We’re planting broccoli & cauliflower seeds today. Yesterday we made chicken stock from our saved chicken bones & bits. Today I plan on making the soup I talked about last week, and then I’ll report it next week.

And speaking of cauliflower:

One of my favorite food bloggers made cauliflower soup recently on Thursday Night Smackdown (TNS). And this week, after having posted last week on soup recipe designing, I found myself wanting some cauliflower soup, so I thought I’d make some up. I didn’t even try to follow her post or the recipe that she used from the imitable Hugh Acheson.  Once I saw “roasted cauliflower” I was off and running.

Ingredients:

2 heads cauliflower, broken up

1 large sweet onion, sliced

1 quart chicken stock

1 quart celery stock (made from blanching celery this summer in boiling water)

1 pint whole milk

Bay leaves, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, salt, pepper, sweet paprika, potato starch

Procedure:

I broke up the cauliflower heads, drizzled olive oil everywhere, and roasted them in a 400 degree oven on a cookie sheet, until they started to turn brown.

Roasted cauliflower

While this was happening, I took a page from my french onion soup recipe, sliced up an onion, salted it and then sauteed it in butter until the bottom had fond, scraped it up with a metal spatula, then deglazed and reduced again – eventually most of the onion was a brown caramelized goodness with lots of fond.

Onions starting to turn

I did a final deglaze with the chicken and celery stocks, added in the cauliflower, along with 4 bay leaves, some ground thyme, tarragon, marjoram, salt, pepper, and sweet paprika.  I brought it to a boil, then immediately turned it down to simmer and left it there for 45 minutes with the lid off, checking the liquid level occasionally while I watched it get slowly lower.

Cauliflower Soup before pureeing

Then I turned off the heat, let it cool a bit, then ran it through the blender to puree it all (after removing the bay leaves).  I poured it all back into the pot (no, I did not strain it), and cooked it down some more. Then I turned it off and put a lid on it.  30 minutes before serving, I added 1/4 cup of potato starch and whole milk mixed as a slurry, then the rest of the pint of milk.  Turned the heat back up to medium and let it simmer until it was time to serve.

We served this with some rice I steamed in the rice cooker. I added some harissa-flavored olive oil and some dill to the rice cooker so it came out nicely seasoned, then we ate it as a side dish or just added it to the bowl of soup.

Cauliflower Soup

You could strain this of course, but after browning the cauliflower and the onions I wasn’t really concerned about making a pretty creamy white soup presentation. I wanted to eat something that was nummy, and this was it. Or maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe I wanted all the nutrition and didn’t want to strain out and throw away good cauliflower/onion bits.  Yeah!  That’s it!

I used whole milk instead of half&half or cream because I did not want it to be any sweeter and I was already worried about making sure the cauliflower taste came through (which is why I also did not deglaze the onion with sherry).

Also, you can vary the stocks/broths, and the ingredients all you want and still come out with some good stuff.  You could use broccoli and have green soup, or summer OR winter squash and have squash soup.  Once you start pureeing stuff you can let your imagination run wild. So, go forth and make soup!

I thought instead I’d talk about recipe designing; in this case, soup.  I grew up with vegetable soup being made all around me, and never once stopped and wondered how to make it.  My mother, my aunts, my grandmother, folks I’d visit all made vegetable soups.

I did however wonder often why some were really amazingly good and some were … not.

Lately I’ve been working on my own vegetable soup recipe.  Let me start straight off and say that vegetable soup does not have to be vegetarian.  One of my grandmothers would put a squirrel in her vegetable soup, but overall it was primarily vegetables, so it wasn’t called squirrel soup.  If you want to make a good squirrel soup — I’ll discuss that another day.  A lot of vegetable soups use meat stocks, so that disqualifies the soup from being “vegetarian” right away as well.

Stock:

A good soup base can just be carrots, celery, and onions in water.  I’m going to start with this no matter what else I add later.  I’m going to sweat half the onions with a little butter for 20 minutes on the skillet at low heat (covered) until they caramelize a bit and reduce in size.  The rest I’ll add raw and rough sliced.  Carrots and celery go into the pot chopped rough.  Bring to a boil, then lower it to a simmer and put a lid on it.  Season with salt.  When you have them, chopped celery leaves are just as good as celery.

We have shrimp stock, fish stock, chicken stock in our freezer right now.  You could also make some pork broth or beef stock. Many people would add a ham hock when I was a child to the vegetable soup.

