19.03.08: Potato & Leek

The Soup Kitchen has essayed several leek and potato soups and produced a Nearly Perfick Recipe, but Daisy's and Holly's novel spin was potato and leek. They produced a terrific soup that was typically chunky (unblended) and herby, with lots of thyme and lashings (or should that be grindings?) of black pepper. Frugally, it also incorporated a jug full of Spring onion soup left over from the day before.

The Ladies Who Lunch always bring a great vibe with them, as you can see (that baby does not belong to Daisy, BTW;-). Maybe they'll get it together to offer food the Pullens Centre sometimes over the coming months, after the Soup Kitchen closes? Let's hope!

18.03.08: Creamy Spring Onion

For my penultimate soup, I wanted a straightforward single-varietal vegetable recipe based upon the traditional mirepoix and maybe made creamy with the judicious addition of coconut. I thought to refine the Spring Onion soup improvised on 06.03.08, when there were no leeks in the market, blending the soup and straining it through a sieve to achieve a silky consistency.

I bought a 3kg box of Spring onions from pals in East Street, bruv, for a quid more than I paid last time, plus a couple of leeks, a kilo of spuds and a bunch of parsley. I went to Oli's for bread and to get a head of their celery, which always seems greener and bushier, and saw that they had wonderful white onions, so I bought a couple of them, too, as per the pic.

Back at base, I peeled and diced the white onions, washed and diced the leeks and half a kilo of carrots, plus a whole head of celery, and sweated this mirepoix over medium-low heat in a splash of oil in the bottom of the soup pot with its lid on to retain the moisture, stirring every couple of minutes to prevent sticking. I peeled the potatoes, chopped them into a rough dice, and added them to the pot. The spuds will cook down completely to thicken the soup.

I washed and then I started to chop Spring onions, adding them to the pot as they were chopped, stirring the contents and adjusting the heat to prevent sticking. Fresh Spring onions give off quite a lot of moisture, so no further liquid was necessary until all the Spring onions had been chopped - which took a minute or 45 - and added to the pot. Then I covered the contents with four litres of Marigold bouillon and simmered for ten minutes before turning off the heat and leaving the pot to cool for ten minutes more before blending.

I blended the soup thoroughly, adding another litre of bouillon and a litre of boiling water with 100g of creamed coconut dissolved into it. However one blends and blends, little bits of onion will always remain, with a slightly slimy texture that's not too pleasant, unless you pass it. Yes force all this soup through a sieve into another pot, using the back of the ladle. It's worth the effort, I guarantee.

One person described this soup in the dairy as 'very Springy' and someone else wrote, 'fucking lovely', but they should watch out, because language like that can get you excluded from Pullens Tenants & Residents Association. A third person put, 'totally gorgeous', which is the same sentiment expressed in a less spunky form. And then there's the woman who has so fallen for my soup that she talks about it in her sleep, to her boyfriend's consternation. She reckons 'soup of souperman are so gooood!!' C'est vrai, cherie. What are you going to do without me?

Defeated ping pong champ sniffs the soup (pic of Victoria by Bruce Webb)

12.02.08: Leek Y Potato

Today, I met up with Seba. and Olga at 9a.m. and we soon found out that we were too late for effective scrumping @ Nine Elms. What hadn't been picked up, already, had been swept up by the cleaners, who seem to be starting earlier these days. We found a solitary leek and some potatoes. Then we found a celeriac root with a few dodgy bits that needed cutting out and a bag of spinach that was on the turn. So, I thought, Leeky Potato (geddit) with additions. Except that I didn't have hardly any leek and not enough spud. See:

Back @ Pullens Centre, I got Seba. and Olga choppin' while I nipped down the market and scored another 3kgs leeks plus a quid's worth of big floury white spuds. We made the soup in the standard manner. Seba wouldn't believe that iceberg lettuce was a legitimate soup ingredient, but I shredded and sweated it down with the mirepoix, added the spinach that Olga had carefully picked over and sweated that, too. Then, we added the diced spuds and cubed celeriac, plus the shredded leeks, continued to cook for ten minutes before covering with a couple of litres of Marigold bouillon and cooking for ten minutes more.

We decanted several great big ladles full of soup into another pot and whizzed the soup up with Brenda the blender, slowly pouring in another litre of bouillon. Once it achieved a smooth-ish consistency, we amalgamated the chunky bits to make a good pot full of soup. "That's as much soup as we ever make," I told Olga, our new recruit, "about 30 portions". Turns out, we served 29 bowls and it was all gone by 2pm! Here's Olga & Seba. with their empty pot:

30.01.08: Chunky Green Vegetables with Thyme

Daisy and Holly - a.k.a. 'the wholesome darling girls' - didn't do so well down at Nine Elms this morning, perhaps because they were too late and all the freegan bargains had been snaffled by earlier worms, so they went down to East Street and returned with bundles of gear: asparagus, celery, onion, spinach, leek and thyme.

