First soup-making attempt since moving to Vancouver: Carrot and Coriander

I have been quiet on the blog front since I made the move from Cambridge to Vancouver. This has been predominantly because I have only just equipped my kitchen to a state where I can actually cook things and also because supermarkets over here confuse me as the brands for everything are different! My first attempt at making soup in my new environment worked out well, despite me making a mess of the kitchen! As it says in the title, my first effort was carrot and coriander!

Ingredients

• 6 large carrots, peeled and sliced.
• 1L stock (I used beef because I only had beef stock in my cupboard, but veggie is probably better!)
• 2 chopped onions
• 2 chopped cloves of garlic
• Small amount of oil
• Salt and pepper
• Bunch of coriander

Procedure

1) Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the onions and garlic to the pan. Cook for a few minutes on a medium heat to soften them.

2) Add carrots to the pan.

3) Add the stock and bring to the boil

Bringing to the boil

4) Simmer for 12 minutes

Following the simmer

5) Add the coriander

Coriander

6) Blend the soup. I used a hand blender and got it everywhere! Job was done in the end though.

Making a mess

7) Serve.

Verdict

I thought that the result was a very tasty soup, that tasted even better when I took it to work for my lunch the next day. So simple to do that I should repeat this soon!

A return to the subject at hand. Soup, Science and Stuff !

Introduction

Hello. Given that the title of this blog is Soup and Stuff I felt that there was a lack of actual soups being discussed. Well honestly there is a lack of anything being discussed but for now I decided to make a soup using what little items I had left in my cupboard. I am trying to avoid going shopping as it is raining and I don’t like Tesco when it is busy. As it has been mentioned before myself and Claire are scientists, and so while I was making this several sciency things came to mind and I decided to include them. I think this makes the blog a bit more interesting (I think I should make it our USP !).

A quick Google search suggested that red cabbage soup could be something worth cooking. I bought the cabbage about 2 weeks ago and I haven’t really had any inspiration for it. For this soup I looked at these recipes and then decided to pretty much ignore both of them. Mainly due to a lack of ingredients, what I took from these is that red cabbage and acid (Lemon juice or red wine) seem to go well together.

Materials and Methods

So first I assembled the stuff I needed. For this soup I used

• 1 red cabbage
• 2 small onions
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 beef stock pot
• 1 small quantity of clover light
• 2 tablespoons Balsamic vinegar
• 1 tablespoon Lea and Perrins
• Then for seasoning : Salt, Pepper, and Thyme

The gang’s all here

The actual method like any soup is really simple. First I chopped the onions, and garlic and softened them with some clover. Then I chopped up the cabbage into smallish bits, this is when the first sciencey thing came to mind.

Science interlude 1

When I sliced it down the middle, the way the leaves of the cabbage were coloured reminded me of structures found inside every cell in our body, the Golgi apparatus. The Golgi apparatus was named by its discoverer Camillo Golgi, in the late 1800’s. In our cells it functions to process and modify proteins before they are released into the cell. The image in the panel shows a cross section of a Golgi from a thin slice of a human cell, which has been frozen and then imaged with an electron microscope. The actual Golgi Apparatus is a big system of vesicles (membranous sacs), and according to Wikipedia your average cell has about 70 of them. Newly synthesised proteins make their way through these stacks and different enzymes modify the new protein for instance adding sugar groups or phosphoryl groups a protein. The individual cells in the Cabbage would have hundreds of Golgis (Golgii ?) in them too and I thought it was quite interesting how similar looking features can be found on a macro and molecular scale.

I hope this picture shows what I was trying to explain in the text

Back to the food

When the aromatics became slightly translucent, I added the chopped cabbage and mixed to ensure that the clover covered the cabbage. I then cooked until the cabbage became soft, stirring often to ensure bits of it didn’t stick to the pan (I was trying not to use too much butter, If you add more I don’t think you would need to stir it so much – for the lazy). The colour of the cabbage seems to intensify as the water inside evaporates.

Note to self to always take more than one photo.

Once it was nice and soft, I added the stock pot and topped up with water from the kettle until the cabbage was submerged. I added about 1 teaspoon of dried thyme at this point. Then I added the balsamic vinegar and the Worcester sauce. I then let the mixture come to the boil and turned the heat down to simmer for 10 mins. When I returned I noticed that the colour of the cabbage had changed from purple to a more red colour. Finally I seasoned the soup with some salt and pepper and at this point I tasted it and decided it was finished. The cogs turned and I realised at this point that the cabbage was purple and not red initially… why wasn’t it called purple cabbage ? This led me to science interlude 2.

