21/22.02.08: 'Cornucopia'

Carlo's corn soup incorporated a couple of kilo bags of frozen sweetcorn from Iceland, melted with onion and slow cooked with spices and coconut until it achieved the desired consistency before being blended and thickened with fine polenta prepared with butter and mixed herbs. It was delicious!

Less successful, IMO, but wildly popular nontheless, was Carlo's lunch plate, comprising a 'non-Indian dal' of yellow split peas, a.k.a. jumbo lentils served with rice and salad. Friday's 'sunshine stew' comprised slow cooked carrots with organic split peas in a thick sauce the secret of which - I'm told - is to sweat down onions with potatoes before you start. I know, it's a mystery to me how he does it, too, but I'm as grateful as anyone.

This week, Carlo is making soup (and his lunch plate) on Monday. On Tuesday, Olga and a friend from Food Not Bombs will be doing their Freegan thing. Wednesday is Daisy's day, accompanied by Rhiannon from Cafe Cairo. I'll be making soup on Leap Day, next Friday and, as it turns out, on Thursday, too, probably. I'm thinking about borscht.

P.S. Re: Comments. Seems like the only peeps commenting were spammers, so I've opted for moderation and verifcation. Don't let that stop you, though.

29.01.08: Yellow Sunshine Soup

I set out to evoke some January sunshine with this sweetcorn (2X£1, Iceland) chowder, thickened with yellow split peas (1kg, about 75p) and potatoes (half a bag of them Roosters that were going cheap, 50p) and enlivened by yellow bell peppers (eight; £3 from Oli's) plus a 680g jar of tatli biber salcasi, sweet red pepper paste (£1.79). I was late getting going this morning, for reasons I won't go into suffice it say the neighbours have noticed my speaker is fixed, and the soup wasn't ready before 12.45pm.

I did it by soaking the kilo of yellow split peas over night and simmering them for half an hour this morning while sweating a mirepoix of onion and leek and carrot and celery. I cleaned half a dozen yellow peppers, removing their cores and seeds and cutting them into inch wide segments, and roasted them in a hot oven with a generous splash of oil. I peeled and roughly cubed the potatoes, adding them to the soup pot, stirring, turning down the heat and adding a splash of liquid to prevent sticking. Then I added half the cooked split peas to the pot with a couple of litres of Marigold bouillon and brought the pot back to simmer.

For that sweet smack of sunshine, I wanted pure flavour and none of the stuck-in-the-teeth texture of sweetcorn. Or bell peppers, FTM. So, I boiled up the frozen sweetcorn with a couple of litres of Marigold bouillon and churned it with Brenda the blender, adding the roasted yellow peppers and blending again and then forced the mixture through a sieve to obtain a broth so rich and luxurious it would have made the Jolly Green Giant impersonate Freddie Mercury: Galileo, Magnifico!

Brenda thoroughly blended my mirepoix mixed with potato and split peas into a smooth puree, to which I added the strained sweetcorn 'n' pepper liquid, the remainder of the cooked split peas and the contents of a jar of sweet red pepper paste. This last ingredient, of course, turned the yellow soup orange. Finally, I finely diced the two remaining raw yellow peppers for garnish and to give the soup a touch of crunch, which seemed to go down well with the seventeen soupees who tried it, several of whom had seconds.