Asparagus in January does represent something of an ethical dilemma, but the important point is that these wholesome darling girls didn't pay a premium price for their 'grass, which would probably have been thrown away if they hadn't negotiated it into their soup. Dasiy also had reservations about using Knorr vegetable stock powder, which contains MSG, but the Soup Kitchen had run out of Marigold and needs must, is it not?

Anyway and for whatever reasons, the soup was delicious. An unblended, chunky and very herby stew that Cathy declared in the log bok, 'the best thing I've slurped all year' while Crispin - winding up Daisy over her resemblance to fellow Brits School graduate, Adele - said it was 'superb'.

28.01.08: Lightly Curried Roots

Monday was becoming our day for rootling through the jetsam of New Covent Garden wholesale market, but Sebastien was otherwise engaged this morning and I didn't want to go it alone, so I mooched off to Lidl instead. Not only is Lidl the land of chocolate-with-hazelnuts and paprika crisps, but it's also the only place I know of locally where one can be reasonably sure of bagging a 'brain' of celeriac. Yer, celeriac brains. As in the roots of the celery plant. Plus, there's this sign in the car park:

At Lidl this morning, never mind the schogetten, I scored a couple of celeriac brains (@ £1.19), a cute lil' bag o' parsnips (79p) and another of leeks (£1.29), plus onions (69p) and garlic (65p). That's five-eighty: not quite a sick squid. On the way back to the Pullens Centre, I swung by Oli's for bread, plus a 200g slab o' creamed coconut (39p: they've got a new brand in) and a bunch of coriander, along with a couple of loaves of bread.

I made the soup the standard way, substituting leeks for most of the onion/celery in the mirepoix, with three diced carrots and about half a dozen crushed cloves of garlic. I peeled and roughly diced the root vegetables, adding them to the sweating mirepoix in the soup pot. Added turmeric and curry powder, about a dessert spoon of each, and mixed with the big wooden spoon. Mixed it pretty good. Mixed it down sweet and added some moisture: slowly, I filled that soup pot up with four litres of Marigold bouillon and simmered it for nigh on a half hour before I brought on Brenda the blender.

Mark was waiting to try the finished soup and he had a cup of tea to warm himself up because, silly billy, he'd locked his dumb self out of his gaff and so he slept in the park last night! I finished the soup with half a block - 100g - of creamed coconut dissolved in a litre of boiling water and garnished it with a generous sprinkling of coarsely-chopped fresh coriander. Just your common or garden hearty neighbourhood soup: I served seventeen peeps, several of whom had seconds, and had a litre left over that I took round to Jen's.

17.12.07: Leek & Potato

I chose to go with L+P this morning in order to record at least one more Almost Perfect Recipe before we break for Christmas and also because mighty fine looking leeks were on special offer in Somerfield, so I bought three kilos (@ £2.50/kg). As for the other main component of this soup, I used most of a 2kg bag of Désirée, a versatile variety that mashes well but is waxy enough to hold its shape when diced and boiled in a soup.

The challenge when making leek and potato soup is to produce a variety of textures and flavours: a creamy background to tangy leek with some chunks of potato. On 3.10.07, I mashed the spuds separately and finely chopped all the other ingredients. On 15.10.07, I whizzed the soup and experimented with coconut instead of dairy products to get a creamier texture (and I rather overdid it). This recipe combines both approaches and makes at least 25 250ml servings:

1. Slice the leeks lengthways and clean them thoroughly under running water. Make a mirepoix by dicing three medium sized onions, three biggish carrots and half a head of celery. Peel and smash half a dozen cloves of garlic.

2. Cook the mirepoix and garlic, with a couple of Bay leaves, in a generous splash of vegetable oil over medium heat in the bottom of your soup pot, with the lid on. Stir often to prevent sticking.

3. As the mirepoix cooks, finely shred the cleaned leeks and add them to the pot as you do so, stirring and replacing the lid. Add a litre of Marigold bouillon.

4. Peel and dice your spuds. The leeks will sweat down quite a bit, so you don't need an equal quantity of potatoes (unless you want to make Potato & Leek soup): a bit more than half and lees than two thirds by weight is about right. In this case, with 3kg of leeks, I used about 1.75kg of spuds. Add the diced potato to the soup pot and cover with a further four litres of bouillon.

