12.03.08: Carrot 'n' Ginger + Chilli

Carrot and Ginger. Or is it the other way round?

Daisy was absent with the sniffles today and so Rhiannon made the kind of pungent soup that would probably have made her better if she'd had any. But, seeing as Daisy stayed under her duvet, all her soup got eaten by others. Fantastic it was, too, with gob-smacking flavour: ginger upfront, hotly pursued by the almost smoky Scotch bonnets; the carrot coming through nonetheless, with the tang of fresh coriander, as garnish. 'Twas truly, deeply, madly orange.

29.02.08: Butternut Bisque

I took a walk down East Street market and at its far end I found a stall selling two big butternut squashes for a pound, so I bought four and figured I'd refine and quantify the Carroty Gingernut recipe what I rocked on 04.02.08.

Having onion and celery for the mirepoix, I spent another pound on carrots and ginger. I also had the end of a jar of biber salçası in the 'fridge, so all I needed from Oli's when I went there to buy bread was a slab of creamed coconut and also a bunch of fresh coriander for the garnish.

1. First, make a mirepoix by chopping onions, celery and carrots - about a pound, or half a kilo of each - and sweat these chopped vegetables with a few peeled cloves of garlic in a splash of oil in the bottom of a soup pot, keeping its lid on to preserve moisture.

2. Add the ginger. If added to the base of the soup and allowed to cook down with the mirepoix, the flavour of fresh ginger will mellow and be pervasive without being over powering. It's hard to overdo it and, if you do, you can always calm down the gingery-ness with coconut. Anyway, in this instance, I used probably four fat thumbs or maybe 12cc of fresh ginger, peeled and minced and mixed into the cooking mirepoix.

3. Peel the butternut squashes. If using a speed peeler, make sure all the skin is removed, down to the orange flesh. Cut the squashes in half and remove their seeds, then chop them into roughly 2cm cubes.

4. Before adding the diced squash to the soup pot, first add 200-250g of biber salçası (red pepper paste), if you have it. If not, use tomato puree.

5. Now add the diced squashes to the soup pot and cover with four litres of Marigold bouillon (one litre per squash). Bring to the boil and simmer for twenty minutes, until the flesh is soft enough to be blended.

6. Turn off the heat and leave the pot to stand for five or ten minutes. This is particularly important in this recipe, because you want the texture of the soup to be as silky as possible and, therefore, all its contents must be thoroughly cooked before blending.

7. While the soup is cooling, before it's blended, dissolve 100g of creamed coconut in a litre of boiling water and make up another litre of Marigold bouillon. As you blend the soup, slowly pour in this extra liquid to achieve a smooth consistency.

8. Check the seasoning. If the ginger flavour is too pronounced, you can calm it down by grating more creamed coconut directly into the soup. Serve garnished with chopped coriander.

This soup went down really well, BTW, with many second and third bowls served;-)

04.02.08: Carroty Gingernut

Seba. & I went foraging at 9.Elms this a.m., but we were late and the pickings were slim. In the market, I scooted ahead to suss out the main ingredient, hoping to find a discarded case of Jerusalem artichokes. Chance would be a fine thing but, as it happened, I did discover a trove of butternut squashes that had been well squashed. I suppose they'd fallen off the back of the lorry and the lorry had kept on reversin'. Out of the squished tubers, I picked up about ten butternuts with only superficial bruises, or the odd bit that wanted cutting out.

Meanwhile, by some kind of innate Gallic instict, Seb had assembled the basis of a mirepoix: onions, celery, carrots, plus a goodly selection of herbs. He found asparagus, too, of which we'll be hearing more about tomorrow... Back there in the then, there was an abundance of carrots and not a few scattered tomatoes. So one picked up a few of the less dodgy-looking specimens. The other main ingredient of this soup is carrots and we picked up quite a few to put with a bag of organic carrots I had left over from the weekend.

Back at base, we laid out the pickings on a table, as per the picture on the left. Seba got busy peeling carots and butternut squashes and chopping them up. I washed the tomatoes and put them in roasting trays with roughly chopped onion and peeled cloves of garlic, as per the picture on the right. Then I went and got ginger from our friendly local Sino/Viet market on Walworth Road and creamed coconut from Oli's, along with the bread.

Upon my return, I sweated a mirepoix of onion, celery and lots and lots of carrots, prolly 4kg. Peeled and finely chopped a lot of ginger: maybe 250/300g and added it to the soup pot. Put the roasted tomato/onion/garlic in another pot, covered it with 2 litres of Marigold bouillon, then whizzed the mixture and passed it through a seive to remove the pips and skin. To the main soup pot, I added the peeled and cubed squash - let's say 5kg - with another 2 litres of Marigold. Simmered for 20 mins, rested for five and then introduced Brenda the blender to the soup. Finally, I added the liquidised tomato, plus 100g of creamed coconut dissoled in a litre of boiling water. Gave it a last loving blending with Brenda.

Et voila: a gingery, carroty soup that was almost sweet, with a velvet texture if I say so myself. It went down very well with everyone, including our final visitor, Tracy, who brought in the Pullens newest resident, Johnny. Being three weeks old, he's strictly a breast milk man and didn't partake of the soup, directly, but ginger gets into the bloodstream so no doubt he'll know about it sooner or later.

