Spice up your soup

It was the Tuesday after bank holiday, I'd taken a walk to the local park to relive scenes of my teenage years, reflect on my direction in life and think about the exciting and rewarding but (slightly) sad summer I'd had. It had comprised of entertaining nights out with my mates, weddings, a trip to Scotland, helping my great uncle get over his wife's death , a top drawer birthday meal, the illness and then loss of my dog to cancer, the arrival of a new puppy, visiting the Olympics and plenty of games of cricket at higher level than the season before.

There were some scraps of brown and rusty red creeping onto the leaves of the trees at the edge of the park and only two further fixtures in the cricket program. I knew that summer was on its way out and autumn was soon to be with me.

When I have a lot think about I like to disappear into the kitchen and on this occasion it was to make a spicy parsnip soup. This is a soup I've made many times and I promised a good mate of mine I'd put in the blog as it's one of his favourites and he wanted me to show him how to do it.

The album of choice for cooking was Talk Talk's first album the Party's Over which is a synthesizer-driven, written to order piece of work that is noteworthy for containing some strong singles and for the fact that it sold enough to contribute towards the funding of the production of later masterpieces Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.

I first poured enough olive oil into my Le Cresceut dish to cover the bottom of it and heated the oil gently. I then diced a red onion, a garlic clove and four pieces of celery before adding them to the dish with half a tablespoon of ground ginger.

After these ingredients had cooked for a touch over five minutes I added dried cumin seeds and ginger root from the collection of spices, which I had received as part of my birthday present, together with half a tablespoon of curry powder. I mixed the curry powder and spices together and while they cooked I diced up around five hundred grams of parsnips and two hundred and fifty grams worth of carrots.

After another five minutes I added the carrots and parsnips to dish after first stirring the curry powder and spices into the onions, garlic, celery and ginger. I then poured a litre of vegetable stock into the mixture and left it to cook in the dish on a low light for about forty-five minutes. I always like to cook soups of this type for reasonable length of time to be sure the ingredients have all the time they need to fuse together prior to blending.

After the soup had cooked for the allotted forty-five minutes I took off the heat and let it cool for half an hour. I then blended it, returned it to the le cresceut dish and added a quarter of a pint of unsweetened soya milk to it. After reheating it through I poured it into bowls for serving.

The results were first rate and a taste of soups to come this autumn and winter. The soup was exceptionally thick and the use of small amounts of several different kinds of spices meant that it was thankfully not strong enough to make my eyes water. However it still retained a distinctive enough taste to stop it being too bland.

Warmed through with the addition of unsweetened soya milk and ready to eat

Rubbed in Cake

This recipe was part of my recent bank holiday cooking project which included two soups, a giant Yorkshire Pudding with Sage, Red Wine Lentils and peaches with cheese. Apart from the Yorkshire Pudding it was probably the most traditional of the recipes I made over the bank holiday weekend.

Yet more Neil Young was playing as work commenced on the cake; this time it was his 1980 record Hawks and Doves which is divided into a stunning acoustic side and a less convincing but mildly worthwhile country music side.

The first job was to put eight ounces of self-raising flour and four ounces of margarine into a mixing bowl and stir them together using what is popularly known as the rubbed in method. This contrasts to the more usual approach of making cakes which involves creaming sugar and margarine together and then adding flour to the mixture.

After the flour and margarine were properly mixed together I added four ounces of caster sugar, six ounces of raisins and a tablespoon of orange zest. In order to help these ingredients mix with the flour and margarine I gradually added to the mix two beaten eggs and two tablespoons of milk while stirring the sugar, raisins and orange zest into the flour and margarine.

The addition of the milk helped make the mixture a little lighter and help it rise when cooked in the oven. After I had stirred everything together I poured it into a cake tin that I had lined with greased baking paper. The cake tin was around 10centimetres deep and 25 centimetres wide.

The cake mix just prior to putting it in the oven

I baked the cake in the oven at 170 degrees (180 for non-fan ovens) for about 35 minutes until the sponge had begun to turn golden brown at the edges. I knew the cake was ready as I stuck a meat skewer through the middle of it and it came out clean. I also used the time honoured trick of pressing the sponge and watching it spring back at me; which is always another indication that it has been cooked for the right amount of time.

The results were first rate as the flavour of the orange and raisins combined with a sponge that was substantial but not overly rich made this a cake perfect with a spot of afternoon tea or as pudding after an evening meal.

Ready to serve as either a light pudding or with a cup of afternoon tea

Life is Peachy

Bank holiday Monday was an interesting one for me as it was the first time that my grandparents had come to visit for nearly eight months.

I decided to play safe with my menu choices therefore and for their pudding I returned to a tried and tested favourite of theirs which went down well when I cooked it for them at the August Bank Holiday two years before. I also played safe with my selection of music while preparing the meal with the expanded re-issue of Elvis' Aloha From Hawaii, a record which although it has its share of exciting straight ahead rock and roll also had enough mawkwish elevator music on it to appease my grandparents' conservative tastes.

