Tomato and Fennel Soup

Phew. Another hard work week gone by (by the time this posts, a couple of weeks), filled with labor, late nights, and eating at the same restaurant every day of the week with co-workers... the glory of business travel. Funny how those things work. At the start of the week I was thrilled for oxtails and scallops with wine-butter sauce, but by the end of the week I was practically crying for salads and lightly cooked veggies, with maybe a ravioli or two. And because the weekly schedule was work, dinner, work, get to hotel at ass-o-clock AM, try to sleep and fail because of strange hotel room, up, work... by the time I wrapped my lips around a glass of wine, I was about ready to compose florid verse in praises of the grape. Yeah, that atmosphere did not conduct itself to a desire to cook once I dragged myself home. I made a halfhearted attempt at celery remoulade, but was thwarted by the lack of celeriac (I swear I saw it at the market last week... or was it two weeks ago? Guess that will have to wait for autumn, now). I collapsed in exhaustion, and woke up wanting something simple, nutritious, and above all, EASY. So I chose this tomato and fennel soup.

Now, don't get me wrong kids, it is still May, and there aren't any worthwhile tomatoes out yet. But here's the awesome thing, tomato and fennel soup from the Les Halles Cookbook uses tomatoes in a CAN! I used to be mighty skeptical about any food that comes in a can, because in my experience canning tends to turn veggies into a slimy, preserved mess. Just think of all that canned spinach and canned beet you were subjected to as a child! Fresh roasted beet is like an orgasm compared to canned beet, amirite? But recently I have come to love canned tomatoes. This is partly because of a determination to never, ever buy out-of-season fresh tomatoes that I made a few years ago, but mostly because they are just really good for making soups and sauces. They retain their flavor nicely, and the slimy texture disappears once they are cooked down, pureed, or otherwise assembled.

Also, in non-conformance with the rest of my project, I ended up making this soup on a weeknight. Yes, you heard me. It is that easy.

First, I cored two fennel bulbs by cutting them into quarters and removing the core. I sliced them on my mandoline until I had a stack of slices.


A lovely fennel root.

Next, I chopped an onion and a potato.



The potato, onion, and chopped fennel.

I heated some olive oil in my big pot, then added the veggies and cooked them for about ten minutes.



Next, the tomatoes went into the pot to cook.



Finally I added 6 cups of chicken stock and cooked the whole mess for an hour.



Once the soup was cooked, I blended it all with a hand blender, and added salt and pepper.



To serve, I added salt and pepper, and squirted some balsalmic glaze that I had left over from a French Laundry Cookbookexperiment in a Jackson-Pollocky design I served the soup alongside some grilled cheese.





The color is kind of odd, isn't it? Instead of the murky, red color of canned tomato soup, this is more of a milky orange. But let me tell you, this soup is incredibly delicious. It's creamy with no dairy (yay, potato), and thick to stand up to dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into the bowl. The balsamic glaze is no mean feat either!

Lessons Learned: Making tomato soup from scratch is easy, delicious and satisfying. And it can be done on a weeknight!

Next Week: Something fancy: Chartreuse of Quail.

French Onion Soup

In my life, two things are certain. One, I love my mother. Two, my mother loves French Onion soup more than pretty much any other meal.

So, when I saw the french onion soup recipe in the Les Halles Cookbook, I knew I had to make the dish especially for her. And what better time to do so than when I stay with her over Thanksgiving weekend? I ran it by mom and my sisters, and they all agreed that it might just be the best idea ever. So when Thanksgiving Day came around, Husband J and I trucked two quarts of the dark chicken stock I made last week out to the suburbs so that we could make French Onion soup for the family on Black Friday.

We started out the day by avoiding the Black Friday crowds and heading to the antique mall (where I found a vintage (looking) half bottle of Eau de Joy, score!!!), then shopping for ingredients at the local Whole Foods. Once the onions, port, cheese and baguette were in hand, we faced a different problem--no oven-proof soup crocks. I'd thought of bringing my ramekins from home, but it seemed too much trouble to bring those and all of the chicken stock needed for the soup. But my plan to find adorable vintage onion soup crocks at the antique mall fell through when said adorable crocks didn't exist. There were good looking ones at the Whole Foods, but they were individually packaged with powdered cheese soups (bleh). So Husband J and I did the unthinkable... we ventured into the local K-Mart.