Science interlude 2 

When I thought about why the cabbage would change colour when I cooked it I remembered an experiment I did during my A-levels. We took beetroot, homogenised the tissue and diluted it out to use the extract as a pH indicator (pH is a measure of how acidic, or alkaline a solution is). I realised that the cabbage must contain the same or similar molecule as beetroot and that something must have changed the pH of the food as I cooked it. Obviously this was the vinegar, which almost everyone knows is acidic.

I decided to test this and took the base of the cabbage and poured a little bit of white wine vinegar on it, sure enough I saw the purple containing pigment begin to change to a pinky red.

If you look in the red circle you can see the colour change when I dabbed vinegar on it

I looked again to wikipedia and found that the molecule which gives beetroot and cabbage (and many other vegetables) the deep purple colour is an anthocyanin. You may have heard of anthocyanins as they are regularly paraded in the media as being super anti-oxidants. In plants they are thought to act as attractors for insects, and as a “sunscreen” protecting leaves from UV light.  The figure below shows the general “skeletal” structure of an anthocyanin, the R groups indicate where different chemical groups or atoms can be present.

The general molecular structure for an anthocyanin (Stolen from Wikipedia)

As I noticed, anthocyanins can also change colour depending on the pH. The colour changes from red in acidic pH, to blue at neutral pH, and finally to yellow and then colourless at high pH. The colour change due to pH change is driven by an equilibrium of a hydrated or “open” form, which is colourless and the “closed” or dehydrated form. Low pH favours the closed and coloured form, and high pH the opposite. This research article titled “The effect of light, temperature, ph on stability of anthocyanin pigments in Musa acuminata bract” contains more information on the chromatic shift in anthocynanin molecules in different conditions.

Results

I ate the soup with some rye bread, it was very good. I think for some it might have been quite acidic, so I would maybe recommend using 1 tablespoon of vinegar. I am a vinegar fiend though and thought it was lovely. One smallish cabbage made enough soup for 2 generous servings so I have some to take to the lab with me tomorrow.

Does it look more red I can’t tell ?

Overall I was impressed with this soup, despite it having hardly any ingredients, it was really tasty and it made me think how much of a weird person I am for thinking about science all the time.

I am going to call this trout surprise, the surprise was inside !

Well it has been an age since we looked at this blog, but we (that is Me and Claire) have decided to give it another go. It will change eventually as one of us is in Cambridge and the other in Vancouver. This has the small advantage that I can now make things with fish it in, as I don’t think Claire would have eaten this.

I really intended to make a stir fry, but it went a bit wrong and adding some stock made a really new stewy soupy thing I decided to call a broth. No doubt some pedant will arrive with the definition of a broth, but until then… it’s a broth !

Ingredients

• 1 x Trout, I imagine any fish would suffice really
• 1 x Decent size head of broccoli
• 2 x Carrot
• an amount of Kale
• some mushrooms
• salt, pepper
• chilli sauce
• vegetable stock

Procedure

First, I took my whole trout and tried to fillet it. Now I haven’t done it in a while and I can really recommend not using a blunt knife, as was all I had. In fact it’s probably easier to just ask whoever you buy the fish from to do it for you. Or even better just buy the fillets ! Then you avoid your trout being packed full of eggs :o. I thought it just looked plump !

here s(he) is in all its glory. I picked it because it looked satisfyingly meaty

This was a surprise. Can you even eat these ?

Not bad for an amateur

So anyway, after washing the eggs, and hacking away with my butter knife I managed to get some fillets. I baked them in foil with lemon, salt and garlic for about 30 mins at 180 degrees. Then I flaked the flesh off the skin and kept it to one side.

So for the veg, this part was even easier. I chopped them up with my fearsome dull blade and started to fry them in a wok with a little olive oil. I quickly realised that there was a lot and I wasn’t going to cook them very well (I am crap at stir frying) so I had the genius idea to put in some veg stock and sort of cook them through in that. It took about 20 mins or so.

This is what it is

Here it is after cooking in stock

Finally I mixed in the flaked fish and left it simmering for a few mins. I then splashed in some sweet chilli sauce to give it a bit of bite. Here is a photo of the dish. My presentation leaves a lot to be desired, but really it was delicious. If I was making it again I would take out the mushrooms and add some noodles or something. It sort of tastes like something you would get at Wagamamas or somewhere like that. Plus with all that veg I think it is relatively healthy. I reckon it would work with chicken too.

