14.03.08: Pumpkin & Split Pea

The Soup Kitchen reveres Delia Smith, even when having a gentle dig at her for promoting McCain's frozen discs of mash potato as a soup thickener. But of course there are people who just don't have the time, inclination or skillz to mash! These days, Deals is driving a vehicle called How To Cheat At Cooking in which she cuts corners by incorporating readymade products into her recipes. In that spirit, I offer this interpretation of my friend Jennifer's soup, the secret ingredient of which is a 425g jar of Loyd Grossman's Jalfrezi Sauce.

To make 30 portions, you'll need 2kg of yellow split peas and a couple of pumpkins, or one big one. I saw some lovely green skinned pumpkins in East Street yesterday, but today they were gone and so I had to haggle with a wily Jamaican pumpkin purveyor instead and pay his price. Not that I minded, because his pumpkin was every bit as good as he claimed and he was grateful for all my change. Plus, with a couple of the Scotch bonnets left over from t'other day for added heat, I could (and did) claim that this soup is coming direct from JA:

1. Soak the split peas overnight and start by boiling them up and simmering for at least half an hour.

2. Finely chop a mirepoix of onion, carrots and celery, about a pound or half a kilo of each. As this soup will not be blended, it's important that the dice is small and neat. And a couple of de-seeded and minced Scotch bonnets (left), or more if you dare, but be aware that these peppers are HOT.

3. Sweat the mirepoix over medium/low heat in a good splash of oil in the bottom of your soup pot with the lid on to preserve moisture, taking it off every few minutes to stir the contents with a wooden spoon and prevent them from sticking or burning.

4. While the mirepoix sweats, peel the pumpkins, remove their seeds and dice their flesh into centimetre cubes.

5. When the mirepoix has cooked down and begun to caramelise in the bottom of the soup pot, add a dessert spoonful each of ground jeera 'n' dana (cumin and coriander), stirring it into the mixture. Then add the jar of Loyd's jalfrezi sauce and the contents of a tin of tomatoes, stirring that into the mirepoix as it continues to cook.

6. Now add the diced pumpkin, stir, cover with two litres of boiling Marigold bouillon, turn up the heat and bring to the boil. Add another couple of litres of bouillon and simmer for ten minutes or so before adding the peas.

7. Now add the cooked split peas with a further two litres of Marigold bouillon, making six litres in all. Stir the soup so that it's well mixed and simmer for a further ten minutes. The soup will continue to thicken as the split peas disintegrate.

8. Check the seasoning. If you've overdone the chilli, calm down the flavour by grating creamed coconut into your soup. Garnish with freshly chopped coriander as you serve.

19 people enjoyed this soup, which was an improvement on the day before, but the experience was a lot more pleasant. A small party came in from the Buddhist Centre up the street, where Ira doesn't cook on Fridays, and one of them also tried a bowl of yesterday's left over cauliflower soup. As did Joe, because he's a bit young to appreciate chilli. Several of the Soup Kitchen regulars lingered over second bowls and wrote compliments in the dairy: 'legendary - makes me sweat in a good way.

07.02.08: Yellow Satay Soup + Veggie Stew

Inspired by the Chinese New Year, apparently, the basis of this soup is yellow split peas, aka jumbo lentils, soaked and cooked down with paprika and cracked black pepper (the pepper corms roasted in hot oil until they crack) then blended to the consistency of polenta. Carlo made his own vegetable stock by boiling up carrots, celery and onion with garlic - your basic mirepoix mixture - and straining the resultant liquid, which he used to liquidise some peanut butter, seasoned with coriander and more paprika. Then he mixed the peanutty liquid with the creamy split pea base, uttered a few inscrutable incantations under his breath, and voila: another big hit soup!

The next day, Carlo extended his soup from the day before by adding pureed mushrooms and called it 'Morning Glory', oblivious to the English slang connotations of that phrase;-) This, however, was a side attraction to his second weekly experiment in offering a lunchtime plate of food for a set price, £2.80. Today's stew comprised various pulses with tomato, onion and garlic, plus parsnips, carrots, and organic red potatoes, with tofu, flavoured with parsley and coriander. Served on Basmati rice and accompanied by a little salad, it was pretty special.

Jan Duke had walked around the yards, telling everyone that a lunchtime special was in the offing at the Pullens Centre and so, by the time I came over at half-past-midday, the place was rammed and there wasn't anywhere to sit. The February weather was so clement that some people took their plates of rice and stew to sit outside at the benches in Iliffe Yard. Consequently, Carlo fed at least forty people, all of whom were quite content, with many happily giving more than the prescribed £2.80, making the day a roaring success from every point of view. Here's a photo from my P.O.V., when I eventually got a seat:

Graham rocking the David Live look; Naomi gazing into space

Carlo will return on Monday when, at the request of DSDHA, he will be reviving his 7 Pulse soup from last week. Some kind of vegetable stew-type punch plate may well also be offered. Seba. and Russell will (probably) be ransacking Nine Elms on Tuesday and may be joined by a new soup maker. On Wednesday it's Daisy, Rhiannon and Holly, essaying another of their ingenuous freegan creations. Carlo returns on Thursday and, on Friday, Cafe Cairo will be decking the hall for their event in the evening, so it's not certain what we'll be doing so far as the soup is concerned. But you can be sure it will be tasty.