Depending on which stock you use, you can alter the character of the soup.  For my soup I plan to add some chicken stock; it has flavor and character, but it will not dominate the flavor of the vegetable broth I’m making or the vegetables I’m putting in it.

Now we have to decide what vegetables to put in the soup.  The ones I’m most used to are:

Onions, Carrots, Celery (check)

Tomatoes, Potatoes, Corn, Green Pepper, Summer Squash, Cabbage, Mushrooms, Butter beans, Cauliflower, Green Beans, and Beans.

Potatoes don’t freeze well.  If you’re going to freeze your vegetable soup for later, I’d recommend leaving out the potatoes.  If you’re not going to freeze any, then potatoes are a staple.  I plan on freezing some of this, so if I add potatoes it will be on the day I’m going to serve it.  I will do this by boiling some potatoes (with some vinegar added), then chopping them up and tossing them in as the soup defrosts.

I’m going to leave out the cabbage and the mushrooms; there are too many other soups I like to make that I put those into. I’m gonna throw the cauliflower out of my basic recipe as well and add it in the winter sometimes.

Beans.  There are a lot of beans in the world.  I’m not making bean soup today, so I’m going to leave out all the beans.  Except for the butter beans and by butter beans I don’t mean big ole dried lima beans.  I mean nice soft fresh, frozen, or canned baby lima beans that are green and small and tender.  Think of them as a green vegetable rather than a dried bean.

Tomatoes are wonderful, tomatoes are great.  They provide flavor and color and the main thing to remember about the tomatoes is to add them to the soup last.  The other thing you have to decide is in what form are you adding them? Tomatoes come in a lot of ways.  I’d like to use fresh tomatoes, so I’m going to buy some paste tomatoes, then chop them and throw them in.  Canned tomatoes come in a plethora of types:  whole, diced, crushed, chopped, stewed, etc.  You could even just add some tomato paste if you just want some tomato flavor and color without the tomato flesh.  In fact, while I’m adding the fresh chopped tomatoes I’m going to squeeze in some tomato paste out of a tube.

Seasonings.  Salt and black pepper, paprika (lots of paprika).  Ground thyme is a must, as is parsley.  A little sage and oregano, or maybe marjoram instead of oregano.

And there I think we have it.  Let’s summarize:

1/2 lb of carrots, chopped

8 oz of celery, chopped, or celery leaves, chopped fine.

2 large onions.  Sweat one with butter, rough slice the other and put it in raw.

2 quarts of water, add more as needed to cover the vegetables completely

2 quarts of chicken stock.

1 pint corn (off the cob)

1 pint green beans (chopped)

1 pint butter beans

1 large green pepper, chopped

1 zucchini, chopped

1 yellow summer squash, chopped

1 pint of chopped paste tomatoes

2 tbl, tomato paste

Salt, pepper, sweet paprika, ground thyme, parsley (fresh, chopped), ground sage, marjoram.

Bring basic soup stock to a boil (carrots, onions, celery, water, salt), then immediately lower to a simmer (lid on).  Simmer for 45 minutes, then add chicken stock and all the other vegetables and seasonings except for tomatoes and tomato paste.  Bring back to a boil, then Simmer for 45 minutes, then add tomatoes and tomato paste.  Add some more paprika (because honestly until the soup is really really red you can add some more:  not hot or smoked paprika, but sweet paprika).  Simmer until ready to serve.  Add more liquid as needed as you go along, it’s bad to not have enough soup liquid to cover the vegetables (very very basic, but very very true).

Conclusion:

I haven’t cooked a thing yet.  This is all just me talking.  I’ll go out and make this sometime in the next month and then I’ll report back on how it went.  I *expect* it to be good.  But if I’m really lucky it will be some kind of platonic jungian archetypical vegetable soup, which is ultimately what I’m aiming for.

Lettuces to tempt El-ahrair-rah

We’ve been eating butter beans, cream peas, herbs, celery, tomato sauce, and winter squash from the larder this past week.  Every Friday we make a new menu for the next week, so that we know what (if anything) we need to purchase at stores on Saturday.  Then we post the menu on the refrigerator — all printed out nice with formatting and everything.  I’ve been saving the weekly menu print-outs for several years now, they make quite a stack of paper.

Here are some pictures of the onion seedlings under their lights in the basement:

Happy happy onion seedlings

Another tray of happy onions

Lights in a dark basement

Outside it is bright and sunny, but cold.  It was 24 degrees yesterday as a low.  In the container in the foreground here you can see a volunteer dill plant bravely attempting to become a perennial.

