Ana Larrañaga's gazpacho

• roughly 1 kg tomatoes
• half a sweet red bell pepper
• a small bit of an onion (like less than a quarter)
• a fleck of garlic (less than a clove)
• two pieces of stale or toasted white bread
• 3 tsp vinegar
• 6 tsp olive oil
• salt (don't be afraid to use it)

Blanch the tomatoes in boiling water for 2 minutes each, and peel them (kitchen tweezers very useful for this step). Throw everything into a blender and blend until smooth. If you really want to go to town, follow this by forcing it all through a coarse sieve. Adjust salt to taste. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours; the longer the better. Serves 4.

Ana made this for us in the days after the total eclipse in Spain in 2026 and it blew my mind. Key idea: The onion and garlic are trace ingredients.

white bean and chard soup

I made a beautiful quarantine soup from the larder today: Burn merguez sausage in a pot so that it leaves nice brown sticky stuff on the pan. Substitute anything here; you could use other sausage or fake meat or a chicken thigh or a bone. Or go old-school vegan! (If you go vegan, get your brown from the mirepoix.) Remove the meat to a bowl.

Clean the pan by sautéeing diced onions, carrots, and celery (that is, mirepoix) in olive oil. Add white beans (either from a can or parboiled from dry for 40 minutes in water). Add water, salt, pepper, garlic, and maybe a mushroom-broth cube or something like that. Bring this all to a boil on the stove and then simmer it in the oven at 300 F (150 C) for 40 min.

At the end, add a bunch of finely chopped swiss chard (silver beet or equivalent; any lettuce will do), and the crispy sausage bits. Return to the oven for 15 min or until the lettuce is wilted. Serve with harissa for hotness.

I'm being unspecific about quantities here, but this truly isn't rocket science. The only thing that really matters is the ratio of salt to total mass.

fresh corn soup

I sliced fresh, very sweet corn off a few cobs into a pot, added water just to cover and salt, and threw in the (denuded) cobs too. I boiled it for 20 minutes or so, pulled out the cobs, blended part of it and mixed it back in. I finished it with a bit of cream, and adjusted salt and pepper at the end. It was ridiculously sweet. So sweet the family asked if I had added sugar. This is somehow related to PMC's soup algorithms.

salvage the squash

I roasted a buttercup squash the other night and the result was pasty, dry and rejected by all.  Today that  squash got a second chance in this soup (loosely based on this recipe):

• 1 medium onion, peeled and coarsely chopped
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
• pinch of curry powder
• touch of cayenne pepper
• 2 tart apples, peeled, cored and coarsely chopped
• 2/3 cup sherry (I would not have though of this, but it is an excellent addition; like white wine in the carrot and ginger soup from Silver Palate cookbook)
• about 3 cups of chunks of roasted buttercup squash (which had been peeled before roasting)
• 6 cups chicken broth (I made this yesterday from chicken necks)
• apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper to taste

Sweat the onion in the butter.  Add the garlic, ginger, curry powder and cayenne and cook for a minute.  Add apples and sherry, bring to a boil and cook for a few minutes.  Add squash and broth, bring to simmer and cook for about 20 minutes until everything is soft.  Puree and add water to correct consistancy.  Balance flavours with vinegar, salt and pepper.

The soup, she is good!

coconut curry soup with fish

I hadn't made enough food for supper tonight, so I whipped this up to fill in the corners.  ML loved it.

• 2 French shallots, finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp butter
• pinky finger sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• small pinch of cayenne pepper
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 carrot, julienned
• 1 small zucchini, julienned
• about 200 g frozen haddock fillets
• about 1/2 cup cooked basmati rice
• juice of one lime
• handful of coriander leaves

Sweat the shallots and garlic in the butter.  Add curry powder and fry for a minute.  Add pepper, ginger, stock, coconut milk, carrot and zucchini and bring to a boil.  Cook for 10 minutes.  Add fish and rice and return to boil.  Cover and simmer for about 10 minute until fish is cooked through and flakes apart.  Add salt to taste (about 1 tsp) and the lime juice and garnish with coriander.

I had baked some sweet potatoes in their jackets while making this soup (about an hour at 400 F) and found spoonfuls of the sweet potatoes complimented the soup well.

French-ish Onion Soup

Chop a bag of onions, toss with melted butter and leave, covered, in a 300 F (150 C) oven overnight to quasi-caramelize them. The next evening, mix these with a few cups of porcini mushroom broth (I used this because it was on hand and much better made from cubes than any beef broth that is cube-based). Add salt and pepper to taste, let it simmer for a little while. Top with a crouton, grated cheese (I used a partially aged gouda) and broil until brown on top. Serves a few. Way fast and easy!

Possible enhancements: The onions only get quasi-caramelized, not fully caramelized, because the closed pot doesn't let them dry out as much as they should; PMC suggests lowering the heat but leaving them in uncovered. Worth a shot! Alan Mooney suggests adding sherry to the broth. Duh!

lentil soup

This was great for lunch with a crusty baguette (we tried the new "La Tradi" from Eric Borderon's artisinal bakery in Quebec City).

• in a heavy-bottomed pan, sweat a cup of classic mirepoix in a bit of olive oil (covered at medium-low heat)
• add half a cup of small green lentils, a small handful each of red-skinned potato, rutabaga and zuccini and a sprig of thyme
• all the veg should be chopped or diced medium (the size of a green pea)
• add eight cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer for about half an hour
• season with salt (about two teaspoons) and pepper when the lentils are tender

water-based soups

Almost all of the soup-related entries here at F,NRS call for chicken stock. Sometimes, however, I don't have any stock on hand. This entry is meant to be an on-going record of soups that don't seem to suffer for lack of chicken stock and those that do or might.

