Category Archives: Soup

The Food Matters Project: Chicken Jook with Lots of Vegetables

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It’s Martin Luther King Day, and Inauguration Day here in Washington, DC. I first moved to DC a couple of months after the last inauguration, so this was my first as a resident. I have to say, the energy in this town was electrifying this weekend. I went for a run yesterday on the Mall and it was packed with tourists and locals soaking in the sights with big smiles.

I had been planning on walking over to check out the festivities today since I live on Capitol Hill, but I scored a last-minute ticket to the up-close area for the ceremony. And I lucked out with timing: twenty-five minutes after leaving my house, I was standing on the lawn outside the Capitol watching the invocation.

Inauguration 2013

The ceremony was beautiful; the musical performances gave me chills. It was amazing to see the crowds waving American flags behind us on the Mall. I was there by myself, but it felt like the complete opposite.

It felt so nice to know while I was out soaking up the atmosphere that dinner was already at home, cooking away. This week’s Food Matters Project recipe was Chicken Jook with Lots of Vegetables, and it’s a great one for the slow cooker. I just made some quick baked egg rolls to go alongside them and dinner was done.

One note: I put the cabbage in with all the vegetables in the beginning, and by the time the dish was done they had basically disintegrated, and the soup was thicker like a porridge. I prefer cabbage in soup a bit crunchy, so I would put it in at the end next time. However, D isn’t a huge fan of the crunchiness to begin with, so he was happy to have them melted in a bit.

chicken-jook-vegetables

Chicken Jook with Lots of Vegetables

1 1/2 tbsp oil
1 bone-in chicken breast
2 cups cabbage, sliced thin
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
3/4 cup broccoli florets
1/2 white onion, minced
2 tbsp garlic, minced
1/2 hot pepper, minced
2 tbsp ginger, minced
1 cup long-grain brown rice
6.5 cups water
2 tbsp soy sauce
sriracha, to taste (optional)
chopped cilantro leaves

Heat the oil in a pan over medium heat. Pat the chicken breast dry and add it to the pan with the hot oil. Cook for about 5-10 minutes on each side, or until it’s golden brown.

Add the vegetables to the slow cooker first, then the garlic, hot pepper, and ginger, then add the rice. Pour the water over the whole mixture, then lay the browned chicken breast on top. Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on low for 8-10 hours. Remember, don’t lift the lid until the very end, or you could add more cooking time!

When most of the water has been absorbed by the rice, open the slow cooker and take out the chicken. Cut into it to make sure it’s cooked through (mine fell apart right away) and remove the bones. Shred the meat into chunks, then put the chicken back in the slow cooker. Stir in the soy sauce and sriracha, if you’re using it. Pass the cilantro at the table.

Baked Shrimp and Vegetable Egg Rolls

1 tbsp sesame oil
1 cup shredded cabbage
1 carrot, peeled and shredded
10 cooked shrimp, chopped into small pieces
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp minced ginger
egg roll wrappers
olive oil, for brushing the egg rolls

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Heat the oil in a skillet. When it’s hot, add the cabbage, carrot, shrimp, soy sauce and ginger. Stir fry for about 5 minutes, then turn off heat and let cool a bit. Meanwhile, spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.

Lay the egg roll wrapper out in a diamond shape and scoop some filling in a line horizontally between two corners. Roll up the bottom away from you first, then tuck the two side corners in. Brush a bit of water on the top corner to make it stick then roll the wrapper up all the way. Lay the egg roll with the edge down on the tray, then repeat until you run out of filling.

Brush each egg roll with a bit of olive oil, then bake them for about 10 minutes.

Check out the original recipe on Erin’s blog.

Recipe: Carrot, cauliflower and chickpea soup

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Earlier this week I told you about my enormous cauliflower, and it was inevitable that some of it would end up becoming soup. I’m averaging about one big batch of soup each week now that soup weather is here.

carrot-cauliflower-chickpea-soup

This week’s soup was a bright orange color with the addition of carrots, and chickpeas made it creamy and filling. Oven roasted chickpeas were a crispy replacement for croutons, along with a sprinkle of parmesan.

Carrot, Cauliflower and Chickpea Soup

1 tbsp olive oil
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
1/2 white onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, pressed or minced
3 cups cauliflower florets
2 cups cooked chickpeas (if canned, drain and rinse them first; if homemade, you can use their liquid in place of the broth if you like)
2-3 cups vegetable broth or water, plus more as needed to cover all the vegetables
1/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese, parmesan cheese, or a mixture of both, plus more for topping (optional)
salt and pepper
cayenne pepper, to taste (optional)
roasted chickpeas, for topping

1. Heat the olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add the carrots, onion and garlic and cook for 5-10 minutes or until the onions get translucent and the carrots begin to soften. Stir occasionally. While they cook, this is a great time to start the roasted chickpeas, if you haven’t made them yet.