5. Bring the soup to the boil and simmer it for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, melt 50g of creamed coconut - a quarter of a 200g block - in a litre of boiling water. Turn off the heat under the soup and leave it to stand for five-to-ten minutes more. Fish out any Bay leaves before blending.

6. Remove about a third of the soup to a separate container and then blend the rest with a stick mixer, adding the coconut mixture (to make a total of six litres of liquid in this soup).

7. After blending, reincorporate the chunky portion of the soup and serve. Popular garnishes include chopped parsley and Spring onion, or chives, but I grated nutmeg over the surface of this soup to give it a slightly spiced finish.

The log bok is full and, rather than replace it, I want to get a page-a-day diary for people to comment on their Soup Kitchen experience, so no specific remarks about this soup were recorded, but it went down very well. So well that almost every single person who sampled it had seconds, several had third bowls, and it was all gone by 3.30pm.

13.11.07: Lentil and Vegetable Stew

Compare the image above with the one on the right and you can see that things are starting to happen at the Pullens Centre. One of the residents - Simon - repainted the woodwork downstairs on the side of the building that faces into Iliffe Yard in order to smarten the place up before the open weekend at the end of the month, when the Centre will be the venue for a community art exhibition. Simon wasn't prepared to erect scaffolding and tackle the upstairs and so the chaps from Makers - the contractor responsible for the external refurbishment of the estate - were persuaded to take the job on themselves. They've also brought forward the redecoration of the frontage so it too will look good for the Open Yards weekend.

What's more, you'll notice the white van in the photo belonging to OCO, the heating engineers contracted to Southwark Council. The boiler at the Pullens Centre hasn't worked all year, despite the attentions of various chaps at various times. Now, however, its been replaced with a brand new one that actually dispenses hot water on demand! Yay! Now we can retire the energy-hungry urn we've depended upon for hot water this past month.

Today, Lou made a lentil & vegetable stew that went down very well, with comments in the log bok that included: 'Really delicious soup, thank you!' 'Yes it is, Ta!' 'Simply the best' (or should that be beast?) and 'a true tummy treat'. 21 bowls were served.

Lou used 2kg of brown lentils which were soaked over night. Lentils don't necessarily need to be soaked in advance, but it reduces the cooking time and - according to some - soaking one's lentils and discarding the soak water before boiling them in fresh water reduces 'gaseousness' a.k.a. 'fartiness'.

I wasn't watching when this chunky lentil soup was made, but I'd guess that Lou boiled the lentils separately while frying onion and garlic in the bottom of the soup pot, to which she added coarsely diced potato, carrot and leek. I daresay she continued to the veg. for ten minutes or so before adding the lentils, covering with stock and cooking for at least half an hour, garnishing the soup with chopped parsley as it was served.

Day 11: Leek & Potato

I don't disrespect St. Delia, no matter what footy-related shenanigans she gets up to. Indeed, if I were Scroobius Pip, remixing 'Thou Shalt Always Kill', I'd command that 'thou shall not desecrate the good name of Delia, nor cast aspersions upon the integrity of her commercial relationships'. I yield to no cook in my enthusiasm for Marigold bouillon powder, so I can hardly sneer when Deals declares it 'without doubt an ingredient that has revolutionised modern cooking'.

But then you check Delia's recipe for Leek, Onion and Potato Soup and she says, 'This is my most favourite soup in the world and now we can buy extremely good mashed potato frozen it means we can be a little bit more spontaneous about the whole process of soup making'. Oh right, Deals, Q.E.D. The good folks at McCain bring out their frozen discs of Simply Mash and the world is a better place. No doubt the Catholic church will soon ordain women priests while the Canaries qualify for European competition.

Today's L & P differs from Day Three's in that it's blended whereas that one was chunky. In that recipe, I used my mashed potato (not McCain's) in the manner Delia describes, as a 'backdrop to other ingredients', but in this version, I'm going to blend the soup anyway, so I don't need to make mash separately. In order to get a nice creamy texture, Delia uses milk and butter, but I'm going to experiment with creamed coconut to add texture rather than flavour to the soup while keeping it vegan.

First I needed to locate the ingredients and somehow - since it's a Monday and there's no market down East Street and because I wasn't very together this morning - I ended up in Tesco. Blimey, they really run those places for their own convenience, innit? Took ages at the checkout because the machinery didn't work and the operator struggled to weigh 2.5 kilos of leeks (@ £2.28/kg) in three instalments. On the plus side, I got a 2.5kg bag of Desiree spuds for 89p.

