Potato Leek Soup

I don't know where potato leek soup has been all my life, but I am glad it has finally made its way into my dinner rotation. This soup is easy and so satisfying. I'm sorry to have kept it to myself for so many weeks. By the way, doesn't the roll in the picture look awesome? Recipe to come later this week. Unless I forget. Sorry in advance for forgetting.

Potato leek soup

3 leeks, cut lengthwise (I waver between cutting in half or cutting in fourths; suggest your favorite fraction in the comments) and chop
2 T butter
2 C water
2 C broth
2 lbs potatoes (4 medium? I don't know. I buy funny sized potatoes, but then I also own a kitchen scale ((brag, brag, brag)) ) peeled, 1/2 inch dice
1/4 C parsley, chopped
1/2 t thyme
dash hot sauce
salt and pepper to taste


Cook leeks in butter on low for 10 minutes. Be careful not to let the leeks brown, they'll get bitter. Add water, broth, and potatoes. Simmer 20 minutes. Blend half of the soup (or whatever amount looks good). Add spices. Eat.

Lentil soup

Eat more soup. Eat more lentil soup.

Here are some links to help you out:
Lentil Soup from Alton Brown
Lentil Soup from Allrecipes

The Alton Brown recipe is spicy, but not too spicy if you are spice-phobic. My mom is a big fan of this one because she likes to cook anything that allows her to break out her immersible blender. The Allrecipes soup is a classic hearty lentil soup and an old favorite from soup-or-stew Sundays (holla back, Heater).

Fred says to try them both.

Ginger tofu soup

Easy, fast, delicious soup. I don't need to say more than that. Although I probably will further down the page. Oh yes, recipe comes from this Moosewood cookbook. If you're looking for a vegetarian cookbook you should check out one of the Moosewood's (literally, check it out from your library).

Ingredients
4 cups (1 quart) vegetable broth [we use vegetable bullion]
1 cup thinly sliced celery
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup ginger, cut into matchstick-sized pieces
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 block firm or extra firm tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 cup leftover cooked rice

Heat broth. Add celery, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. Simmer 5 minutes. Add tofu and rice and cook another 5 minutes. 

Yay! Seriously, that's all there is to it. The broth develops a nice light ginger taste while the pieces of ginger add good heat and interest. If you aren't a huge fan of ginger then you could try mincing so the pieces aren't so strong; or cut really big pieces that you can avoid when you're dishing out or eating the soup.

Soup and Stew Sunday #6: Another Black Bean Soup

Seems like we keep doing soups in twos for our Soup and Stew Sundays. I guess it has something to do with our love of comparing things. Anyway, this week, we made a black bean soup adapted from this smitten kitchen recipe.

Future Ben and Carolyn, make this soup again. It was good, required few ingredients, and really easy to make. I know we usually save the review for after the recipe, so I'll leave it at that for now:

one large red onion, chopped
4 bell peppers, green, red, yellow, and orange, chopped
a tablespoon of oil

Saute for 5-8 minutes, until the vegetables are tender but well before onions begin to caramelize.

4 teaspoons of cumin
4 cloves of garlic

Add these and continue sauteing for 2-3 more minutes.

4 (15oz) cans of black beans
1 tablespoon of chipotle peppers in adobe sauce
1/2 teaspoon red pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
2 teaspoons of salt
2-3 cups of water

Chuck it all in there and stir it up a bit. Let it simmer on medium for at least 30 minutes. The longer you let it simmer, the thicker it will get (which is good).

Remove 2-3 cups to a blender and puree, then return and stir.

juice from 1/2 lime

squeeze this in at the end and give it a good stir. Taste, and adjust salt levels accordingly.

We ate this soup with tortilla chips on Sunday and a quesadilla today. It could go with just about any bread product. So there you have the recipe. We used a little too much water so the soup was a bit thin yesterday. It thickened up nicely overnight though. The lime juice was noticeable on Sunday, but it didn't come through tonight; Carolyn and I both agreed that we could add more next time. Other than that, it was a perfect black bean soup. The variety of bell peppers is necessary, I think, and their presence adds a little bit of refreshment that breaks up the black bean flavor.

Give this soup a try and let us know how it turns out.