2. Add the cauliflower florets and stir everything to coat them. Then add the chickpeas and the broth or water, just enough to cover the vegetables and chickpeas. (Fledgling tip: If you’re using canned chickpeas, don’t include their liquid, but if you made them from scratch their cooking liquid is mild enough that it works as a great broth here. See below for another alternative if you don’t have a cooked batch of chickpeas on hand.)

3. Turn the heat up to high and bring the soup to a boil, then turn it back down to medium low. Cook everything until the vegetables are very soft and the liquid has cooked down so the vegetables are starting to show at the top.

4. Add the cheese and stir to incorporate. Turn off the heat and let it cool down for a few minutes.

5. Carefully puree the soup use an immersion blender or in a food processor in batches. Work slowly so it doesn’t spatter on you!

6. Add the salt, pepper, and cayenne (if you’re using it) and taste as you go until you hit the right flavor. I like it spicy, so I added quite a bit of cayenne and also used it on my roasted chickpeas.

7. Serve in bowls, topped with roasted chickpeas and a pinch of grated cheese.

Serves 3-4

Fledgling tip: If you don’t already have a batch of homemade cooked chickpeas on hand, you can cook them right in the soup pot, although it’ll take longer to cook. If you can plan ahead a bit and soak them, that will help them cook a bit faster. Say you’re going to make it when you get home from work: rinse and pick over the dried chickpeas in the morning and put them in a pot covered by a few inches with cold water. Cover tightly and just leave it like that while you are at work, and when you get home they will have grown significantly in size. Rinse them off and add them to the soup when you add the broth, and cook until they’re very soft when you taste one. Continue with the recipe at step 3. Just remember when you make beans from scratch they get much larger when they cook, so 2 cups dried will make a lot more than 2 cups cooked. Luckily, there’s a lot you can do with the leftovers, from hummus to falafel to just roasting them and eating them as a snack!

Related posts:

Butternut squash soup
Bloody mary soup with shrimp, spinach and chickpeas
Market Finds: Gigantic Cauliflower

Bloody mary soup with shrimp, spinach and chickpeas

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Happy 2012 to all, and if anyone out there is feeling like they need a bit of a detox, you’re not alone. I got a new food processor/blender for Christmas that makes awesome smoothies, and I went and bought a ton of fresh fruit and veggies to try it out.

We had a couple of friends stay over on New Year’s Eve and I made brunch the next morning. I decided that I wanted to put my new toy to the test and make homemade bloody marys — that’s with fresh vegetables, not bottled tomato juice. It turned out to be a lot more labor intensive than I expected, mostly because I had to play around with the recipe a lot. After several rounds of adding liquid, blending and straining, I had a pretty good, very spicy batch of bloody marys that worked wonders on the hangovers. After we had enjoyed our drinks, however, I still had a ton of leftover pureed veggies that hadn’t even made it through the strainer.

Rather than put them to waste, I thought I’d make soup with them tonight. I was thinking of it as kind of a mix of a hot gazpacho and a bloody mary, with some toppings mixed in for good measure. It’s full of vegetables and protein, so a bowl was very filling. I’ve written it below as though I was making this all at once instead of a first round for the drinks and a second round to use up the leftovers, so the measurements below are approximate and I’d recommend tasting a lot as you go. And the mix-ins can be varied — the idea is to use up any lingering stuff you have in your fridge from holiday festivities, so get creative!

Ingredients:

5 tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1/2 small onion, chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped (optional, or use horseradish, which is traditional in bloody marys; we just didn’t have any)
1 cup packed spinach
1 clove garlic, minced or pressed
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
4 oz cooked, deveined and peeled shrimp
1/2 cup cooked chickpeas
salt and pepper, to taste
water, as needed

1. Put the tomatoes, celery, carrot, onion, jalapeno, 1/2 cup of the spinach, garlic and Worcestershire sauce in a saucepan over medium-high heat with a liberal shake of salt and pepper. Cook until all the vegetables are soft, adding water in 1/4 cup intervals as needed if it gets too thick. The consistency will depend on the kind of tomatoes you use, and keep in mind that all the vegetables will release water as they cook.

2. Once the vegetables are soft, put the whole mixture in a food processor and pulse until it reaches a consistency you like. You can also make it ahead up to this point and refrigerate for later.