We wandered the aisles, half cowering in fear, gazing at the cheap-ass Martha Stewart collection kitchenwares and the disproportionate number of deep fryers. As we were about to give up, Husband J suddenly found a set of adorable red flower-shaped ramekins, absolutely perfect for our soup purposes. We gleefully snapped up six, and ran home to prepare the soup.

First step is of course, prepare the onions. The recipe calls for one big onion per serving, and chopping six onions proved pretty time consuming, and kind of offensive. I'm not really bothered by chopping onions, but as I went from one to the next, everyone started to complain about watering eyes and started opening windows and turning on fans. I? Shed nary a tear. Weird, right?

Anyway, once chopped, the onions went into the pot to caramelize with a huge load of butter.





It took a while for the onions to get dark and beautiful, but once they were, we poured in some port:



and some vinegar:



and some bacon:



then added the chicken stock and herbs, and brought the whole mess to a boil, then simmer. While the soup simmered, we toasted baguettes brushed with oil to make toasts, grated a ton of Gruyere, and prepared a big salad.



Simmering...

With the soup finished, it's time for the fun part! First float a toast in the bowl, then pile the Gruyere on top. Then put the bowls under a preheated broiler so the cheese melts and chars and forms a crust.



This is where I ran into some problems--Mom's broiler requires that several buttons be pushed before it turns on, and I foolishly only pushed one. The broiler didn't turn on, but the residual heat in the oven melted the cheese into a greasy mess with oil pooling on top of the soups and the baking sheet. I realized what had happened after a minute and turned the broiler on, but the crusts were not as robust as they could have been. I mopped up all the oil I could, and served.



Well, as always, the soup was a huge hit. Mom loved it, which was very satisfying, and to me it tasted exactly like the real thing, what you'd order in a classy French restaurant. (Minus, my grandmother commented, excess salt and gobs of cheese, which I think was a compliment).

Lessons Learned: Make sure the broiler is on before putting the cheese soups under it. Just because you are not affected by onions doesn't mean everyone else is. It is possible to produce delicious french onion soup in your own kitchen. K-Mart is good for something after all.

Next Week: Braised short ribs

Mushroom Soup

Yup, I crapped out on the whole fish again this week. Last time it was because I decided to make the wholly more interesting coeur de porc, but this wee I have a much lamer excuse... actually, the excuse is three-fold: socializing, weather, and exercise.

Wait, what?

Ok, I'll explain... we got invited to a party on Sunday night, which is great, as I love parties, and the host promised CASSOULET! Woo hoo! So I decided to make fish on Saturday. Then weather happened. Saturday was the coldest, greyest, gloomiest day of this cloudy, grey, gloomy week, so I decided to stay in bed and eat leftover takeout and frozen pizza. Then exercise... on Sunday I went to yoga class first thing in the morning, and the thing about yoga class is, it decreases my appetite by about 50-75% (weird, I know since most exercise makes me ravenous). So I didn't want whole fish for lunch. I went with a great sounding light meal for fall, though--mushroom soup.

Now I know you all have had that horrible Campbells cream of mushroom soup in pretty much every horrible casserole your mom ever made in the 1980s (I am looking at YOU beef stroganoff, and YOU TOO green beans with canned fried onions on top!). I have no idea who in their right mind would actually eat cream of mushroom soup as a soup, instead of as a weird binding agent for grey beef and egg noodles. But fortunately, this mushroom soup has no cream, but instead homemade chicken stock and sherry.

I started out with a mix of oyster, shitaake and cremini mushrooms, and also found some dried morels in the corner of the whole foods. Husband J loves morels, ever since we had them on a sausage, ramp and morel pizza. Once at the farmer's market he saw morels and started running over to the stand... but when he got close enough to see the price tag, he ran just as fast in the opposite direction. So, we don't eat a lot of morels, but the dried ones are slightly less pricey, so I decided that mushroom soup was a good enough excuse to get some.