Sorry about the bowl

Spicy(ish) parsnip soup!

I have been attempting a new variety of soups this week and my latest attempt was spicy parsnip soup. For once I didn’t look around for recipes and just guestimated what I should use. The outcome was quite tasty, but I think I could have made it spicier!

 

Ingredients

• 3 large parsnips
  
• 1L vegetable stock (I used two veggie oxos in 1L water)
• 2 medium sized onions
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1tsp ground cumin
• 1tsp paprika
• 1tsp chilli powder
• Knob of butter

Procedure

• Peel and chop the vegetables
• Melt the butter at a medium heat and add in the garlic and onions. Cook until softened, but not brown.
• Add in the parsnips, cumin, paprika and chilli powder and cook for a couple of minutes
• Add the stock and bring to the boil

• Simmer for about 15 minutes/till the parsnips are soft
• Take off the heat and blend using a hand blender
• 
• I tried to make some parsnip crisps at this point, but ended up burning them. I think I had the right idea, just too high a heat. I shaved some pieces of parsnip using my veg peeler and then fried them at a high heat. I still put some in my bowl to look cool.

 

Excuse the mess in my kitchen!

All in all it was pretty nice, but I would increase the spice factor next time and not burn things!

Mushroom Soup!

Happy new year everyone! Over the Christmas and New Year period I didn’t do any cooking myself as I was looked after by my family! In the last week it has been back to reality for me and back to my kitchen! I have been enjoying making soup to take to work for lunch again and this week’s highlight for me was mushroom soup!

Ingredients

• 500g (ish) mushrooms, chopped up! I had 3/4 of a 750g pack left in my fridge!
• 80g butter
• 2 chopped onions
• 2 chopped cloves garlic
• 2 tbsps plain flour
• A litre of hot stock (I used a beef stock pot from Knorr, I think most people would use veggie or chicken stock)
• 4 tbsps cream (it works okay without it too)
• salt and pepper for seasoning

Procedure

• Melt the butter in pan and cook the onions and garlic on a medium heat for about 5 minutes until they are softened.
• Add the mushrooms and cook at a high heat for about 3 minutes while stirring!
• Then add in the 2 tbsps of flour and mix well to coat the mushrooms
• Add the stock, bring to the boil and then simmer for 10 minutes
• After the 10 minutes is up, blitz with a hand blender (take it off the heat for sure and let it cool down if you are scared of injury).
• Season with salt and pepper.
• Reheat and stir in the cream.

All that is left to do is eat it! I had mine with a very nice seeded roll. Nom nom nom!

French Onion Soup:- “it was really really really good”

This weekend I decided to make an attempt at making French onion soup for dinner. It is something that I have always loved yet never actually tried to cook myself. It really was perfect comfort food for a lazy day.

I turned to one of my favourite sources for recipes: the BBC good food website. You can find the recipe here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4250/french-onion-soup, but I will list everything below.

Ingredients

• 50g butter
• 1kg brown onions , thinly sliced
• 2 tbsp thyme , picked leaves
• 3 tbsp dry sherry
• 2 Knorr beef stock pots made up to 1.2 litre (BBC says you can use fresh stock or stock cubes)
• 1 small baguette , sliced
• 1 garlic clove , halved
• olive oil
• 100g Gruyère cheese , grated

Procedure

• Melt the butter and gently cook the onion and thyme for about 20 minutes.

Chopping this amount of onions really made my eyes stream. It was worth it.

Sweating down onions and thyme

• Increase the heat slightly and cook for 15 minutes. The onion will become sticky and caramelised. Stir it a few times while it is cooking so it doesn’t stick to the bottom and burn.
• Add the sherry and cook for 3 minutes
• Add the stock and bring to the boil. Season.
• Simmer for 10 minutes.

• 

Simmer simmer simmer

• While this is going on, toast the bread (I forgot to do this bit), rub each slice with garlic and if you want crush some of the garlic and spread over the bread. Drizzle a bit of olive oil over it and then cover it with the cheese. Stick this in to grill until the cheese is bubbling and looking yummy.

Just in case you don’t know what grated cheese looks like

• Stick the soup in a bowl and put a crouton on top

Nom nom nom nom

• DEVOUR

I think this has been my favourite soup making exploit to date. I had it for lunch today and it still tasted amazing!