08.01.08: Carrot & Ginger

loopylou@soupers_united.not writes:

A cold grey wet morning was just the thing to inspire me to cook up something warm and perky - Carrot and Ginger soup leapt out at me from Russell's Soup Bible, so I bimbled off to East Street to buy the ingredients - well most of them. In the words of Ol Blue Eyes, I Did It My Way. Had to wait a while to get served, but was entertained by the trader on the next stall punting out duvets with patter like "it's got a 25-year guarantee - as long as you never use it", etcetera. If any of these people go out of business, they can always take up writing the gags in Xmas crackers! Markets always cheer me up, but supermarkets have the opposite effect...

Once back in the Centre, I got cracking and sweated 2lbs/1kg onions with 2lbs/1kg of carrots and a smallish head of celery for about 20 minutes. Then I added 6 cloves of garlic and a large lump of ginger - about 2 thumbs' worth - and continued cooking while I peeled and diced 5lbs/2.5kg of carrots. I added them to the pot with about 7 litres of Marigold vegetable stock, brought the soup to boil and let it simmer for approx 15 minutes. I stirred in lots of black pepper during and, after the cooking, and got our colleague Brenda the Blenda to do the business with her blades. I'd bought 8lbs/4kg of carrots in total, so had 1lb left, which I grated straight into the pot as the soup was bubbling away. I simmered the pot for another 5 mins and finally added about 50g of creamed coconut: just enough to make it creamy and give it a bit more body, as I didn't want the flavour of coconut to be obvious in this soup.

I served the soup with bread from the Old Post Office Bakery in Landor Rd, Stockwell (left). This is a worker's co-operative that makes organic bread which you'll find in many wholefood shops in South London, as well as Fareshares. You can also buy from the bakery direct, which is what I do as you get it slightly cheaper and can choose from their whole range. They sell a large loaf for about £1-20 as opposed to anything up to £4 in some (WARNING: IMMINENT RANTING) poncey rip-off wholefood delicatessen. But let's keep it friendly. As well as the staff of life, I also recommend their delicious cakes, biccies and pizza. In fact, just thinking about it is making me ravenous, so let' me finish this blog entry so I can go there now and stuff my craw.

My sole New Years Resolution is to get the soup ready by midday, but today I fell at the first hurdle by failing to get out of bed in time. I am going to try harder, I promise. Luckily there's some kind of magic in the Pullens Centre and one of the myriad of ways this manifests itself is that, no matter what time the soup is ready, that is the exact moment the first punters arrive. This time, it was a pair of our stalwarts, Linda Brooker and Bruce Webb. Every time I do this, I worry that no-one's going to turn up and I'm going to be left with a whole pot of soup, but every week it all gets eaten - hooray !

Soon the place was busy and warm and full of life. There was plenty of second portions and cups of tea all round. I love coming to the Centre every week to make soup. The Pullens' community is sadly unique (not the other way round thankfully). There's no communities left like this in London and, as someone who doesn't actually live on the estate, trust me, it's a very special place. I know the spirit of the place is the result of the Pullens community having been born from the squatting movement, while all the other large local squatted communities were broken up years ago and the buildings either demolished (e.g.: St Agnes Place, R.I.P) or evicted, gentrified and none of its' original guardians living there (e.g.: Oval Mansions).

So Big Up all the Pullens ex-squatters who through sheer hard work and bloody-mindedness ensured that neither of those things happened here.

One of the people working in Peacock Yard offered his services in the near future to help cooking/serving one day. This was in response to the flyers asking for volunteers. We are delighted with any offers of help - don't feel you have to be here all day - a few hours you can spare even only as a one-off is most welcome and this is the spirit of the whole enterprise: to encourage a feeling of ownership of the Centre by the community. So if you have an urge to get involved, don't be shy - it's great fun.

The other way the Pullens Centre magic manifests itself is that we nearly always serve 23 bowls of soup. Today it was 22, but as I was locking the door, a woman came along asking if we were still serving... (cue Twilight Zone music).

Day 23: Pumpkin

It's the last day of our October souping and I've got a stinking cold. Happily, Lou was fit to make soup and, it being Halloween, she reprised her pumpkin concoction from Day Five, when spicey was spelled as it should be rather than it actually is.

As someone wrote in the log bok: 'Halloween - pumpkin soup? Work that one out!' Evidently, the equation was simple enough people for the Soup Kitchen to achieve a record number of bowls served on our last day of operation: 30!

Lou's variation on her tried and tested formula was lashings of ginger which worked for me with my cold. As someone else wrote in the log bok: 'Damn lovely - I'm not feeling well so it's given me a lift.' And as a third person wrote, 'it's not a trick, definitely a treat.'

So ends the first chapter of the Soup Kitchen. Over the month, we've done better than break even, showing an average profit of nearly nine quid per day! Of course, we don't pay utility bills and we don't pay ourselves. We are going to have to pay about a hundred quid to service the magic wand that makes it all happen, though.

Apparently, the Soup Kitchen was favourably mentioned at last night's AGM - which I didn't attend because of my rotten cold - and our Resident Liaison Officer is enthusiastic about our innovative experiment in social cohesion. Consequently, after a short break, we will resume the daily service of soup next week.

Happy Samhain, everybody. May the Great Pumpkin shower you with Autumnal abundance.

Soup Maker: Lou

Soup: Gingery Pumpkin
No. of bowls served: 30
Expenditure: £15.78
Donations: £26.98
Final score: +£203.96