Mushrooms waiting to be souped. The ones in the black bowl are the morels. They look... um... not delicious. But they were.

The soup itself was incredibly easy to make. Just sweat a thinly sliced onion in some butter...



Then add the mushrooms and more butter to the pot, and cook for 8 minutes.



Next, add the chicken stock and a sprig of parsley, bring to a boil, and simmer for 1 hour.



After the hour is up, it's time to puree. Once again Tony gives a dire warning to us to make sure to hold all of our weight down on the blender to save ourselves from the inevitable splatter of hot mushroom puree. And once again, I laugh in the face of splatter with my stick blender.



Once blended, season with salt, pepper, and stir in a little sherry. Since it's Sunday, and DC frowns upon the posibility of the heathen hoards getting trashed while the good teetotallers go to church, there was no sherry to be had. Husband J came to the rescue by running to the only wine shop open on Sundays and found a bottle of sweet bourdeaux. Perfect. Two shots of the bourdeaux got swirled into the soup, and lunch was ready to go.



And the result? Seriously, the best soup ever. Better than the vichyssoise, better than soupe au pistou, better than she-crab with sherry even! (I didn't make she-crab soup with sherry, I just like it.) Dignity barely prevented Husband J and I from lifting the soup bowls to our faces and licking them clean.

We had a ton left for the rest of the week too, which is great, as Tony promises that this soup gets better with time (it's true). This is definitely something to make again, and soon.

Lessons Learned: Sometimes the simplest things to make are the most delicious. But get your sherry on Saturday. Dried morels are almost as good as fresh.

Next week: Man, I wish I knew. Possibly I'll try for the fish again, or something with delicious red meat... mmm.

The cassoulet, by the way, was excellent, but I'm feeling a bit nervous about making it myself. That's a TON of food for one thing, and it's all simmering meats. Delicious but I must have eaten a portion about the size of a cigarette packet and didn't eat anything until 8:00 pm the next day it was that filling. Remind me to serve 20 people with a thimblefull of cassoulet each.

Soupe au Pistou and Basic Tart Dough

Last Monday after our extravagant turkey dinner in August, a day where we could hardly sit outside because it was so hot, the temperature suddenly dropped. I walked outside to go to work in a light summer dress only to find that outside, it was in the low 60s. I could not believe it... but it is a sign. Summer is almost over.

Husband J is thrilled. Fall is his favorite season, and he can't wait to break out sweaters, coats and scarves, and eat fall type foods like apples and sausage, roasted root vegetables, and rich braised meats.

I'm not so thrilled. Despite the oppressive humidity that characterizes D.C. summers, I really love the warm weather and the start of cold weather always makes me feel a little sad. It's time to have a last summer meal, veggie heavy, and full of the last of the best late summer produce. Soupe au pistou is definitely the best way to do that, as it is full of zucchini, summer squash, tomatoes, and basil.

This weekend, Labor Day holiday weekend, was an odd one. I ended up heading home sick from work early on Friday, and stayed sick through Saturday, leading to a very low key video game playing day. Sunday I woke up feeling better and headed to the market for veggies. When I got to the stand that sells my favorite yogurt and butter, they had a big sign out front: "WE HAVE MASCARPONE!" so I couldn't resist getting a tub. That gave me an idea for a mascarpone fruit tart, so I grabbed a load of peaches and blackberries (I think those fruits go very well together). The soup and tart will be very delicious refreshments for tonight's activity--visiting neighbor C's apartment for a double feature of the second season of Tool Academy (Husband J terms it "TA2: The Reckoning").

First, the tart crust. I was hoping for a better result than the pie frankencrust from two weeks ago, which turned out dry and patchy, and not very photogenic. Tart crust is not made in the food processor, which is good, as I've decided I prefer making crusts with my own two hands. Tart crust is also softer, sweeter, and more delicate than pie crust.

I started out by sifting flour into a bowl, creaming butter and stirring it into the flour, then adding egg, sugar, and vanilla.

Crust ingredients in the sun.