Soup and Stew Sunday #5: Quinoa and Black Bean Chili

Quinoa? Don't worry, I didn't know what it was either. And, by the way, you're saying it wrong. It's not "qwin-noah," it's pronounced "keen-wha." My roommate, among her many other virtues, happens to be the sort of person who knows the sort of person who purchases quinoa in bulk from the co-op. Thus, this week for soup-or-stew-Sunday we were introduced to this delicious grain.

But enough preliminaries. I know you came here for the recipe. We adapted a chili recipe we found on allrecipes.com.

1 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed
2 cups water

Bring water and quinoa to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until quinoa has absorbed the water.

1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin

Cook onion in oil. Add garlic and spices, cook a little more, about a minute (or until people walk into the room and say "sure smells good").

1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
2 (19 ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 green bell pepper, chopped (we also added another 1/2 pepper that happened to be in the fridge)
1 zucchini, chopped
2 tablespoons minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (Roommate bravely used a knife and fork to cut the slimy, scary peppers)
1 teaspoon dried oregano


Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes (or until vegetables are soft). Add tomato juice or water if you think the stew looks too thick--we did.

salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup frozen corn 

Cook about 5 more minutes, or until corn is hot.
Serve with chopped fresh cilantro and shredded cheese on top.

Quinoa is really great! Ben thought that the small grain made the broth of the stew seem thick, reminiscent of a meat chili. I like the quinoa because when they are cooked and hanging out in the both they look like teeny-tiny shiny eyes. Sorry to get all creepy on you.

Soup and Stew Sunday #4: $%&# vegetable soup

Poor Ben. He had a long day. He lifted heavy things at the gym this morning. He did his python homework all afternoon. It was probably inevitable that the challenge of a recipe-less stew would be too much for him.

"So, I don't remember how this whole stew thing works. Do you fry stuff? This is why we need a blog. Don't we have a blog thing? Go look at the blog and see how we make stew. What? We haven't written one of those yet? Urghhhh..."

Probably I should be helping.

...Anyway, the soup was un-delicious, so we're not going to blog about it.

Soup and Stew Sunday 3#: Rival Tomato Soup

How is it Sunday again already? I am falling way behind on this whole blog thing. It's a good thing Carolyn manages to keep a schedule, or the blog would never get updated.

Well anyway, I'm here to tell you about the soup we made a week ago, so it doesn't get lapped by tonight's soup. We went with a traditional tomato soup. Yes, we made a tomato soup the week before. No, we do not consider tomato soup two weeks in a row "completely half-assed." Besides that tomato soup was way out there, chipotle peppers and ground up tortilla chips?! In a soup?! What? So we had to bring it back to Earth, and make a nice, wholesome, regular tomato soup that everyone can get on board with. Now, it's been a week, so the following recipe is only going to vaguely resemble what we ate, unless Carolyn comes in and edits it. Carolyn's roommate, who's name will remain "Carolyn's roommate" because I don't know whether she wants to be positively identified on the Internet (yea, I capitalized it. I mean this one, the one everybody uses, not some other, lowercase internet), supplied the recipe and the role of head chef, so maybe she has the real thing written down somewhere. Bare (bear?) with me as I attempt to recreate the magic of last week's culinary masterpiece. (Everything Carolyn and I make in the kitchen is a culinary masterpiece, by the way. The art institutes of the world simply have yet to realize it.) To the recipe:

3 cloves garlic, minced
4 or so carrots, sliced 
2 stalks celery, sliced

fry in oil for a few minutes, you know the drill by now.

1 (28 oz) can of crushed tomatoes
1 (14 oz) can of diced tomatoes
3 cups of vegetable stock
Some spice, might have been thyme?
Salt and pepper
"4 drops" of hot sauce
some amount of Worcestershire, might have been a tablespoon?

Toss that junk in, let the whole business simmer for, oh, say 20 minutes. Then blend the thing up. All of it.

This soup was a perfect simple tomato soup. There's nothing offensive in it, but the flavor is strong enough to satisfy. Whereas last week's tomato soup stole the show from anything else you might eat with it, this soup is great to serve next to grilled cheese, which is what we did. Carolyn had made croutons from her leftover french bread (no post about croutons, Carolyn?) and we also garnished it with slices of avocado.