Good with water:

• cauliflower soup using the pureed vegetable soup algorithm replacing stock with water
• lentil soup
• leek and potato, but I oversalted it (Dec. 2008)
• (Hogg say:) carrot-ginger: a bunch of carrots, a cubic inch of ginger (boil carrots and ginger with salt and blend), orange juice and cream

Bad with just water:

• chicken noodle (just kidding)
• Tuscan white bean soup, probably

ch-ch-cherry pie

Or rather "ch-ch-cherry soup" as Ben likes to say. After losing any fruit our Evans sour cherry tree had set to plum curculio two years running, I resolved last year to treat the tree systematically with insecticide in the spring rather than just hoping that nature would sort things out in my favour. As a result, we were able to harvest about 10 pints of cherries (a little more than half a peck, as in "a peck of pickled peppers") from our tree during this weekend's visit from the Fabulous Nerissa. Marie-Lou, Ness, Ben and I pitted those babies in record time and I set out to make the sour cherry pie filling described in Steingarten's piece "Pies From Paradise" in The Man Who Ate Everything.

Both Steingarten and the editors of Cook's Illustrated recommend tapioca for thickening cherry pie. The fruit flavour is reported to be "brighter" and the filling clearer. Corn starch, they say, produces a muddier taste. Steingarten instructs us to blend instant tapioca into a powder before using it, but no matter how long I let it whir around in there it wouldn't get much smaller than large grains of sand. I used it in that form and since the tapioca only dissolves partially when cooked, there were a multitude of little jelly specks in my filling, which was nonetheless absolutely delicious. I let it cool on the counter and then for several hours in the 'fridge before making my pies, as recommended. When the filling remained quite runny even when well chilled, I should have been more concerned than I was. I figured it might thicken more when I baked the pie.

It didn't. Two pies were made. We cut into the first only an hour after taking it from the oven, which I knew was going to be a mistake but it was too compelling. It was still very warm and the filling was like soup (sound familiar). The crust was also underbaked, a consequence of the cold filling throwing off my usual timing. The second pie spent the night in the refridgerator and cut much more nicely the following day; the above picture is of this pie. So that was that for this year's cherries, but I have found a nearby source of good frozen pie cherries and will press on. I have to find tapioca flour and increase the amount and see if that helps. I'll also bake it until the pastry is well and truly brown on top next time. Stay tuned for further developments.

leftover risotto soup

I had some leftover risotto kicking around in the freezer from this summer and an old bag of red lentils that never seemed to get used and were "bothering me". So I

• sweat a large onion in some olive oil, added a bit of diced carrot and celery, the washed lentils (about 1.5 cups), some thyme, a pinch of dried ginger and around 6 cups very light chicken stock (1 can + 5 cans of water)
• brought this to a boil and simmered until the lentils were tender
• stirred in the risotto to make a nicely thicked soup
• adjusted seasoning with salt and pepper

Lentils and rice is, of course, a classic combination, but using the leftover risotto gave me all sorts of bonus complexity at no added cost in time. "But PMC," you say, "isn't risotto making a branch of rocket science? Doesn't make this dish unfit for this forum?" Not so, as I think you'll see here.

99 cent cauliflower

I sometimes wonder how supermarkets ever make any money on fresh produce. Maybe they don't. Maybe that whole department is a loss leader so people will come and buy breakfast cereals and Pop Tarts. In winter in Quebec, a cauliflower sells for about 3 bucks, but this week I picked one up for 99 cents because it had developed some brown spots (heavens!). The store can't just trim that stuff off because customers wonder just what unwholesome fungus must have been removed, but I can and did. The rest of it made this:

• Chop coarsely and sweat one large cooking onion in about 4 tbsp of butter
• Add chopped cauliflower and light chicken broth (I usually use Campbell's but with two cans of water to one of broth) to cover. Simmer until cauliflower is tender.
• Blend until smooth (an immersion or dipstick blender makes this very easy).
• Adjust body by adding milk. Season to taste (s&p and maybe some nutmeg).

You can stop here and still enjoy this soup; the kids like it this way. A lot of recipes call for this plus grated old cheddar. The tanginess of the cheese works. But just try this base plus chopped fresh coriander. It's unbelievably good. I make a lot of soups along the lines of this one. It's pretty algorithmic:

• potato and leek
• carrot (add minced ginger and garlic to the onions and some white wine to the stock; hold the milk; hold the nutmeg but add curry powder and lemon juice to seasonings)
• parsnip (schmancy option: puree a boiled beet and swirl in some of this for that marbling effect)
• potato and watercress/spinach (blanche cress—abundant unsalted boiling water for a couple of minutes followed by shocking in cold water and squeeze out—to reduce bitterness; cook potato in half stock, half milk then blend with cress)

clam chowder

I tried to convert PMC's simple oral description of chowder into the most basic possible recipe.

• few strips bacon, cut into clam-sized bits
• few medium onions, chopped to the size of clams
• few large potatoes, cubed the size of clams
• two cans clams
• half-and-half cream
• salt, pepper, bay leaf

Fry the bacon low until much of the fat has been rendered. Add onions and cook until they are translucent. Add potatoes, clams and clam liquid, a bay leaf, enough water to barely cover everything, and enough salt and pepper to make the water taste "good". Simmer until the potatoes are just cooked. Add enough cream to make it creamy and let it sit for ages (a day, in my case). Re-heat, check salt level (salty is good), and serve. Don't let it boil once the cream has been added.

The result was a good, simple, sweet (from the onions, I guess) chowder. One note: I bought high-end canned clams.