I mixed all of these with a fork old-school style, and the crust came together easily. I took a taste of the raw dough, and it's just astoundingly delicious, like the sugar cookie dough my grandmother makes for her Christmas cookies, and which I can (and have) eat(en) by the handful (salmonella be damned). I wrapped it up and set it in the fridge to cool for an hour.

After the hour passed, it was time to roll the crust out. This crust was just beautiful... soft, rich, delicious tasting, and rolled out nicely in a circle. The only problem was, despite the generous flouring I gave my silicone mat and the rolling pin, the crust just did not want to transfer to the pan. First it stuck to the mat, forcing me to tear it up and re-roll it, then an attempt to transfer it into the tart pan caused it to tear in half. I ended up pressing the crust together in the pan again, creating a Frankentartcrust which ended up being a bit more photogenic than Frankenpiecrust, anyway.

Frankentartcrust!!!

While the crust baked in the oven, I made the custard, using the recipe called for in the Tart Alcasienne (apple tart), replacing the called for heavy cream with mascarpone. Only I screwed the filling up by adding the eggs before putting it on the stove, and realized my mistake before putting the whole mess on the stove to heat. I decided to try it, hoping the egg wouldn't curdle if I kept whisking. One sore forearm and a mess-o-curdle later, I dumped the pot and made another batch of custard, this time keeping the eggs separate until I boiled the cream. That seemed to work well. Once the custard was finished and cooling, I sliced the peaches, arranged the berries in the crust, and poured custard over the whole thing. Into the oven it went to set.

Time to make the soup! The canellini beans had soaked overnight, so they went into the pot for 10 minutes, 5 minutes less than their package said to cook them. While they cooked, I chopped the zucchini, onion, garlic, tomato and fennel. Onion and garlic sweat in the pot first, then I added the rest of the veggies to soften in the oil.

Gorgeous veggies!

Once the veg were soft, I added the chicken broth, a bouquet garni, the macaroni and the beans, and set the thing to simmer for half an hour.


Meanwhile I made the pistou (basically pesto, without the nuts). This involves mashing six cloves of garlic and a bunch of basil leaves into a paste with a mortar and pestle, then adding olive oil a bit at a time, mashing until smooth. "If you are criminally lazy," says Tony, "you can use a food processor." Okay, done!

Mmmm... criminal laziness....

A bit of Parmesan, salt and pepper, and the pistou was finished.


This is where the problems in the soup pot began. The macaroni started cooking nicely, and was soft and delicious in a few minutes. The beans, however, remained rock-hard and kind of disgusting. Full disclosure... I'm not the biggest fan of beans in general, since my early days when beans came in a can and were covered in slime, and I've never worked with dried beans in a dish before. Not a good day to try....the clock was ticking for Tool Academy to start, and the beans were just not cooking! Finally I decided enough was enough--the veggies and mac were turning to mush, and the broth was cooking out of the soup. I took the soup off the heat, stirred in the pistou, packed it into a tureen, and trucked it over to Neighbor C's for a night of tools and prosecco.

Despite the great cannelini bean disaster, the soup went over very well, with everyone having seconds and lapping up even the nasty beans (I warned everyone about the al dente nature of the beans, but it ended up being too much trouble to pick them up or eat around them). Everyone involved loved garlic, which is a good thing, since with the pistou the entire thing had eight big cloves. It really would have been great if the beans had cooked properly, but as it was, the taste was good, even if the texture was a bit off.


The tart was of course the hit of the night. In my opinion the fruit was the best, followed by the nice sugar cookie crust. The tarte alcasienne custard was a bit too eggy and rich for a summer fruit tart, but it didn't taste bad. Husband J opined that it was better than the usual too-sweet custards in fruit tarts, so all in all, it worked out.

I tried to arrange the peaches artistically, but it didn't quite work out...

It's almost time to start stewing and braising, which means I need to make some veal stock. Alas, no veal bones were to be had at the market today. It's kind of depressing that there are no real butchers to be found in DC, though I have a promise from one of the farmers market stands that I can e-mail them on Thursdays to see if I can find some bones at the next market. I'm not feeling too sanguine though, since veal is a spring thing, right? I'm running out of recipes that can be made without veal stock and demi glace, though, so if anyone knows where I can find some bones, please let me know...