As you can see, there was a lot of filler in the entry, mainly because I have the memory of a porpoise, so sorry about that. The soup was good, you should try it. That's all for now.

Soup and Stew Sunday #2: Spicy Tomato Soup

Well, it's Tuesday, and that means I'm late in putting up our recipe for Soup and Stew Sunday. Over the weekend, we made a really amazing tomato soup, recipe from one of Carolyn's Moosewood Cookbooks (Carolyn, check to make sure that link is the right book). You'll need a blender for this recipe. Without further ado, here's our recipe:

3 cups chopped onion
2 tablespoons of oil

As usual, saute the onions in the oil. Saute them lightly; you'll see that the onion is only ingredient that has crunch, so you do not want to overcook it.

2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon oregano

Add these spices to the onion and saute another minute or two to let the flavors fry into the onion and oil.

1 quart tomato juice
1 can of diced tomatoes
3 tablespoons minced chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (this can be found canned in most grocery stores)

Add these ingredients and let it cook for about 10 minutes. It gets interesting next.

2 cups corn tortilla chips, blended up
3 cups of the soup

Blend the chips into the soup until it is a single emulsification. Pour it in with the rest of the soup (use a little water or tomato juice or non-blended soup to get it all out properly). Then stir it all together.

Garnish with anything green (the book recommends avocado, which would be awesome).

This soup was one of my favorites to date. I realize that our loyal readers are only aware of one other Soup and Stew Sundays recipe so far, but we've been doing this for months, so that's saying something. It was also fantastically filling. Carolyn made french loaf, sliced it up and made cheesy bread to go with it. Delicious.

A few notes about changes:
-The recipe called for vegetable stock rather than tomato juice; I'm very happy we went with the juice.
-I added more chipotle than the recipe called for. I would like to add even more in the future, but Carolyn thought it was a touch too spicy.
-At the time, I thought we used too much tortilla chip, but looking back, I was pretty happy with it. The recipe actually only calls for 1.5 cups, but I just tossed in all the leftovers of a bag.
-Next time less onion, more diced tomato.

Final thoughts: This soup only took about 45 minutes from start to finish, only requires 7 ingredients, and tastes amazing. I could see eating it year round, too. The only fresh ingredient is onion, so it could be considered a winter soup. The flavor really lends itself to pairing with fresh green things, though. Maybe it's a bit too hot to eat in middle of summer, but even then I probably wouldn't turn it down. Definitely making it again soon.

Vegetable Chowder

We've been live on the internet for a week now and we've only just got to our first soup-or-stew Sunday post? Impossible. This week's entry is a recipe out of my 1970s era Moosewood cookbook, with only a few minor changes.

1 medium onion
1medium potato
2 carrots
1 stalk broccoli
cauliflower (not in the original recipe, but we had some left over, so why not?)
1/2 lb. mushrooms
1 stalk celery
1 cup frozen peas
1 cup frozen corn

Saute vegetables together in 1/4 cup butter. We added the vegetables in shifts, starting from the top of the list and working down so that the onion, potato, and carrot would have sufficient cooking time. Add seasonings with the vegetables; we used salt, black pepper, white pepper (because Heather was co-cook), basil, and thyme. Our vegetables took about 30 minutes to cook, test for tenderness by poking a knife through an unsuspecting carrot. I added about a 1/4 cup of water midway through cooking to help build more steam to get to the vegetables cooked.


When vegetables are cooked add:


1/2 pint heavy cream
milk (We used a little less than 2 cups, far less that the quart of milk called for the in recipe.)


Heat carefully over low heat, stirring constantly so the milk and cream don't burn on the bottom. I took my cookbook's advice and had the milk and cream at room temperature before adding to the soup; this will reduce cooking time, thus reducing the chance that your soup will curdle (gross). I added more salt and lots more pepper. Cook just until heated through, less than 10 minutes. Soup is best served in front of The Amazing Race.


Very good soup! We added lots of pepper (both black and white) so ours was nice and spicy. The vegetables are a good assortment of colors, making this a very attractive soup. I haven't tried any left overs yet, but I'd wager that this is one soup that will taste much better on the day it is made than it does reheated. This was the first chowder we've done so far. I'd be interested in using the basis of the recipe again, adding in whatever vegetables are in season. Spring's almost here, right? Is it time for asparagus yet?