Carrot soup with salmon

I was wrong to think that I have time to spare after the exams, when I ‘only’ have the dissertation to write. Well..but no more excuses. Here comes a recipe of delicious carrot soup topped with salmon. Yum!

Seves two:
5 large carrots, peeled and chopped
1 red onion, chopped
1 glove of garlic, crushed
1 tbsp butter
salt and pepper
50 ml white wine
125 ml single cream
100 ml vegetable stock

125 g salmon
seasoning: lemon pepper, dill, salt and pepper, lemon juice and the like

# Heat the butter in a saucepan, add garlic and onion. Fry until golden (don’t burn).

# Add white wine and boil until reduced in half.

# Add carrots and stock to the saucepan, bring to boil and simmer about 20 minutes (or until carrots are tender).

# Puree the carrots-onion-garlic mixture in a blender, then add the cream and bring the soup to boil again. Remove from heat and season with salt and pepper.

# In the mean time, prepare the salmon. Season it to your liking and fry it on a pan.

# Serve the soup in bowls, topped with salmon pieces. Offer bread as an aside.

Peasoup with peppermint and grilled salmon

Sound weird? I also thought that when I saw the recipe in one of the Estoninan newspaper…so you have a green pea soup which tastes like peppermint and which is served with salmon. Strange, right? But, as said in last post, you should eat fish every week and I try to be open for new tastes and challenges, so I decided to give this recipe a try.

Originally it should serve 4 but I don’t know whether it was because my plates were to big or I measured the quantities wrong, but I could only squeeze 3 platefuls of soup out of it. Ok, you might have salmon enough for 4 but in case you are serving it for four not for two as I did, I suggest you to increase the amount of ingredients.

And what else – please don’t use chicken stock or any other stock to season the soup. I had this plan at the beginning – you know, whenever you are doing a creamy soup and are not satisfied with the taste (maybe it is too bland) then if you pour some stock in it, it usually comes out ok every time. But with this soup using stock is forbidden. Seriously. You would just kill the taste of peas and peppermint and that would ruin the soup.

500 g salmon

400 g frozen green peas

50 g butter

2 small onion, chopped

150 ml dry white wine

salt

500 ml water

handful of chopped peppermint leaves

2 tbsp olive oil

juice of a half lemon

0.5 tsp pepper and some lemon pepper

200 ml cream (35%)

 

# Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan, add peas and onion and heat through. Add white wine and simmer for about 15 minutes. Season with salt, add the water and simmer until the peas are soft.

# Process the potful into a nice creamy soup. Push the soup through a sieve, add peppermint and process a bit more, to mix in the peppermint.

# Cut the salmon into four, rub in with olive oil and salt and fry until browned on each side (for about 2 min). Then place salmon in an oven dish, sprinkle with lemon juice and pepper and bake at 190 degrees C for 6 minutes.

# Add the cream to the soup and bring to boil. Adjust seasoning – you might want to add some salt. Serve immediately – place soup into a soup bowl, put salmon in the centre and top it of with some whipping cream (not sweet!).

Indeed, this was something different. With all its freshness it is a perfect summer soup. A nice presentation as well, so if you are looking a first course to impress your guests, this is it.

Soup for the eagle-eyed

Actually a soup for those, who would like to have eagle-eyes. It is the old truth that when you eat carrots, your vision will improve. It might not be true, but at least when my mum used to scare me “You’ll get huge and ugly glasses in case you don’t eat your carrots”, then I believed her and ate all yellow vegetables from my plate. Had I known at that time that there is no direct relation between how many carrots you eat and your eyesight, I obviously would have left them on the plate. Did you know was this myth created? It seems that in World War II, Britain’s air ministry spread the word that a diet of carrots (already known to be a good source of Vitamin A, essential for healthy eyesight) helped pilots see Nazi bombers attacking at night. That was a propaganda story originating from Britain’s Ministry of Food, intended to cover the real reason for the Royal Air Force’s successes: Airborne Interception Radar, also known as AI. The secret new system pinpointed enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. Apparently the motive of the Minister for Food was twofold — it also encouraged folks to eat more vegetables (that could be grown in your own backyard) during ration time, when meat and imports were scarce. Weren’t expecting that, were you?