 

Guest post #2 from the boy: Pulled Pork

As his last effort was so good, I let Thomas loose to right another blog post. Here is the result:-

The porkening

Introduction

Well as my last entry for this blog seemed to go okay, I thought I would write another entry to tide it over until Claire makes more soup. Last weekend we decided that we needed to eat lots of meat… we settled on pork because:

1. Beef and Lamb are expensive

2. Chicken can be pretty dull

3. Who wants to eat huge amounts of fish? (note from Claire: I don’t even want small amounts of fish)

A few times in the past my dad has roasted pigs whole, and with this in mind on a smaller scale we decided to follow this recipe from the Beeb. You could just follow the link now and read it yourself, but its probably easier to just read on now.

The Ideal Scenario

Materials and methods 

100 g sea salt

150 g light muscovado sugar

1 kg pork shoulder

50 ml maple syrup

50 g wholegrain mustard

1 tbsp English mustard powder

Right so this is a really easy thing to make. You take the pork (we had a chunk that was about 1.3 kg) and rub in a mix of all the salt and 2/3 the sugar. Then you put that in the fridge overnight.

Pork in preparation

In the morning I found that the bag I left it in was full of liquid a sort of salty sugary bloody mix. I took the executive decision to pour it away. Then I made the marinade using the rest of the sugar, the mustards and the syrup. I then used my hands (gross) to smother the pork in it. Like so:

The morning after…

Afterwards I put it on a tray and sealed it with foil. The BBC page said to make a tight seal but I pretty quickly broke the seal when I was curiously checking to see what was going on. I have no idea if this affected the final meal in anyway. After sealing it was put in the oven at 130 degrees for about 7 hours. Half an hour before we took it out I poured some more of the marinade on, I am not sure if it was necessary really but I did it anyway.

Results

Cooked pork

The finished thing looked amazing, it smelt really good too. It doesn’t look exactly like the picture on the BBC article, but after tasting it I no longer cared because it was bloody great .I shredded it with 2 forks and we had it on sandwiches. Then on sandwiches the next day. And then on sandwiches the day after that. Claire grilled the skin on the top to make it crispy, she said it was nice but you will have to take her word for that as I don’t like the skin.

Pulled pork huzzah

In conclusion this really satisfied a craving. It’s probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but when it tastes that good who really cares ?

9/10 – would eat again !

Butternut Squash and Chorizo Soup

Yesterday I decided to attempt a soup I have never tried before- butternut squash soup based on Nigella’s recipe -with a few modifications where I had different things in my cupboard to what was recommended. Additionally, the boy decided that he thought chorizo would be a nice thing to have with squash and who am I to say it would be a bad idea? Here is how it went:

Ingredients

• 1 medium sized butternut squash
• 1 medium sized onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 beef oxo cubes in 1L water
• 1 tsp cumin
• 2-3 tbsp milk to thicken the soup if you so desire
• half a chorizo ring
• 2 tsp chilli powder
• olive oil
• sea salt
• black pepper
• butter

Procedure

Preheat the oven to 180°C

Cut the squash into quarters lengthways (this was actually quite difficult for me to do) and stick on a baking tray or in an ovenproof dish.

Drizzle the olive oil over the squash and throw on the chilli powder and cumin. Season with salt and pepper.

Cook for 45 mins or until soft. Once cooked allow to cool and then peel off the skin and remove the seeds. To be honest I found this whole thing a faff and it ended up in cubes anyway. If I did this again I would probably peel, de-seed and cube the squash before adding the oil etc and cooking.

Next, chop up the onion and garlic. Melt a knob of butter in a pan and then gently cook the onions and garlic for about 5 mins until they are soft. Then add in the stock and the chunks of squash and simmer for around 5 mins. As this was going on, I decided to cook sliced chorizo in a separate pan until crispy.

I blended the soup with a hand blender and it was at an okay consistency without the milk. I then added the pieces of chorizo.

I tried some last night and I wasn’t overly enamored by it. I had it for lunch today and it tasted much better. I can’t tell you what the chorizo tasted like in it as unfortunately it must have sunk to the bottom of the container and there wasn’t any with my lunch. The boy says that the chorizo definitely added a lot to the flavour and would definitely recommend its inclusion!

