Soup Post

Disclaimer: The are no soup recipes or soup photos in this post.

But I have been on a helluva soup-making binge lately. At least once a week, I make a pot of some kind of vegetable soup, and I eat it for lunch every day that week. The thing about my soup is that it's usually not much to look at. I've made borscht, tons of gazpacho, squash soup and plain-old vegetable stew. All good, none beautiful (ok, maybe the borscht). The result has been very little blogging on my part. Laziness might also have something to do with that though...

Here is a sample of some of the more interesting stuff I have made:

Pretzel Bites (half of this recipe)

Udon Noodles with Tofu

Roasted Beet Hummus

Raspberry Walnut Tart

Potato Ricotta Fritters with Indian Spice

Gazpacho

The most difficult thing about this recipe was getting to the farmers market before noon on Saturday. You see, a trip to the Northeast Minneapolis Farmers Market was absolutely vital for my gazpacho because store bought tomatoes would never do. For me, gazpacho is dependent on the quality of your ingredients, all of which are in season right now.

While I ventured out on a Saturday morning for tomatoes and cucumbers, the market had a lot of other useful produce for this dish. I bought these white peppers, but I don't know their actual name.

They sort of taste like bell peppers. I also bought some fresh garlic, which I had never cooked with before.

Anyway, this is my (first) recipe for gazpacho. It's pretty easy to play with the quantities of the ingredients, and I'll definitely be making gazpacho again soon.

Ingredients:

6-7 plum tomatoes, coarsely chopped

1 medium sized red onion, coarsely chopped

2-3 small cucumbers, coarsely chopped, not peeled

2-3 cups of chopped bell pepper, any color or kind

1/2 cup parsley

4-5 cloves garlic

3/4 loaf french bread, torn into chucks

The juice of 1/2 lemon

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1/4 cup olive oil

A few dashes each of: dried oregano, dried thyme and coriander

2 teaspoons salt

Pepper to taste

Enough tomato juice to cover your veggie/bread mixture

In a food processor, you need to lightly process all of your vegetables. I did this on the "pulse" setting, one vegetable at a time. I used my food processor to shred the bread chunks and garlic too.

Add all vegetables and bread to a large bowl. Add olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, spices, salt and pepper. Cover with tomato juice, mix well and chill overnight.

Three Curry Soups

The best thing about soup is that you can make it out of just about anything. This post is evidence of that, and I hope that it inspires you to make your own delicious curry soup. It's a great time of year for it, with the cold weather and all. I've made these three blends throughout this fall and winter but never got around to posting them.

These soups are all Indian inspired, but if you don't like spicy, you obviously have other options. I also make a mean potato leek soup. Two of these three involved the use of a pressure cooker, but you can easily do without one when cooking anything. It just takes a bit longer. Two of the soups also require the use of a blender. If you don't have one, buy one.


Lentil soup, which you can see pictured above, is one of my favorites. At some point, I will do a full post on this recipe, which I am fairly sure is legitimately Indian. An Indian friend usually eats it with rice, but I find that's unnecessary. It's already so tasty, filling and healthy. A little yogurt is fine, since I make it fairly spicy.


This bowl of goodness is the result of an old squash that sat around my apartment for a week or so. I knew I had to use it soon, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Curried squash soup was a perfect fall solution. I used many of the same ingredients as I would in the lentil soup, but I just added them to pureed acorn squash, which I baked first.


My last soup of 2009: Carrot Tomato Soup. This one was quite a bit lighter and less spicy than the previous soups. Basically, I pressure cooked the veggies and pureed them. I then sauteed some onion, black mustard seeds and cumin seeds. I added the veggies with some chili powder and turmeric. It was quite good with crackers.