Split Pea Soup, With Vegetables: Two Simple Recipes

Themes of the times are simplicity, economy, moving away from meat and dairy, and of course, ever importantly, deliciousness and health.

These past days I’ve made minor changes to my usual methods of soup-making, using vegetables and green split peas and yellow split peas respectively, in more or less equal measure – rather than giving the throne to one or the other. The result has been very smooth and creamy vegan vegetable soups with basic and local ingredients.  I’ve used no dairy,  and no potato or rice, so these soups are therefore lower and slower carb. They move beyond their familiar cousins –a Split Pea Soup with carrots and onion, thyme, maybe bay, perhaps ham or bacon — a Cream of Carrot as a thinned root vegetable potage with the variation you choose– to announce not a superiority but a difference, and an assuredly vegetarian one that doesn’t lack heartiness.  Try this approach for ease.

Fermented Herbs, Verdurette, Herbes Salees

I’m feeling happy for the emergence on the food scene of Olia Hercules. I saw this film a while back and felt really thrilled to be learning from someone so deeply rooted in her own food traditions (and she’s deliberate on that plural) yet gifted with such a light and beautiful cook’s touch. That Ukrainian Green Borsht of hers is of course a much more vivacious cousin to my prosaic Schav.

Today in the Guardian is an excerpt from her new book Mamushka. I want it! Want want want! Because I know I’m going to be bowled over with inspiration, just as I was simply from reading about the way she uses fermented herbs in her lovely and simple soup.  Make sure to check out the link.

Her version uses dill, parsley, sorrel, celery, and spring onions.

Schav: Truths to Tell

The Nettle Sorrel Soup was so delicious, I considered it a gateway to Schav, a purer use of sorrel that by never having sampled had become a little mythic. You eat it cold.  And yes, that’s the true colour in the photo above, what we might have thought of as pea-green, a little dreary, a little khaki. I resisted the photoshop urge because I want to speak the truth about Schav.  I placed the spoon in this position so you too could imagine picking it up and experiencing a spoon-full.

It’s what the real old-timers ate, the ones who gesticulated with their hands and ate intense, heavy food like … Liver and Egg Salad, or Chopped Liver in moulded, perhaps grotesque shapes, maybe with strawberries, maybe with pineapple.  Or at least such recipes appear in my all time favourite Jewish cookbook Love and Knishes, along with loads of dishes with schmaltz and lima beans and kasha– these kind of ingredients.  So the book was a natural first place to look for an “authentic” recipe for Schav.

Love and Knishes is a charming book.

Nettles and Sorrel for a Fab Green Soup

Another quick must-share, yesterday’s Nettle Sorrel Green Soup, an easy and good Sunday supper and dish to discuss in my new anti-recipe, pro-technique zeal.

And I’m now polyamorous, sharing my passion for Nettles with Sorrel, because that lemony zing on the side of the tongue is a wild and captivating sensation.

Minestrone and the No-Waste Kitchen

I know people like recipes, and that recipes define the public realm of cooking, including information and instruction to combat food waste in our kitchens.  I’m always struck by how irrational this is, because it’s rare that you’d have, as leftover (i.e.,waste you want to avoid happening), the specific amount of an ingredient that a recipe would call for.  Is there something I’m missing?

Chicken Soup Free Associating

Yes, they’re daffodils, and no, they’re not edible, but I’m trying to cheer myself up and not bring all of you down.  Cough, cough, hack, hack, up in the middle of the night, cough, cough, hack, hack.  Are some of you out there the same? Pity us.

I’ve been really craving good old fashioned Chicken Soup, in which you simmer the chicken with carrots, onions, leeks, celery, parsley, peppercorns, parsnip and dill if you are lucky.  Noodles would be great– I like the way Japanese Udon noodles get all gloopy the way I remember from cans of Chicken Noodle soup when I ate such things. Cough, cough, cough.

Punjabi Buttermilk Stew: Notes and Queries

Idly browsing Food52, I alit upon this recipe for Punjabi Buttermilk Stew with Spinach Dumplings and was drawn in.  The dish sounded so utterly delicious. (Which it was, and is why I wish to share it.)  Preparing it became a kind of odyssey of ingredients, questions and realisations, about which I’ve written what I hope is not too laborious a blog post.  Please disregard if it is! These are the issues that came to the fore for me as I prepared the dish:

• Culturing Buttermilk
• How to substitute local winter kale for frozen spinach
• Sour substitutions for citrus in your cooking
• Peasemeal as a UK substitute for Gram Flour.
• Cooking oil conundrums. British Rapeseed Oil as a solution?

Kik Wot Split Peas: Ethiopian Stew and Soup

A Split Pea Stew becomes a Split Pea Soup With Ethiopian Spices…

Mom’s Vegetable Soup

Honouring the death of a difficult woman by remembering the soup she often made.

Bones, Fat, Squash Leaves, Flowers, Dumplings, Tempeh

Squash-leaf Soup with Flowers and Corn Dumplings in a Lemony Pork-Rib Broth. Meals evolving, like dancing on graves, creating a new cuisine. I saw this supper as a kind of exploration and experiment, which I guess is really my favourite way to cook and share food, learning as I go….