Life beyond soup: Chorizo and Butterbean Stew

Last night I decided to take inspiration for my tea from the Nosh for Graduates book that was kindly donated to me by my mate Amy. Luckily for me it is not so great on the veggie recipes for her, but has some good suggestions for meat lovers like me! I picked out the suggestion of Chorizo and butterbean stew as it looked quite tasty, but did make a few modifications in terms of stock. I didn’t remember having eaten butterbeans before, though I am sure in my youth my parents have given them to me, so I wasn’t sure about that element. I went ahead anyway and the recipe was easy to follow, as outlined below, simple to make and quick to produce a nice looking meal!

 

Ingredients

• 1 onion sliced
• 1 410g tin butterbeans, drained and rinsed
• 1 clove garlic sliced (the recipe doesn’t include this, but I love garlic so added it in with the onions)
• 1/2 red pepper sliced
• 1 knorr beef stock pot (The recipe recommends 1tbsp liquid chicken stock, but I didn’t have any)
• 2 chorizo cooking sausages chopped into thin slices
• 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1tsp sugar
• 1/2 mug of water
• Crusty bread/roll to serve

Method

• In a wok cook the sliced chorizo for 2-3 minutes.
• Remove the chorizo at this point and set aside
• Add the garlic, onion and pepper to the pan and fry for a few minutes until they soften
• Add the mushrooms, water, sugar, balsamic vinegar and the stockpot
• Return the chorizo and bring to the boil
• Turn down the heat and then simmer for 5 minutes

• Add the butterbeans and then boil for 1 minute
• Job done!!

Serve the stew in a bowl with some crusty bread, or if you are lucky enough to have some homemade bread rolls around like me (See previous post) serve with one of those.

 

 

I honestly wasn’t sure about how nice this one would be, but it tasted delicious. I may cook it for the boy in the near future to prove that there is life beyond soup for me!

A word from the boy: Baking bread – the novice approach

Baking bread – the novice approach

Introduction

Hello, if you are reading this I will assume you have read the previous posts on this blog and will be aware that the GF makes a lot of soup. Well her talents vastly outstrip mine in that culinary area, however, I felt that making bread to go alongside it would be a good idea. That way I do not feel terrible eating soup everyday without contributing to it in some way!

This bread recipe was basically stitched together from stuff I know about baking. Honestly I have never been one for exact measurements (which is probably why all my experiments at work fail), so I will roughly describe what I did. If you have cheated and looked at the final result you will see it turned out okay. In Claire’s words “nom nom nom it is amazing and you are wasted in science” so I am calling it a success

Materials and Methods

So to make bread you need 3 basic things… flour, water and yeast. To make bread that actually tastes good you need sugar, salt and some sort of fat (I used Lurpack, king of butters).

Bread Ingredients

For six rolls (decent sized ones) :

•   500g strong bread flour
•   333g water (tepid)
•   1 Tsp yeast
•   1 Tsp salt
•   1 Tsp sugar

The method I use most for making bread is called the sponge method (at least that is what Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall calls it in his book). Basically you make a sort of batter out of the water, sugar, yeast and half of the flour. You then leave this for a period of time, often I make it the night before and leave it in a warm place overnight. When you mix the batter you should immediately see the yeast start to work and bubbles will appear. In the morning the sponge batter will be really stringy… I assume that’s how its supposed to be anyway.

In the morning add the salt, fat and rest of the flour and combine with your hands into a dough. Using this seed flour from Sainsbury resulted in a really sticky dough (see below).

It can be quite intimidating at first, but tip it onto a floured surface and start to work the dough. The easiest way I find to knead it is to hold the dough with one hand and stretch it out with the other, try not to rip it though. At first it will stick to you lots but as you work at it it will eventually stop sticking and feel tighter. A good guess is that it will take you 10-20 mins to knead it . The more you knead it now the better it will be in the end so put the effort in (it is possible to overknead dough but pretty much impossible to do by hand so don’t panic) ! Here is the kneaded dough ready to rise.

After the dough has risen to about twice its size, separate into even bits and shape into rolls. Then place these on a tray and leave to prove. Again you are waiting for them to roughly double in size.

Finally after all the effort it is time to bake them. Place rolls into a preheated oven at about 200 degrees (Don’t do what I did first time and put them in at 230 and incinerate them). One thing HFW recommends to really improve the bread is to make sure your oven is really humid inside, I do this by putting a tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven before the rolls go in. After 20 mins have a look and see if they are hollow sounding when you tap them. If you didn’t mess up horribly you will have awesome bread. Try not to eat it all in one go!

RESULTS

I will let the picture do the talking. Thank you for reading :).