disintegrate and really thicken the soup, so if you use a full two cups of red lentils, you’ll want to use 7 or 8 cups of broth. More broth = soupier soup. Less broth = stewier soup. If you use red lentils and another type of lentils, you can use 6-7 cups of broth.

To make this work on a week day, I cook the onions, garlic and spices the night before, letting them cool down before covering and storing them in the refrigerator. In the morning, I add the tomatoes to the onions and bring them and the broth to a boil while I’m eating breakfast and getting ready for work. Pour everything in the slow cooker, plug it in, leave the dishes in the sink, and run out the door.

Creamy-Spicy Blended Gaspacho

Erik — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 16:00:53 +0000

This is a fast, delicious, and tasty soup. It’s a one-step recipe and a quick, light meal using the best of summer.

Creamy-Spicy Blended Gaspacho

Makes 2-4 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Sq. Greenmarket)
1.5 cups	Pine nutes
0.25 cup	Olive oil
0.5	Lemon	Juiced
2 cups	Tomatoes	4 – 6 large tomatoes, or more if cherry tomatoes; cut them up into pieces before blending	Lani’s Farm *
5 cloves	Garlic		Keith’s Farm *
2 tsp	Chili powder	Or 2 fresh chili peppers
1 tsp	Kosher salt
0.5 bunch	Thyme	Taken off the stem	Keith’s Farm *

Directions

Put everything in the blender. Blend until creamy. Serve. Ta-da!

How to Make Chana Masala

Erik — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:15:19 +0000

[UPDATE: After publishing this post, I saw how the picture at the end of it ran straight into the picture of our chili mole. What can I say? In the winter we make a lot of food that is served in bowls (stews, soups, chili). I guess this is our standard pic!]

We know we’ve been a bit MIA lately. Lindsay was travelling again M-Th for work (as she has been for most of 2011 to date). I was also away for 5 days, and when I got home I was horribly ill for another 3.

We’ve managed to keep up our eating habits, but mostly through quick and easy meals. Between that and the fact that we’ve been using the same basic Dark Days ingredients since December, that means we didn’t make much worth posting about or that we haven’t already posted. One more month and we will be out of Dark Days, and we can already see the light at the end! We’re trying to figure out what to do for April, which is going to be another busy Dark Days month for both of us.

In the meantime, we DID make a nice chana masala that’s worth posting. Granted, our chickpeas are not local, so it’s isn’t a pure Dark Days recipe. Also, if you don’t have tomatoes canned from the summer, those be local. But after 4 dark months, we’re willing to bend the definitions a bit. Enjoy!

Chana masala
Makes 4-6 servings

Ingredients

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Sq. Greenmarket)
2 cups	Yellow onion	Diced	Paffenroth Gardens *
5-6 cloves	Garlic	Minced	Keith’s Farm *
~2 TBsp	Fresh ginger	Grated or minced	Fresh Direct
4 cups	Cooked chickpeas
0.5 cup	Broth from cooking the chickpeas	Or other broth or water
1 pint	Canned whole tomatoes	Or 2 cups diced fresh	Canned this summer from Cherry Hill Orchards *
1 TBsp	Sunflower oil	Or any vegetable oil	Stolor Organics *
1 tsp	Brown mustard seeds	Whole seeds, not ground
1 tsp	Cumin seeds	Whole seeds, not ground
0.5 tsp	Ground cloves
0.5 tsp	Ground cinnamon
0.5 tsp	Ground cardamom

Directions:

If you are using dried chickpeas (which we recommend), cook the chickpeas, overnight if needed. Even though they sound exotic and look weird, chickpeas are a legume just like any other bean, so you can follow our instruction on how to cook dried beans. If you make a bulk of beans in the slow cooker, you can refrigerate or freeze the rest for later use.
If you do this in advance, be sure to set aside 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid when the beans are ready because it will add a nice starchiness that brings the chana masala together, as opposed to water or broth. Measure out 4 cups of the cooked chickpeas.
Dice the onions, mince the garlic, and then add the ginger. Our trick is to always keep a few whole ginger roots in a ziploc bag in the freezer. It’s easy to then use a Microplane to grate the frozen ginger. If you’ve ever tried to grate soft, fresh ginger, you know what a horrible experience that can be because it is so fibrous. This makes it a lot easier.
Heat a Dutch oven or large skillet over high heat. Add the mustard seeds and cumin seeds, stirring frequently, until they start popping. It’s important to use whole seeds here, and not ground.
When they start popping, lower the heat to medium, add the oil, and stir for about 1 minute. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger and cook until the onions soften, about 5 minutes.
Add the remaining ingredients (chickpeas, tomatoes, water/broth, and spices). Give it a good stir and reduce the heat to low / medium-low. Cook for 45 minutes, stirring it every now and then.
Chana masala is nice served over rice. We had leftover rice from Chinese takeout earlier in the week. The way it reheats (a little stale and crunchy) is perfect. Just give it a quick fluff-up with a fork.