3. Transfer the mixture back to the pan over medium-high heat. Stir in more water here if needed to bring it to a soupy consistency. Taste to see if it needs more salt and pepper.

4. When you’ve got a flavor you like, stir in the second 1/2 cup of spinach, the shrimp and the chickpeas. Cook until the spinach is wilted and the soup is heated throughout.

I served this with a dollop of plain yogurt along with cornbread and some cauliflower florets tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and broiled.

Bloody mary soup

Butternut squash soup

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We’re finally coming into fall here in DC after a long, steamy summer and a very rainy September! Friday night, I made my first batch of my favorite seasonal treat: butternut squash soup. There is some flexibility with this soup, so I make it differently depending on what I have on hand and make big batches so there are lots of leftovers. Sometimes I’ll add a green apple for some tartness, sometimes a few carrots for a deeper orange color and some extra vitamins. I used to make this with chicken broth, but I prefer to use homemade vegetable broth or water now so that the flavor of the meat doesn’t overpower the flavor of the vegetables. If you use water, it will basically make vegetable broth as the vegetables cook in it, but you’ll need to add a lot more salt if you’re not using a broth (which would already have salt in it).

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1 small to medium butternut squash
2 carrots (optional)
1 granny smith apple (optional)
water, vegetable broth or chicken broth
salt and pepper, to taste (use more salt if you’re using water instead of broth)
a sprinkle of cinnamon and/or nutmeg, to taste (optional)

1. Heat the olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Meanwhile, chop up the onion.

2. When the oil is hot, add the onion and the garlic (press it if you have a garlic press, otherwise peel and mince it). Cook until the onion is translucent and beginning to brown. Meanwhile, wash, peel and chop the butternut squash and carrots. You’ll want the butternut squash to be in uniform-sized chunks so they cook evenly. The carrots can just be chopped into thick circles.

4. Add the squash and carrots to the pot and immediately cover by two inches with water or broth. Turn up the heat to high and bring to a boil (you can save time here by pre-boiling the water or broth while you’re chopping everything else). Once it’s boiling, turn it down to medium-low and simmer. Add some salt here if you’re not using a salty broth.

5. Keep it simmering until the squash and carrots are soft throughout (poke them with a fork to be sure) and the water level has come down so that it’s just barely covering the vegetables. If the squash and carrots are soft and the water isn’t boiling away fast enough, you can turn up the heat. Taste the broth and see if you need to add any more salt. Grind in some pepper while you’re at it.

6. Take the soup off the heat and transfer it into a food processor or blender. (I recommend using a cup or ladle to do this so you don’t risk splashing yourself with boiling water and squash.) If you need to, it’s fine to do it in batches; just don’t overfill or you’ll end up with an orange mess all over your countertops. Run the food processor until it blends up all the vegetables and makes a thick soup — they’ll be so soft by this point that this won’t take long at all, even if you do have to do it in batches.

7. Transfer all the soup into a serving bowl and stir in cinnamon and nutmeg, to taste.

Serves about four.

Moroccan beef stew

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Just wanted to share this recipe I got from Self.com’s weekly recipe emails and tried tonight for the first time. YUM! The flavors of the cinnamon, tomatoes and cumin and the spiciness of the red pepper flakes all came together for a great complexity. I used a bit less beef than it called for and accidentally poured 1/2 a cup too much broth in, so mine was more liquid-y than it was supposed to be. I ended up simmering it for about 50 minutes instead of the 30 to 35 minutes the recipe called for to try and thicken it up a bit more. The good news is the beef was so tender by the time it was done I could cut it with my spoon. An overall fantastic recipe — I’ll definitely be making this again!

Spicy weeknight turkey chili

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I made this quick and easy chili tonight. The thing I love about chili is that you can kinda throw in whatever you feel like and make it to taste. The measurements are a bit rough, but make it to suit your fancy.

Ingredients:

splash of olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
hunk of ground turkey, about the size of your fist
a few slices of onion, chopped
1 can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can red kidney beans, rinsed
1/3 cup frozen sweet corn
1/3 cup frozen sliced peppers
a splash of red wine
chili powder (I probably used about a teaspoon total, but I have the cheap store brand version that isn’t very strong, so it took a lot. Add it to your taste.)
sprinkle of dried basil flakes
sprinkle of red pepper flakes
liberal shakes of salt and pepper
Optional: shredded Mexican cheese, avocado, chopped scallions, sour cream or plain yogurt, salsa, etc

1. Heat the olive oil in a smallish pot.

2. Add the minced garlic and stir until fragrant.

3. Add the onions and ground turkey and stir until the meat is cooked through and browned.

4. Add the tomatoes, beans, corn, peppers and wine. Stir until it’s all combined.

5. Stir in the spices. Taste it as you go to determine if you need more of anything. This is a pretty flexible dish — for example, I added the wine as an afterthought because I had gone a little heavy on the red pepper flakes and my eyes started to water when I tasted it.

