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.

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.

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.

24.01.08: Pomodoro E Basilico

Back once again came the Bolognese maestro, reprising his creamy tomato soup, this time in a version with chick peas in the bottom, a subtle touch of chilli, and ample quantities of fresh basil torn over and stirred in for tip top flavour. Carlo brought with him a couple of getting-past-it pot plants that all but died on the bus journey, but he wasn't to know that I'd picked up a (literal) shed load of basil @ Nine Elms on Monday. So, however unseasonally, this was another beautifully balanced tomato with ample herbaceousness. But the bad news is that only eleven peeps ventured over the Soup Kitchen threshold to taste it and non saw fit to comment in the log bok, leaving the chef to question whether it had been worth his effort?

23.01.08: Sweet Potato with Red Peppers & Chilli

Returning to the Soup Kitchen following their successful debut last Friday, Daisy and Rhiannon, assisted by Holly, made (according to the new log bok) 'a splendid concoction of the following: sweet potato, red peppers, carrots, chilli, coriander... and a little bit of love'. Sounds delish, no? Well, apparently, it was. I saw, apparently, because I never got to try it. Instead, I spent most of the day trying to get to Tooting: first on a Northern Line tube train that couldn't get past a broken signal; then on a 155 bus for which I had to wait nearly an hour while several buses packed to the gunnels with disgruntled tube passengers sailed by. Cheers, TFL.

Anyway, I digress. Digress while standing at a bus stop near the Oval re-reading a dogeared copy of Metro, that is. When I got back, the soup was all gone and, heinously, our talismanic frog pot that we used to collect donations was in smithereens! According to Daisy - in loco parentis - it leapt off the counter and croaked on the floor. I don't know how she can joke about it. I was very fond of that hungry frog and it served us well over sixty full days of serving soup. But all must pass. So, farewell then, amphibious Friend of Soup. May you attain in this last leap the lilly pad of Nirvana.