Winter Garden

Carrots!

Carrots, lettuces, a few tiny broccoli (used in a pasta dish):  these are what we harvested this week.

Lettuces

Because of impending cold weather (which got down to 17 degrees F), we cleared a side box which we hadn’t planned to keep covered of its carrots.  The carrots are smallish but a decent size for us; and the flavor is excellent.

Onions started sprouting just 4 days after being seeded in the basement.  We now have our lighting setup going 12 hours a day (7 am to 7 pm).  More spring crops will be started in another week or so.

Our washing machine started going bad last week (no it’s not drinking, smoking and cursing, but it did start having a bad rubber burning smell).  Given the costs of repairing a 14-year old washing machine, we started researching a new one.  Why is it that in this world you can’t choose to spend more money on a better quality, higher functionality item instead of seeing extra money go to bells and whistles you don’t need.  The last thing I need is a washing machine that has “apps” and will call my smart phone (only one of us even *has* a “smart” phone).  The lowest end machines (for price) have obviously poor design, baskets and agitators made from cheap materials (really flimsy plastic in at least one case), and a lack of necessary features.  Higher end machines add things we have no desire or need for:  we don’t need 14 washing cycles, multiple computer boards, apps, etc.

We strongly desire a stainless steel basket, the ability to choose the water level in the basin, a delicates cycle (in addition to the 3 basic cycles), and a high level of construction design and materials quality with long performance and easily replaced modular parts. Ha Ha Ha Ha ha ha.  I am being completely rhetorical when I ask “is it too much to ask?” because I am an old jaded cynic who tries to remember to hope for the best, but plan for the worst.  The whole process of selecting a new washing machine rapidly becomes a microcosm of a lot of what is wrong in today’s world.  Oh well.

I made a horseradish, mustard, salt, garlic, and parmesan paste to smear over our pork chops last night.  It was delicious.

Yesterday the weather got up over 70 degrees.  From 17 to 70 in less than a week makes for really odd January weather.

Mixed Lettuces & Broccoli

Garden:

We picked 4 little broccoli shoots/heads this week, along with 2 heads of lettuce, some mizuna, cilantro, and some general leaf lettuce.

We started 2 trays of Texas Early Grano Onion seeds in the basement on 12/27.

Eating:

We’ve been eating out of the canned and frozen preserved food categories this week.  Everything is yummy.  The salsa verde is holding up better than I thought it would, we’ve had pickled jalapenos, corn, braised greens, butter beans, cream peas, and the green beans.  I keep getting good feedback on my canned green beans from people, particularly the haricots verts.

Hunting:

The quail hunt was a lot of fun.  We had six men and a mule team with a wagon and two guides.  We spent all day hunting, with a break in the middle for grilled dogs and burgers in the middle of the woods.  I brought home enough quail for 4 meals, tired out and well satisfied.

Cooking:

I’ve been sitting down every day with my two new Jacques Pepin books or my “the professional chef, 9th edition”.  They are a real pleasure to devour and absorb.

Cilantro

Well with all the getting ready for christmas cheer this week, and having my son home from college we didn’t get around to doing the Onion seeds yesterday or the day before.  I don’t know why we thought we’d have time for that, but hey.

Christmas Tree

We put up The Tree this week.  The Tree and The Family pretty much define the core of our christmas traditions.

The cooking/blog related gifts this morning made me so excited that you get to see pictures of them.   Of course, I’ve had my Julia Child and my Bill Neal and my Edna Lewis for many years, and a few years ago I was lucky enough to get a copy of Vincent Price’s “A Treasury of Great Recipes“.  But I never quite got these books, though I have lusted after them.  Now the looming major acquisition would be the Larousse Gastronomique.  At any rate, I have enough cooking reading to do for a whole year now.  I also got a mandolin with stainless blade.  I don’t *need* a mandolin any more than I need a rotating meat slicer, but they can be very useful several times a year and I’m thrilled to have it.

Pepin! Methode et Technique!

9th Edition: TPC

No garden news at all really, though it has warmed up enough this week that we uncovered everything all week.

Had a christmas eve dinner last night at my father’s house that couldn’t be beat:  country ham, turkey, cornbread dressing, oyster dressing, haricots verts, butter beans, corn pudding, gravy, etcetera; and our family’s signature pale fruit cake for dessert, with a tot of port.  A lovely time was had by all.