Starting with a mirepoix of onion, celery and carrot, sweated in a big knob of Flora, I alternately added shredded leek and diced potato to the pot, keeping the lid on. I kept back a couple of the leeks, shredded and sautéed them separately. I added two litres of Marigold bouillon to the sweated vegetables, whacked the heat up and boiled vigorously for about ten minutes, then added another couple of litres of bouillon, turned the heat off and left the pot to cool for ten minutes before blending.

Meanwhile, I melted a block of creamed coconut in boiling water and added it to the sautéed, shredded leeks. Then I tasted the mixture and suffered a crisis of confidence because coco-leek is a bit weird. I briefly considered having two soups, but then I told myself not to be silly and stirred the coco-leek mixture into the blended soup, along with another couple of litres of bouillon (making a total six litres of bouillon in all, to two-and-a-half kilos each of leeks and potatoes) then returned the pot to the heat and brought it to the boil. Right on cue, my upstairs neighbour, Cathy, came in and she had the first bowl. She didn't mention anything about coconuts, but she did write in the log bok that the soups are 'getting better by the day'.

In fact, the barely perceptible coconut flavour attracted little comment. Joe here certainly didn't mention it. A trio trooped in from the Buddhist Centre and one of them remarked upon it, favourably, and another one of the regulars later picked up on it, but nobody had anything bad to say. I noticed how the coconut fat continued to thicken the soup after it had been reheated a few times while the flavour faded even further into the background as lunch time wore on. There was a bit of rush again today and I served 28 bowls of soup by 3pm.

Soup Maker: Russell
Soup: Leek & Potato
Other ingredients: Creamed coconut
No. of bowls served: 28
Expenditure: £12.77
Donations: £36.01
Running balance: +£116

Day Three: Leek and Potato

This morning I went down our local street market, East Street and spent a fiver on a bag of veg, including three kilos of leeks. I had the idea I wanted to do a chunkier soup that's not blended, but still had a thickened consistency, so in this recipe, I mashed the potato and dissolved it in the soup to give a creamy background against which the flavour of the leeks stands out.

Because this soup isn't blended, I took extra special care to cut the carrot/onion/celery base into a fine dice and cooked that in the bottom of the pot with a couple of bay leaves, lid on, while finely shredding the leeks. Leeks, BTW, have to be thoroughly washed: peel off the outer leaves and slit the leek length-wise before washing it under running water to rinse out any lingering traces of mud.

Rick the homeless guy was first through the door, around midday, before the soup was ready. Following the incendiary incident and with the vicar's connivance, he's relocated to a shed in the churchyard of St John's in Larcom Street, but is hopeful that soon he'll get a bedsit through St Mungo's. Helpfully, he vacuumed the carpet and mopped the lino before being the first to sample the soup of the day.

I sweated the shredded leeks with the cooked mirepoix and at the same time steamed half a kilo of peeled potatoes. When the leeks were cooked, I poured over three litres of boiling Marigold bouillon to fill the six litre pot and mashed the cooked spuds through a ricer directly into the soup, which immediately thickened it.

I chopped some parsley for garnish and, bizarrely, discovered an unopened jar of pesto in the 'fridge, so I was able to offer the option of a dollop of the stuff in the soup. I thought this worked pretty well and Rick agreed. He wrote in the log bok: "Just Right Nothing Better". Kai from Crampton Street wrote, who is also becoming a regular, wrote, "your soup just keeps getting better".

One of the blokes working on the exterior renovation of the estate complained, obliquely, that his soup wasn't salty enough. It's true that I don't add salt to my soups and a couple of people have remarked upon it. I reckon that's because these people are smokers and their taste buds are clogged!

I anticipated that more workmen would take advantage of a warm place to eat their sandwiches, not to mention free soup, but word evidently hasn't got round yet. However, if anyone knows the Bulgarian for 'free soup', the place could apparently get packed out v. quickly! Rick said he'd taken one of the Soup Kitchen flyers to Webber Street, which didn't exactly fill me with glee, and I gently explained that the Pullens Soup Kitchen is primarily intended to serve Pullens people.

Speaking of Pullens people, Linda Brooker was in today, adding a copious sprinkling of salt to her soup. Turns out that the big pot Gabrielle used to use when he ran the cafe at the Centre a few years ago belongs to her and she brought it back, so now we have a 16 litre pot to work with, if things get busier. As it goes, the last bit of soup went home with Jen York , who came in at the end of the day with Esme, six, and brought with her a saucepan for Shanti, 14, to have hot soup after school.

Soup Maker: Russell
Soup: Leek and potato
Other ingredients: Bay leaves, parsley/pesto
No. of bowls served: 14
Expenditure: Fiver
Donations: £11.15
Running balance: +£8.24