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.

25.01.08: Gorbanos

As if in answer to Carlo's exasperated question, yesterday, when he wondered if it was worth his while struggling half way across London laden with wilting basil plants in order to make amazing soup for less than a dozen souls to enjoy, today was a sell-out. Seriously, a neighbour knocked on my flat door to tell me how good the soup was and, when I went round to investigate, someone else crossed the road to say the same thing. The log bok collected ten written endorsements, or commendations, incl.: two 'fantastics'; an 'absolutely delicious'; one 'damn good and a 'couldn't put it better myself. Yummy!'

'Gorbanos' is another of Carlo's enigmatic appelations. Basically, this soup was made of lightly curried yellow split peas blended with creamed coconut and mixed with fresh spinach. Carlo also dressed some spinach and chopped celery with a lemon vinaigrette to serve as a side salad, which two people described in the log bok as, 'great'. So what was a difficult week finally ended on a high note.

A few things went wrong this week. Lou - who has been on board the Soup wagon since we started - quit (come back!) and my home phone line got cut off, so I've been playing catchee uppee on this blog. On the other hand, I've cured my sick loudspeaker. One of my precious House Pods had developed a mysterious buzz, but I seem to have fixed it by the simple expedient of TURNING THE VOLUME AS LOUD AS IT GOES.

17.01.08: Gingered Royal Yellow Peas + Pasta Night

Carlo made a terrific, gingery soup with yellow split peas that inspired an artist whose style is strongly reminiscent of Mr Natty Bo to draw a picture of it with the comment appended: 'Cool man! O'Reety!!' Someone else wrote, '"Really rather yummy," said the Princess with a pea up her arse', while a third commented that it's 'so good to have real food so close to work, the soup gets better every day'. Which is frightfully gratifying, but the sad fact is that too few people tasted today's soup and quite a lot got thrown away.

In the evening, Carlo served a pasta dish he called Penne Kemptonaise, after the town in Germany where his girlfriend lives. Sigh. He bought organic ricotta and made a cream with avocado and diced hottish red peppers. Not only that, but he curried the rest of the new potatoes left over from the previous day to amazing effect. Wow. Sadly, hardly anyone turned up to eat this fantastic fare, so Carlo had to throw food away and he probably lost money. So, it looks like that's the end of Pasta Night:-(

11.01.08: Split Pea & Pumpkin

Today, I was joined by Sebastian, a new face in the Soup Kitchen, who I hope will become a regular, even though he insists he needs to get a paid job. I picked this recipe for yellow split peas and pumpkin out of Debra Mayhew's Soup Bible and purchased a bag of dried yellow split peas and a couple of nice looking chunks of pumpkin from an Afro-Carib grocery in the Heffalump shopping centre yesterday evening and soaked the split peas overnight.

This morning the weather was diabolical again but that didn't stop me dragging Sebastian down Walworth Road in the sleet and bluster to show him round the shops. In East Street, I bought a head of celery and half a kilo of carrots (onions I had), plus a couple of extra bits of pumpkin to make the total weight up to 3kg and a bunch of coriander.

Back at base, I put the split peas on to boil for twenty minutes while Sebastian cleaned, peeled and diced the pumpkin into small, bite-sized chunks. He also had a good go at roasting the pumpkin seeds, which I've never managed to do successfully. The trick, apparently, is to clean and then dry them them thoroughly before spreading them onto a roasting tray with some good quality oil and roasting slowly, turning the seeds in the pan often so that they cook evenly and adding salt, or paprika, or whatever flavouring you desire. S'nice.

Although the Soup Bible doesn't call for the full mirepoix, I made one anyway and seasoned it with two dessert spoons each of freshly ground dana (coriander seed) and jeera (ground cumin). The recipe calls for tarragon and chilli, but I didn't have any tarragon and I chose to do without chilli (although, on reflection, a couple of fresh green chillis would have been nice) and, instead, to emphasise the great flavour of coriander, both ground and fresh.

Those who tasted the soup enjoyed it, at least there were no complaints, but there weren't many of 'em and nobody wrote in the log bok. After a week in which we've consistently served 23 people every lunchtime, today there were only 17. Go figure.

I neglected to take any photographs, but in the evening, the soupers enjoyed an exeat to Dex, in Brixton, where our good neighbour and regular soup lover, Mr Natty Bo, led his Topcats once more through their rhythmic paces. So here's a couple of pics of that:

Next week's soup kitchen rota: it's Russell on Monday, serving a soup of Cauliflower, Flageolet and Fennel Seed; Lou. is on Tue, probably re-rocking the Turkish red lentil soup from day ten; on Wednesday, Russell & Sebastian plan to forage in Nine Elms for a freegan soup; Carlo will be smiling throughout Thursday and going into the evening with Pasta Night; and on Friday, a crew from Stockwell's legendary but sadly fire-damaged Café Cairo will make soup at lunchtime and go on into the evening, weaving magic carpets. See you there.