Tomorrow I’m going quail hunting.  With any luck I’ll be able to stock up on several meals worth of yummy little partridges (2 per person per meal).

Last, but not least:

Appalachian Old Farm Apple Scumble

Bottled Cider in a Row

I had reported in my homebrewing journal posts that I had bottled my hard cider and started it on a second fermentation.  These are the bottles with the fabulous labels the other one of us made.  The cider is good, I’m happy with the cider, but the labels really make it for me.  Hurrah!

See you next week in the New Year!

We’ve been living off the produce we picked last week, as well as all the canned and frozen goods we made this year which are in their basement repositories.  The carrots are particularly tasty.  At this point we have enough greens cooked and frozen to last us for months.  We’ve been asked to bring our canned green beans to christmas eve dinner at my father’s house.

The only gardening type thing we did this week was make some more mung beans sprouts and we forgot to shoot a picture of that.  So this week’s update is without photos, alas.

We’re starting to decorate for christmas; the exterior lights, the wreaths, and the moravian star are all up.  We’ll decorate inside and put up the Tree on Tuesday; then hang the ornaments on it while drinking egg nog and listing to seasonal music – something I’ve done every year of my life.  In fact, my earliest memory is my first tree and and the ornaments on it while my mother stands nearby.  I couldn’t even walk yet.  We’ll hang the stockings with care, knowing for a fact that Santa (Good ole St. Nick!) is coming.  Even the dog gets a stocking.

I’ve been looking for programmable high quality christmas tree lights to replace the ones I bought over a decade ago – these are pretty much just plain worn out now.  I have loved them because not only can you make them blink, or flash, or chase in sequence, but you can make them slowly dim and brighten by color, so slowly that it barely makes an impact on your vision until they’re different.  I’ve searched in vain for a couple of years now for lights with similar versatility – but this year I found them, after over an hour’s search on Google (and that is an eternity for a google search).  There is an excellent company that is now making modular holiday light systems.  I bought a series of 5-color LED tree lights on a string, with an accompanying power supply and a 10-function controller with speed adjustment.  If you’re interested, the company is environmentallights.com, and they’re based out of California.  I’ll report on them later, after we put up the tree.  If we like them, I’m gonna replace and augment our exterior lights (limited though they are) over time.

This week will also feature another round of holiday cooking, for the most part the same stuff as we did at Thanksgiving.  By the time we’re done with this turkey and the current ham we’ll have had enough of those until approximately April.

My son gets here on Monday, and I’m really looking forward to his visit.  It’s his freshman year at a military college, and I can’t wait to see him.

The weather here has varied from 27 to 70 in the past 7 days.  Not expecting a white christmas, either.

This coming week we’ll be starting the Onion Seeds!  We need to clean up the basement seed area, and get everything pristine.  The onion seeds will just be the first of a series of plantings in preparation for the 2012 spring growing season.

Ho Ho Ho to all of you!

Cilantro

10-12 beets, 4 small radishes, Actual Carrots and smaller carrots (the latter from thinning), cabbage, parsley, cilantro, dill (volunteer), the last of the celery, a bit of broccoli (which we ate for dinner and had great flavor).  Also, the rest of the swiss chard, a variety of greens, oodles of lettuces (including the one head of frisee we had left, and all of the mache).

Lettuces

Root Crops

Broccoli & Chinese Kale

We cut all the greens way back as we harvested them.  It will be awhile before we get more, but we have 4-5 months of braised kale cooked and frozen now.  It will be interesting to see if they sprout again in the spring, and when.

Greens

Mustard & Kale

With forecasted lows getting down to the mid-20s (they lied about last night), we decided to go into a more winterized mode.  We picked all of the carrots in the front box (we still have carrots in 2 other places), all the beets, celery, swiss chard, and greens.  Then we put up hoops and secured row cover fabric for the long term.

More lettuces

Row covers went over:  lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots.

Brussels sprouts have small sprouts forming but not anything close to harvestable yet, so we covered them with burlap for the next couple of colder nights. We’re not holding our breath to actually get brussels sprouts but with highs forecast in the mid 60s later this week, we want to at least try to keep the plants going.  Hope springs eternal.  Since we know brussels sprouts don’t overwinter if they don’t make before the really cold weather sets in they’ll be goners.

Parsley, celery, cilantro

Cabbage, beets, broccoli, carrots, dill

Getting everything washed and prepped was quite the chore, and lasted throughout the evening!

