Tag Archives: thyme

Mushroom soup

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Soup!

This is a great, and fairly easy to make, mushroom soup. It’s creamy and earthy, and the leeks actually help to bring out the more subtle mushroom flavor.

One sort of unique thing about this soup is that you make the stock for it from scratch. I’ve never actually made stock before (please don’t get too upset), but I’ve heard homemade stock is much better than the stuff you buy at the store. One of these days, I’ll have to commit to saving up some chicken bones so I can compare.

I can tell you that the mushroom stock for this recipe is delicious, and you get it pretty cheap, for the price of a carrot, an onion and some thyme, along with the stems of the mushrooms you bought, which you weren’t going to serve anyway, right? After boiling those ingredients in water for a while, you strain those ingredients out and put the mushroom caps, and sauteed leeks, into the liquid. That, together with some cream and white wine, is the soup. Stock, mushroom caps, leeks, white wine and cream.

You may ask why you wouldn’t simply make a soup with all of the ingredients, i.e. the carrots, onions, leeks, mushroom caps, mushroom stems, etc. Perhaps even puree them together? I was thinking about this myself, but by making a separate stock you really increase the flavor intensity of the resulting dish. The ingredients used for the stock, if you try tasting them, are a bland, vaguely flavored mush. Still strangely appealing, but not something you’d want as part of a meal.

The other reason is that there is something fitting about having this be a chunky, thin soup rather than a more velvety, thick, smooth soup. I’m not sure why, but the rustic texture of a soup with chopped vegetables in it seems to go better with the woodsy mushroom flavor. Maybe I’m imagining that you can make this in some homestead where you might have access to the woods, but not to a blender or food processor.

White Russian ice cream and blueberry coffee cake, trout meuniere, carrot-ginger/potato-leek harlequin soup, and other things

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Harlequin soup - right is carrot ginger, left is potato leek.

Collard green salad.

Trout meuniere with a mustard cream sauce, broccoli, and cauliflower gratin.

Blueberry coffee cake and White Russian ice cream.

A while ago, I made a four-course dinner with the following courses: a kale salad with bacon, a harlequin soup (half carrot-ginger and half potato-leek), trout meuniere with cauliflower gratin and broccoli, and finally blueberry coffee cake with White Russian ice cream. Whew!

The harlequin soup came out well as usual – the flavors of the carrot-ginger soup and potato-leek soup actually went together pretty well. The salad was interesting – I was supposed to use kale, and only had access to collard greens. Raw collard greens, that’s right. I would probably reconsider making this salad, although one of the things you do to make the greens softer is pour very hot bacon grease over them. It actually went together pretty well, and the bacon is sort of a “reward” for getting through the greens.

The trout and sauce were simple to make and delicious, as was the cauliflower gratin (probably incredibly unhealthy but great). The trout is basically breaded sole meunière (with trout instead of sole), so named because the fish is coated in flour before it is cooked – the meunière is the miller’s wife.

Finally, the White Russian ice cream. I don’t usually use recipes from Rachael Ray, but I was thinking of doing something along these lines and wanted to use something that would definitely work. The White Russian flavor is extremely apparent and delicious, and it goes particularly well in an ice cream format because of the cream that normally goes into a White Russian. It can – and should – be used anywhere vanilla ice cream is!

Coconut cake with hibiscus sauce, salad with pomegranate seeds, salmon and mashed potatoes, duxelles puff pastry

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Blanched and peeled pistachios. They look like little avocadoes...

Cake + sauce.

Dried hibiscus flowers. Image by Wikimedia user Thelmadatter.

Salad with pomegranate seeds and red onions.

Salmon with a cream sauce, over mashed potatoes and peas

Wow, this entry is late. Anyway, just before the holidays I had the chance to cook for some people from my class at school, which was really fun.

Let me start at the end and work backwards. Dessert was a coconut cake, with a hibiscus sauce and some toasted pistachios.