I dumped a small tub of low fat cheese spread (without wanting to do any product placement I used low fat Philadelphia which worked well) into a mixing bowl together with a teaspoon of grated orange zest, a teaspoon of vanilla essence and three and a half tablespoons of ground almonds. After mixing these ingredients together with a metal spoon I left them to stand in the bowl while I prepared the peaches.

I took five peaches and cut them in half length ways as well as removing the stones from each one. I then placed the halves of the peaches in a high-sighed and newly greased glass baking tray. I spread the cheese, orange zest, vanilla extract and almond mixture evenly over each of the peach halves.

After the peaches had been fully covered with the mixture I cooked them on the baking tray in the oven for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (190 for non-fan ovens). When I took them out of the oven I noticed the edges of the cheese spread had begun to turn brown, which was a sure sign they had been cooked for long enough.

As they were two years previously the peaches stuffed with cheese were very popular with my grandparents and even my granddad (who is a diabetic and dislikes tomatoes) enjoyed them. The spread was not overly sweet but still had enough of a taste to blend with the peaches to make this a top quality but easy to make pudding. It certainly helped put me in my grandparents' good books after our eight month hiatus.

Post cooking- the brown colouring on the cheese is a dead giveaway that the dish cooked properly

Prior to cooking- always make sure the peaches are fully covered in spread.

Oranges are the only fruit

As part of my recent bank holiday cooking project I made a soup using some ingredients I wouldn't normally think of putting together, the result was a soup containing carrots, oranges and leeks.

With Led Zeppelin's perennially underrated final studio album In Through the Out Door on the player I weighed out two pounds of carrots before topping and tailing them, peeling them and then cutting them into small horizontal strips around 2cm wide and 1cm thick. I put the carrots to one side of the chopping board and took two leeks which I sliced into similar size pieces to the carrots. I made sure when preparing the leeks to remove their outer layers and scrub away any dirt caught between these layers. It is often the case that leeks bought from supermarkets, like these were, are quite messy and require a lot of cleaning during preparation.

I put the carrots and leeks into my Le Cresceut dish which I had first covered the bottom of with olive oil. I put the dish on a low light on the hob to cook while I made some orange juice. I squeezed the juice from two  oranges into a measuring jug and after the carrot and leeks had cooked for ten minutes I added the juice to them together with a hint of black pepper. I stirred the contents of the dish to be sure the juice and pepper blended with the vegetables properly prior to adding any more ingredients.

I next grated some of the skin off the oranges I had used to make the juice and added half of the zest I had made the dish and kept the other half for the garnish. After the ingredients had cooked for another five minutes I added a pint and a half of stock to the dish and left it to cook on a low light for around half an hour. Once I was sure the dish was cooked I took it off the heat and left it to cool for about twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes were up I blended the soup on a high setting in order to make it have the consistency of fruit juice from a carton- this was an approach to soup blending I had seen in high class restaurants and I was keen to replicate it with this dish.

I then served the soup with some orange zest and sprigs of parsley atop the bowl. On finishing a helping of the soup I knew that this was one recipe I would re-visit again and again; the orange had the happy ability to make the carrots and leek taste sweet like the tinned vegetables I had as a child but without the unhealthy ingredients found in tinned veg. For that reason alone I would recommend this soup.

Straight after blending- I put the blender on a high setting to give  the soup a light consistency just like they do in Michelin Starred restaurants

Self- made birthday cake

It was my birthday recently and I took it upon myself to make my own cake. I decided to make it by adapting a Victoria Sandwich recipe from an old cookbook from the seventies.

With the overproduced country rock and singer-songwriter stabs of Neil Young's eponymous first album darting out of the speakers I creamed in a bowl four ounces of margarine and four ounces of caster sugar. I knew I had mixed the ingredients together properly because the butter looked like it had fluff on it which told me the sugar had bonded with it.

I next beat two eggs into the mixture while periodically adding four ounces of self-raising flour. Once all the flour had been fully stirred in the cake mix was ready to bake. I greased a 20cm wide and 10cm deep cake tin with margarine and a sprinkling of plain flour.

Before I put the mixture into the tin I used a trick learned from a friend who is a talented cook as well and added 300 millelitres of skimmed milk to the mixture so as to make the sponge light and give it plenty of air.
I then added it to the tin and cooked it in the fanned oven at 170 degrees (180 if your oven isn't a fan one) for forty-five minutes. I knew sponge was ready as when I took it out of the oven it sprung back like a soft mattress when I pressed it with my hand.

While the sponge was on the side cooling I made the butter cream icing by taking a hint of vanilla essence, two ounces of butter and four ounces of icing sugar. I mixed these together in a bowl until I had sticky paste to which I added some red food colouring which dampened the icing a little.

After the sponge had cooled I cut the cake in half widthways and spread half the icing over the bottom half of it so as to form a sandwich. I then spread the other half of the icing on top of the cake. I was a little disappointed as the food colouring had turned the icing pink instead of red and therefore it was clear that aesthetics were not going to be the strong point of this cake.

However the taste was a different story; the sweet , rich buttercream icing was kept from being too overpowering by the light sponge which was helped in its lightness through the addition of the milk prior to cooking.

Cake from Big Pink: the icing may have not been the best colour but it was  certainly tasty enough.