I mentioned last week that I was making caramel via the “boil a can of sweetened condensed milk” method.  I put 2 cans in the pressure cooker (unopened cans, but with labels/glue removed), and brought them up to 15 psi for 5 minutes, then I pulled the whole thing off the heat.  After it cooled down and lost pressure, I pulled the cans out and set them aside to cool. After an hour, I rinsed each can in cool water, then opened them.  I ended up with 2 cans of lovely creamy tawny brown caramel which was just a bit too thick to pour, so i was able to spread it over the cake as “icing” just perfectly.  If you like caramel this will make you wish you’d made another can, just to eat.  The sweetened condensed milk people advise against any method of boiling the can: explosions are not unheard of by people who don’t follow proper procedures. Caveat emptor.

This morning for breakfast I made fried egg sandwiches on toasted english muffins with a slice of the country ham (seared in the skillet), cheddar cheese medallions (placed on the skillet until bubbling and melting, then turn the heat off until they resolidify as crispy cheesy disks), and triple cream brie.  We were both like, “wow”, as we scarfed them down.

By Thanksgiving, all visible signs of fermentation had ceased in the carboy, and most solid particulates had settled to the bottom or gravitated to the sides of the jar.

I tasted it!  It has a nice cider taste, slightly sweet and apple-like.  It was not too dry, too astringent, too hard, or too anything, actually.  I am pleasantly surprised at my first efforts after so much time.

I’ve been saving champagne / asti spumonte / other bubbly bottles for some time.  I bought a pack of 12 plastic champagne corks and the wires to bind them, some english apple cider liquid yeast, and some Stevia.

I had already bought this lovely little auto-syphon hose.  It functions by pressing the mechanical pen-like tip to the bottom of the bottle, whereupon it opens a channel that allows the liquid to flow through the tube and into the bottom, filling it from the bottom up.  Lifting the tip off the bottom immediately stops the flow of liquid, allowing you to change bottles without haste or making a mess.  It has just enough tube in the bottle that if you fill the bottle nearly to the brim, when you withdraw the tube the liquid is at the right part of the neck.

I bottled 7 champagne style bottles this way, after putting 1/2 teaspoon stevia and 1/2 tsp liquid cider yeast (warmed to room temperature previously) and some yeast nutrient  in each bottle.

I am hoping via this process to get bubbly (from the secondary fermentation of the yeast) hard sweet (from the non-sugar sweetener) cider.  If you try to sweeten it with sugar, all you will get is more fermentation.

I anticipate cracking a bottle of it the week before Christmas to check its progress.  If it is sufficiently good, a few people might be getting a bottle in their Christmas gifts.

Now I just have to figure out what to call it, and get my wonderful spouse to make me some super labels.

Mung Bean Sprouts

We harvested lettuces, cilantro, parsley, sage.  We grew some more mung bean sprouts in a jar.

We’ve been using items preserved from the summer:  canned tomato sauce, canned green beans & haricots verts, canned roasted sweet peppers, frozen butter beans, hot sauce, dried herbs.

Lettuces

It got down to 27 degrees a couple of nights so we covered the crops again.  We have a cabbage that is ready to harvest.  I foresee boiled cabbage and potatoes in my future, and maybe some nice simple cole slaw to go with some bratwursts.

I made lamb meatballs last night and used some of the last of the refrigerated green bell peppers from the garden, along with fresh parsley and cilantro, and a bit of sage in amongst the other ingredients in my recipe.

We’re down to the very last 4 very small (thumb-sized) tomatoes picked while green.  We picked all the tomatoes in the week prior to the October 9 update; so that has been *awhile*.  They’ve just been sitting on the counter all this time while we ate their compatriots.  Mostly they’ve gone into salads.  Nearly all the green tomatoes ripened on the counter without any rotting.

We ordered country ham from AB Vannoy hams again (hurrah for them!).  This time I tried a whole ham pre-sliced.  Next time I’ll go back to ordering a whole unsliced ham and then slicing it myself, for two big reasons. When you cook a ham whole in the oven for several hours, it helps the connective tissue to break down (making it more tender) and it also renders the fat very slowly (which ensures that the fat doesn’t burn).  The fat covers most of the exterior of the ham and helps seal in the juices and everything just comes out better.  Furthermore, I like to slice my country ham very very very thin.  You really can’t slice it too thin for me, and that also contributes a synergistic effect to the feel of it in the mouth when you eat it.

I am about to bake a cake and frost it with caramel made by boiling sweetened condensed milk in a can.  I’ll report back next week on how it goes, if I remember.