Coconut cake’s been on my list for a while now, and I’m glad I finally got a chance to make it. I am also frustrated that I burned the bottom of the cake slightly. There are several ways to test the doneness of a cake, including inserting a toothpick and seeing if it comes out clean (the toothpick test), seeing whether the cake springs back when you depress the top, and also waiting for it to start pulling away from the sides of the pan. I generally use the toothpick test, and I’m worried that I’m being too stringent since things I bake often come out a little overdone. In writing this, I realize the other possible problem is that I am using very long toothpicks that we happen to have. I wonder whether the point of the toothpick test is that it is only supposed to check the middle of the cake?

But what was really fun was making the hibiscus sauce. First of all, hibiscus isn’t that easy to track down, especially in Philadelphia. What saved me were some totally awesome Mexican grocery stores in the Italian Market neighborhood, specifically the one right next to Taqueria Verecruzana at 930 Washington St. They stock an incredible array of stuff in a tiny space! I didn’t really know what hibiscus flowers even looked like but fortunately was able to recognize their Spanish name, jamaica. Oh yeah, and the sauce was really delicious, and a beautiful, deep purple color.

For the main course I baked some salmon and served with a really tasty mashed potato, pearl onion, pea and dill mixture. At the last minute, I figured it could use a sauce, so I whipped something up with lemon, white wine, dill and cream.

Before that, I served an appetizer of mushroom duxelles in puff pastry, with a little thyme and a smoked tomato sauce. Duxelles is basically a mushroom paste with cream and white wine, named after the duke of Uxelles, who employed the chef who created it. (I think it would be a little bit of a stretch to call what I made duxelles, but I’m working on it!) I got the general outline of that recipe here.

And finally, for the salad, I served this pomegranate and spinach salad. I think I have written about this before. Note that it only works with fresh pomegranate seeds, and also almonds really do work better in this recipe than walnuts, which is what I used.

Beet and Carrot Salad, Green Tea Cheesecake, and Roasted Chicken

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Cheesecake with green tea leaves and raspberry / mint garnish

Beet and carrot salad, with plenty of parsley

Before... you can see the chicken in the center, coated with a honey-mustard mixture and surrounded by tomato, red onion, and rosemary and thyme

...and after.

Between exams, other projects, and travel I hadn’t really been in a kitchen for a little while. So I decided to cook something, even though I’m away from home at the moment (in Portland).

Other people’s kitchens make me a little nervous – I can’t count on things that I need being available when I need them. So I decided to make some dishes that I could make without too many special implements. This meant a beet and carrot salad, roast chicken with tomatoes and onions, and a cheesecake.

I decided to go with this green tea cheesecake since I was also looking for an excuse to go to a nearby location of the amazing Asian supermarket Uwajimaya. I freaking love Uwajimaya. If I lived in Portland, it’s where I would shop even though it’s about an hour of extra travel. They have incredible fresh seafood of all types, as well as lots of really interesting fruit – fresh rambutan, lotus root, and buddha’s hand, anyone? I was pretty close to making a last-minute decision to incorporate some of these ingredients in what I cooked, but given that Epicurious had only one recipe including dragonfruit, I decided to wait.

Anyway, so, cheesecake, chicken, and beet and carrot salad. The beet and carrot salad recipe was fairly intimidating, even though I really like roasting beets from scratch. I decided to dispense with most of the complexity of the recipe, particularly the idea of buying golden and red beets and making a separate dressing for each.

Instead, I bought only red beets and made one dressing for the whole thing, combining the ingredients of the dressings from the recipe. I used cumin, shallots, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. I also decided to use a ton of parsley, since it was getting overshadowed by everything else, but lends a really nice fresh flavor to the salad. The recipe calls for leaving the tops of the carrots on while you roast them. This also looks pretty nice, but I’m not sure it was worth the trouble.

