18.12.07: Another Borscht

Lou had some of her puréed beetroot soup leftover from Friday and so she extended it with the addition of sweet red peppers and shredded red cabbage, which worked particularly well. She made a mirepoix using a couple of large and one smaller onion, eight carrots and six celery stalks, with six cloves of garlic. As these diced veg sweated down, she chopped and added the pepper and cabbage, plus four cans of plum tomatoes, then the beetroot purée and four litres of water. It was served, with a swirl of yoghurt and garnish of chopped dill, to 23 appreciative people.

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.

14.12.07: Fresh Beetroot

Magda works for the cleaning company that has its offices almost next door to the Pullens Centre and is one of our regulars, often bringing in her own bowl so she can take her soup back to the office. Being Polish, her house mates assume she must make a pretty good borscht and no doubt she could if she put her mind to it, but this weekend we agreed to help her out and Lou made beetroot soup for everyone, but especially for Magda and her dinner party guests.

As on Day 12, Lou bought a net of beets from Crusons in Camberwell and followed the absurdly simple recipe she found in The Great Green Cookbook: boil 'em up, rub off their skins, add stock (enriched with Marmite) and puree. I'm calling this 'Fresh Beetroot Soup', rather than 'Borscht', because I don't think it would work unless the beets were absolutely fresh. As it happened on Friday, however, they were and this soup certainly hit the spot.

I did manage to slip over the Pullens Centre for soup, but wasn't able to there much over the second half of the week because the contractors finally got around to my flat and I had a yard full of Polish guys in florescent vest (see left). I don't want to moan (but I'm going to anyway): I put up with four months of living in semi-darkness while the scaffolding was up, all Summer long, yet they waited until the coldest days of the year to paint my window frames and front door. Wonder what the Polish is for 'sod's law'?

12/13.12.07: Carlo Interlude

As you can see from this picture of the sun in the tree opposite the Pullens Centre, the weather this past few days has been crystal clear and freezing cold. The kind of conditions that surely call for the kind of hot and spicy soup of which Signor Atif is a past master.

Carlo is establishing himself as the Soup Kitchen's midweek attraction and his style is becoming familiar: on Wednesday, he makes a powerfully-flavoured soup which he calls by some enigmatic name that gives no clue as to the constituents of the soup, although its usually supported by such weighted adjectives as 'vegan' and 'organic'. This week's concoction was billed as 'Sweet 'n' sour Valentine': basically, a very gingery orange broth with pearl barley in the bottom. When I say gingery, it cleared the sinuses. Carlo told me he made it 'Thai style' and I'm not sure what that means, but I suspect what he did was grate the ginger and boil it up to make an infusion, added to finish what was a sensational and distinctly adult soup.

The day after, Carlo tends to extend what's left of his soup from the day before by adding a green vegetable puree, re-jigging the spices, and serving the soup with garlic bread as croutons. This week, he used broccoli (billed on the black board as 'Something Fab') and the resulting soup was thicker and heartier. Or maybe that was just me, getting into the festive mood a couple of weeks early.

Freed from the need to make soup from scratch, Carlo can focus his considerable culinary expertise upon the pasta, as Thursday is Pasta Nite. Again this week, he served fusilli with an extraordinary, fruity veggie sauce that defies conventional notions of Italianate, tomato-based pasta dishes. This one incorporated rhubarb (rhubarb!), which was a first for me, and was accompanied by a crisp carrot and sultana salad. Which was nice.

Although there weren't really enough takers to make it worth his while, hopefully Carlo will persevere with Pasta Nite for at least a few weeks into the New Year, until sufficient numbers of people get used to the idea that they can eat their dinner at the Pullens Centre on Thursday evenings.

11.12.07: Broccoli

Lou usually makes soup on Tuesdays but this today it was down to me. I sank a few pints last night with former Pullenite, Tim Platt, and started late this morning, so I thought I'd fall back on a classic, one for which I have an almost perfect recipe that I can knock out while slightly groggy and half asleep. So here goes:

1. At a stall in East Street, I spent a fiver on a carrier bag full of broccoli, about the kilos, plus the mirepoix vegetables: carrots, onions and celery, plus garlic and half a dozen waxy potato.

2. Start by peeling and crushing the cloves of a head of garlic and dicing three medium-sized mild onions, four biggish carrots and a smallish head of celery, tossing the veg as it's chopped into a splash of oil in the bottom of the soup pot, over medium heat.

3. Turn down the heat and season the mirepoix with a generous sprinkling - say, two desserts spoons full - of powdered coriander. Continue to cook with the lid on the soup pot, lifting which it regularly to stir the chopped veg to stop it from sticking.

4. Prepare the broccoli by removing and reserving the florets and chop the stalks into approximately a 1cm dice, adding it to the soup pot. The broccoli I had was nice and fresh, but the stalks were a bit stringy and needed quite a lot of cooking to soften up before being liquidizised.

5. Peel the potatoes, dice them into centimetre cubes and put them into the pot with the rest of the veg. Cover it with four litres of Marigold bouillon, bring the soup to the boil and simmer it for twenty minutes, until the broccoli stalks are soft and the potatoes start to dissolve. Then leave the soup to stand for five or ten minutes before whizzing it up.

6. Throw the broccoli florets into the soup with another two litres of bouillon, return to the heat and cook for a further ten minutes before blending the cooked florets into the soup with a stick mixer.

7. Serve with an optional swirl of fresh yoghurt, or cream if you prefer.

I used fresh, runny EasiYo yogurt and went a bit over the top in the bowl that's pictured, but it sorted my hangover and generally went down very well. Especially with Mike who wrote in the log bok: TRIFFIC - Broccoli; King of the Soup Jungle!!