6. Let the pot simmer on medium-low heat, with the cover on, until it has thickened. This will probably take around 45 minutes, but keep checking on it and stirring it every 10 minutes or so.

7. Top with shredded Mexican cheese, avocado, chopped scallions, sour cream (or plain yogurt, to cut calories), salsa, or whatever tickles your fancy.

Spicy chili and cornbread

Making this dish made me really crave cornbread, and I was busy lamenting the fact that I didn’t have a mix handy when I realized that I probably had all of the ingredients for cornbread anyway — cornmeal, flour, etc. I did a quick search and found this recipe, which I chose because all the other ones had a ton of lard or butter and I didn’t have either on hand, plus yogurt was a much, much healthier alternative. They turned out a bit dry, but good with some butter melted on top and dipped in hot chili, and they certainly satisfied the craving.

Leftovers for lunch! Everyone knows chili tastes even better the day after.

(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I forgot to include #6 in the instructions.)

A chicken soup day

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After a bad experience with something I ate at yesterday that resulted in a brief visit to the ER, my stomach was feeling a bit raw today. After testing the waters with a small bowl of oatmeal and some toast, I wanted something with a bit more substance this afternoon. Specifically, I was craving Self.com’s tortilla chicken soup, which I had made a few months back and loved. The recipe is missing a piece online, I think–it references a salsa but doesn’t give the ingredients for it. Judging by the picture, the salsa is made of black beans, avocados and corn, so that’s what I’ve been using.

Since the soup is broth based, it was light enough to go easy on an uneasy belly, but it can also easily be beefed up with more of the salsa–which is what I’ll be doing as I go through the leftovers this week.

I skipped the jalapeño this time, but threw in one of these little sweet red peppers I bought at the Bethesda Central Farm Market this morning–so cute! The recipe makes a lot, so I stuck the leftovers in the fridge. Last time I made this soup, it basically fed me all week.

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Cooling Gazpacho

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The weekend before last, I flew back to Massachusetts to move the remainder of my stuff out of my parents’ house once and for all. I took two days off to pack and drive down, then my family stuck around for a few days to sightsee, so I ended up working by day and touring many of the culinary prospects DC has to offer in the evenings with them. I started the week off munching on Fenway franks and watching the Sox rout the Orioles (the hometown team of my new place of residence, ironically enough) and ended their visit with a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream melting off the cone in the scorching heat by the river in Alexandria.

I’ve learned in the past couple of days that there is really no “spring” in DC like I’m used to in Boston—I went from wearing a wool coat to work in the morning to sweltering in shorts in the span of about 48 hours. And according to what everyone’s been telling me, the heat is only going to get worse from here. Yesterday it climbed to about 90 degrees F, which is really as hot as it ever gets in Boston, and I was so hot I didn’t even want to eat at all, let alone turn on the oven or the stove to make dinner. In Seville, Spain, it regularly reaches over 100 degrees F in the summer, so they make gazpacho: a cold vegetable soup. It was one of my favorite dishes when I was studying abroad there two years ago, so it was a natural choice for my first hot summer day.

I based this recipe off of Self.com’s heirloom tomato gazpacho, but cut the measurements in half for a smaller portion and used a food processor to make the soup a bit smoother.

Ingredients:
4 small tomatoes
1/2 red onion
3/4 red pepper
3/4 yellow pepper (I’m sure orange would work here, too, but the yellow gave it a great color)
1/2 English cucumber
1/8 cup cilantro
1 tsp. red wine vinegar
4 tbsp. balsalmic vinegar
2-3 tbsp. olive oil

Preparation:
1. Cut the tomatoes into 1/4-inch chunks, reserving seeds and juice.
2. Cut the onion, red pepper, cucumber, and yellow pepper into 1/4-inch chunks.
3. Put vegetables and cilantro in a large bowl.
4. Add red wine vinegar and balsalmic vinegar to mixture.
5. Run through a food processor, in batches if necessary. Pulse until you reach the desired chunkiness–it’ll depend on the size of the food processor, but I ran mine for about 15 seconds per batch, until the vegetables were in small pieces. Go longer if you want a puree or shorter if you want a chunky soup.
6. Return the soup to the large bowl and add olive oil. The amount can vary according to taste, but I used about 2 tablespoons.

This recipe makes about 4 servings. For me, that’s enough for dinner last night and to have leftovers for the rest of the week.