The chicken was fun – I’ve never roasted a whole one before. I started with this Easy Provencal Lamb recipe from the Barefoot Contessa, who’s usually pretty reliable. But when I got to the store, I found that bone-in lamb now costs $10 per pound. So for 7 pounds… yeah. A chicken that could feed everyone cost me 10% of that price. I removed the giblets – had never done that before, and they weren’t even bagged. This was less disturbing than I thought it would be. I then smothered the chicken in the honey-mustard sauce and put it in the roasting pan. The chicken gets surrounded by diced tomatoes and onions in oil and honey.

Interestingly, it turns out I put the chicken in the roasting pan upside-down. Apparently, people do this on purpose, because it helps keep the meat moist, especially in this case since the chicken was basically poaching in all the collected liquid from the tomatoes, onions, and sauce. So the chicken came out really well.

Uh, the second time, that is. As soon as we cut into it the first time, it turned out was still raw! How embarrassing. I had used the “juices run clear” test, which it turns out is not accurate. Instead, insert a meat thermometer in the thigh, and wait until the internal temperature reads 165 degrees. I promise your chicken will not dry out (well, it won’t dry out because you cooked it fully – I can’t guarantee it won’t dry out for other reasons). Once I cooked it through again, it was fine. Overall, I recommend 425 or 450 degrees for an hour or 90 minutes.

The cheesecake may have been the best part of the meal, and it was certainly the easiest. Cheesecakes are made from a simple batter which includes cream cheese, sugar, and eggs. In this case, we also added crushed-up green tea leaves, and some greek yogurt. These were both substitutes for the far more expensive ingredients that the recipe calls for: powdered green tea and fromage blanc. The green tea complements the savoriness of the cheesecake really nicely, as does the shortbread crust. All three of shortbread, green tea, and cheesecake straddle this savory / sweet line pretty well.

The cheesecake is garnished with raspberries and mint, and you serve it with a tea, also made from raspberries and mint. I was pretty skeptical about this, but it actually tasted pretty good along with the cake.

Avocado soup, lamb and figs, and a rice fiasco

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Avocado soup and a delicious cocktail...

Lamb; you can see the roasted figs distributed on top. Rice and beans. Broccoli.

Now that I actually have a schedule during the day (and a busy one at that), I try to do 2 cooks during the week. A “big cook” on the weekend where I do 3 courses, and a “small cook” during the week where I just make a main dish.

For big cook this week, I put together this avocado soup, and this roasted lamb and fig recipe, together with some roasted broccoli and rice and beans.

Soup is an interesting thing to make. The balance of flavors keeps changing, and so the soup must be tasted constantly as it cooks to make sure everything is in balance. With this soup, I tried to maintain the proportion of its main flavors (chicken broth, avocado, lime and pepper) so that nothing would overwhelm anything else. In general, when I am making soup, I don’t pay close attention to the recipe; I’m not sure that’s even possible.

I will note that ginger is also supposed to be a part of soup, but ginger doesn’t survive much cooking, and so I let it burn off rather than trying to keep adding more. I will probably fix this the next time around. Also, though the soup seemed quite smooth after I pureed it, I took Thomas Keller’s advice – “when in doubt, strain”. This was a smart move, since a fair amount of fibrous matter stayed in the strainer; straining may qualify as one of my kitchen secrets. Finally, as the soup aged in the fridge the lime component actually got stronger; this was an interesting side-effect.

The main was fairly straightforward – roasted filets of lamb. I bought some strange hunk of lamb from Trader Joe’s (I can’t remember what it was now) that was trussed up like a chicken. It was really cheap, and yielded seven filets! However, it took me about a half hour to get it broken down. Also, the recipe calls for a rack of lamb. Since meat with a bone in it apparently cooks much more slowly than boneless meat, I ended up overdoing the lamb fairly significantly. Still good, but seeing all the finished lamb sitting in pools of juicy goodness – which should have remained in the meat – broke my heart.

For dessert, I attempted to make this rice pudding. It was a complete and total disaster, approaching the tarte tatin incident of 2009, about which more later. I’m not sure why, but the rice simply would not absorb any liquid. I tried letting it go for a fairly long time (about 45 minutes), by which time it actually burned, forming a thick layer of charred rice along the bottom of the pan I was using. Hm.