For me, carrots have always been those orange roots. But was I narrow minded! Hundreds of years ago carrots weren’t just orange — they came in all kinds of colours, including green, white and even purple. In the 17th century, Dutch growers crossed pale yellow carrots with red ones to produce orange carrots. Why did they do that? To curry favour with the Dutch monarchy, “The House of Orange.” Smart fellows! Now all we see, are orange carrots all over the place.

As we have already stopped on the origins of carrots, I would also like to let you know that if you eat a lot of carrots – like several kilos per day – your skin will turn yellowish or even orange. Like getting tanned without the sun or solarium. And this is very true. Carrots contain beta carotene (it’s what makes them orange) and mega dosing on them will turn your skin orange. So there. Be careful.

Now to today’s dish, finally. When I was fed up with eating raw carrot or boiled carrot as a side dish, I decided to go for the carrot soup, and see what comes out of it. A nice yellowish soup indeed! Although very tasty, I recommend you to prepare it when you don’t have more than 2-3 mouths to feed. You see, peeling and washing the carrots is pretty timeconsuming (and boring thing to do) and if you are preparing it for 5-7 people, you might find yourself thinking that it might not be worth all the trouble. I prepared it for two persons and peeled about 400 g of carrots. Huge pile! It took me ages to to the preparatory work and later on the carrots boiled like 100 years until they were soft enough so that I could process them into a nice and creamy soup.

And another thing – the saucepan was full of carrots and I was already hoping to save some leftovers for the next day…but when I started to puree those 400 g boiled carrots, the soup started to, bit-by-bit, diminish…So I ended up having only two platefuls and though pretty tasty, I won’t do it again on a busy weekday-evening, when you are back from work, hungry and expecting to get a meal ready within 20-30 minutes. I do recommend it for a weekend lunch, accompanied by nice bread and chilled tomato juice. But only for 2 or 3 people, otherwise too much trouble.

# Peel and wash carrots (around 400 g for two persons), place into a saucepan and pour over with chicken broth. Bring to boil and simmer until the carrots are soft. If needed, add some broth while the carrots are boiling (you want the carrots to be constantly covered with broth).

# When the carrots are soft, remove the saucepan from the heat. Add a few tablespoons of cream cheese and puree the potful. If you feel that the soup is a bit too thick, add some more hot broth. Season with some pepper and coriander (you probably won’t need salt, as the broth should give you a nice salty taste anyway) and serve immediately.

I really liked the color of this soup. Seriously, it was so nice and summery. At first, J was a bit of suspicious. You know, “how does one eat liquid carrot?”-suspicious. But in the end he was satisfied with the result. As was I. Still, I would have loved an additional spark, maybe a dash of paprika or garlic or something like that. True, pepper made the soup spicy and it was not bland, but something was missing, something which would have made this soup the best cream soup for me…So I have to do it again and experiment with the seasonings. If I end up finding the perfect combination, I’ll let you know.

Onion soup, worth all those tears

If someone would have told me a few years ago that one day I will be cooking, let alone eating onion soup, I would laugh them out. I literally despised anything with onion or garlic, because of the bitter taste they had…yukyukyuk. But somehow, little by little I started to use onion and garlic in the dishes I make (maybe one of the reasons is that J is a huge fan of them) and guess what, I have started to like them. Even that much that I prepared onion soup.

Well, it was J birthday as well and he deserved a treat and onion soup was something he would like, that’s for sure. Although I must say, somewhere between slicing the onions when I literally cried because it was so painful for my eyes, I already thought the hell with that, Im going to make a creamy potato soup. But Im a strong girl. I got over it, chopped all the onions and prepared the soup. Still, if anyone can tell me how to chop the onions and not cry at the same time, I would be very grateful.

Now, back to the soup. You’ll get enough for 5-6 servings:

700 g onions, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
50 g butter
2 cloves garlic, crushed
½ tbsp sugar
1.2 litres beef stock
275 ml dry white wine
salt, black pepper and thyme (optional)

# First of all do all the chopping. As said, it was painful, at least for my eyes, but…I did not know any other way. And the good thing is that after that it goes much easier!