That’s all there is to an exotic-sounding and healthy Indian dish!

Holy Mole Chili

Lindsay — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 01:50:59 +0000

This is definitely the best vegetarian chili I’ve ever had…at home or a restaurant. Thank you, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, for the great recipe. I’m usually a little disappointed in vegetarian chili. I eat it and feel virtuous for having a Meatless Monday, or whatever, but it’s nothing I get excited about. But this is amazing!! I swear you won’t miss the meat. The cocoa gives it incredible richness, but the chocolate flavor is very subtle. The heat level is perfect for us, but you might want to cut down on the dried chiles if you’re sensitive.

I’ve been traveling a lot for work, so we’ve fallen into a little pattern. Erik and I cook a couple of times over the weekend and then he finishes any leftovers while I’m gone. It didn’t seem fair that I had to eat room service junk while he got to eat this, though, so I made him promise to save me a bowl.

If you can’t eat gluten or if you prefer meat in your chili, see the notes at the end of the recipe.

Holy Mole Chile
Makes a big pot, but it reheats well

Ingredients

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Sq. Greenmarket)
1/4 cup	Sunflower oil		Stolor Organics *
1/2 pounds	Onion	About 1 large, chopped	Paffenroth Gardens *
3 small	Dried chiles	Snipped into small pieces with a pair of scissors	Northshire Farms *
5 ounces	Frozen chopped bell peppers	Substitute 1 large fresh bell pepper	Migliorelli Farm *
3 cloves	Garlic	Smashed using the heel of your hand on the flat part of a knife or a large spoon	Keith’s Farm *
1 pound	Seitan	Ripped into bite-sized pieces	Homemade using Cayuga Pure Organics flour *
2 TBsp	Chile powder
1 tsp	Ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp	Ground cumin
28 oz can	Whole tomatoes		Canned this summer from Cherry Hill Orchards *
3 TBsp	Cocoa powder
3 TBsp	Blackstrap molasses	Blackstrap is much less sweet than regular molasses.
1 3/4 cups	Dried beans	Soaked for 6-10 hours	We used a combination of pinto and Jacob’s cattle beans from Cayuga Pure Organics *
2 1/2 cups	Vegetable broth		Homemade using veggies from various farmers *

Directions:

Add the oil to a large pot, preferably a Dutch oven, and warm over medium-high heat.
Once you feel heat in the pot, add the onions and both types of peppers. Sauté until the onion is translucent, 2 to 3 minutes.
Add the garlic and seitan and cook for 6 to 8 minutes. The seitan will stick to the bottom of the pan, so stir occasionally.
While the seitan is cooking, prep the rest of the ingredients in two groups.
Group 1 = chile powder, cinnamon, and cumin

Group 2 = tomatoes (open the can, but don’t drain), cocoa powder, and molasses. Note: The molasses will be much easier to measure if you use the oily measuring cup and just fill it 3/4 of the way. (4 tablespoons = 1/4 cup)

Once the seitan has cooked, add the spices in Group 1 and stir for a minute or so until you start to smell them.
Add the Group 2 ingredients (tomatoes, cocoa powder, and molasses). Stir, breaking up the tomatoes with the spoon.
Add the beans and vegetable broth.
Cover and bring to a simmer. Cook for about an hour or until the beans are tender.
Once the chili is done, try to wait 15-20 minutes before eating it, so that it can cool down and thicken up

Possible substitutions:

I think you could subsitute a pound of any sort of protein for the seitan, as long as you’re mindful of the fat content. If you use ground beef, for example, it might be a good idea to decrease the oil to a few teaspoons.
You could also use pre-cooked or canned beans and cut the cooking time to 30 minutes or so.

Yum!