# Place the saucepan on a high heat and melt the oil together with butter. When this is very hot, add the onions, crushed garlic and sugar, and keep turning them at high heat for about 5-6 minutes. 

# Reduce the heat to its lowest and leave the onions to carry on cooking for about 45 minutes, by which the onions have softened.

# Pour in the stock and white wine, season with salt and pepper (and thyme, if you like the taste) and stir well. As soon as it all comes up to simmering point, turn down the heat to its lowest again and leave it cook uncovered for about 1 hour.

While soup is simmering, make the croutons. You’ll need:

25 cm long baguette, cut into cubes

1 tbsp olive oil

1-2 garlic glove, crushed

# Drizzle the olive oil on to a baking-sheet, add crushed garlic and spread the oil and garlic all over the baking sheet.

# Place the bread slices on top of the oil, turn them over so that each cube gets lightly coated with the oil.

# Bake at 180 degrees C until crunchy (for about 20-25 minutes).

All this can be done in advance – both croutons and soup will stay covered in a fridge for at least 2 days. Keep in mind though that when you’re ready to serve the soup, bring it back up to simmering point and taste to check for seasoning.

The traditional way of serving onion soup is something like that – place hot soup into oven-proof dishes, top with croutons and grated cheese and place the dishes in the hot oven until cheese is bubbling. I don’t have oven-proof soup bowls, so I just topped the soup with croutuns and sprinkled with some grated cheese. The soup was very hot, so the cheese started melting immediately anyway.

J was happy and surprised. And even I enjoyhed those slowly cooked, caramelised onions that turned mellow and sweet…lovely dish, if only it didn’t take so much time to prepare…and of course, if only it wasn’t so painful for my eyes.

Creamy soup with potato chunks – a compromise

Since Christmas, when we got a food processor, I have prepared many different creamy soups. I very much like their rich and creamy flavour and it is so easy to make them – just cook the vegetables until tender in broth, purée and serve. You can finish the soup by adding cream, milk or cream cheese, to make it even more rich and moist. But you can actually prepare a silky smooth soup using only water, especially if you have a blender (not a food processor) at your disposal.

So, anyhow, I am a fan of creamy soups, and J is not that much. He prefers a soup with chunks. So I tried to prepare a compromise solution, something like this creamy broccoli soup was. I bet there is an easier way of doing this kind of soup cause I felt like it was weird to cook vegetables differently in two saucepans…but I did not know what else to do…so in case you have any ideas how to prepare a chunky-creamy soup in a more simple manner, let me know. In the meantime, I will tell you how it is possible to prepare two bowls of soup from the following ingredients:

300 g broccoli stalks (you might want to use the broccoli florets to prepare this salad)

2 potatoes

1-2 garlic gloves

chicken broth

4 slices of bacon

white pepper, salt, chili powder

50-100 ml milk

some butter

 

# First of all, wash and peel the potatoes, also wash broccoli stalks and chop everything.

# In a saucepan, melt butter and sauté crushed garlic for a few minutes. Butter adds richness which I like more than the fruity note olive oil provides (but you are welcome to sauté garlic in oil as well).

# After a few minutes of sautéing, place chopped broccoli stalks over the garlic and cover barely with chicken broth.

# At the same time place potato chunks into another saucepan, also cover barely with chicken broth. Boil both vegetables for about 15 minutes and remove from heat.

# Drain potatoes – don’t through away the broth, just pour it in the same saucepan with broccoli. Set potatoes aside until you purée broccoli stalks (together with all the broth).

# When nice and smooth, place potatoes into the soup, add milk and season with white pepper, salt and some chili powder, if you like spicy soups. Stir.

Keep in mind that most cream soups are best when the flavour of the vegetable isn’t blurred by too many ingredients, but at the same time you should still add just enough salt and pepper as it is said that they bring out the somewhat muted vegetable flavors.

So, back to the soup – once you have joined potatoes with the puree, seasoned and stirred everything, then the soup is almost ready. It can wait, covered, until you chop, fry and drain the bacon slices. When serving, top the soup with bacon and grated cheese. Very tasty, J was impressed