ETA: Forgot my lessons and future plans! Here we go...

Lessons learned: Cannelini beans take for freakin' ever to cook and don't taste that good al dente. Everything tastes better with 8 cloves of garlic. Never put the eggs in the custard before you put it on the stove, they curdle no matter how fast you whisk. Mascarpone tart is ok, but there are better ways to showcase mascarpone flavor, next time just use cream. Tart crust is delicious but delicate to handle. Veal bones apparently do not exist in DC.

Next week: Possibly salad nicoise, or if I am feeling very ambitious, whole roasted fish basquaise which has the added bonus of leftover bones so I can make fumet (fish stock). The soupe au pistou used up the rest of my chicken stock, so we'll probably have to roast another chicken in the near future so I can have more bones. Who is up for a stock making party?

Chicken Stock and Vichyssoise

Ok, well. Despite my previous bitching about making stock in the middle of August, there actually appear to be a ton of recipes in the Les Halles cookbook that actually require the making of stock before they can be attempted. And this blog is about following each recipe to the letter with no shortcuts so... stock it is.

But, not crazy-ass veal stock. That has to wait a few more weeks. No, this week is white chicken stock, using the bones from last week's roasted chicken.

There is no real recipe for chicken stock in the Les Halles Cookbook. Instead, Tony gives the basic guidelines for stock, which basically consist of "dump a bunch of chicken bones, some veg and some herbs in a pot and simmer for 6-8 hours." Easy, right?

So, I grabbed an onion, and a pound of carrots, and a big stalk of celery (which Alton Brown teaches me is called a mirepoix), as well as a bunch of sage, thyme and rosemary (notice how I listed them out of order so as not to annoy you with any earworm type songs?), and dumped them into my new stockpot with last week's chicken bones.


It took about half an hour to get the thing up to a near boil, at which time I turned the heat down to medium so all that liquid could simmer. I split the difference and simmered for seven hours while my husband watched Tool Academy and I played Persona 4. (I love a lazy weekend, don't you?)

Well, the house started to smell amazing (I credit the herbs in particular) and the stock reduced to about half the liquid that started out. The stock wasn't exactly colorless, but a nice golden brown, which I decided would have to do. I strained the stock through the last of our coffee filters (not realizing before I did so that we didn't have any left for tomorrow's coffee... ugh...), cooled it in an ice bath, and socked the better part in the freezer. The rest went into the fridge for tomorrow's Les Halles recipe, vichyssoise, cold potato/leek soup.

One of the catalysts to starting this blog was my (finally) reading Tony's Kitchen Confidential (well, listening to him read it on audiobook, which I'd argue is even better), in which he describes a Proustian moment of tasting vichyssoise on the Queen Mary, marveling at the wonder of eating cold soup, and quantifying this taste, as well as the taste of raw oyster, as one of the two major moments of learning to love food as something more than fuel. While the name vichyssoise brings to mind (for me anyway) Claude Raines dumping a bottle of Vichy water into the trash at the end of Casablanca, symbolizing a break from Vichy France and Nazism, cold leek and potato soup is definitely a taste I can get behind. So now that we have the required chicken stock, let's get on with the soup!

I invited friends M and B (a married couple) to lunch on Sunday, so the plan was to serve vichyssoise along with two other vegetarian faves of mine, miso glazed tomatoes and corn/scallion salad. The latter recipes were some I got from the Washington Post, and are probably the best summer produce recipes I've come across, and the most satisfying in terms of deliciousness/produce show-off/blending superb ingredients into something sublime.

So, Sunday morning I roll out of bed, pull on some jeans and run to the farmer's market to get my pick of fresh tomatoes, leeks, potatoes and corn. First stop is the stall with those big ugly purple mottled tomatoes that look like mutants and taste like heaven. I pick out four big juicy ones, when suddenly I am stopped by a man with a "press" card around his neck.

"Excuse me," he says, as I fumble to turn off my audio book (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson).

"Uhh, yeah?"

"I'm from The Washington Post, we're doing a story about tomatoes, and I just took a picture of you picking out tomatoes. Can I have your name?"

"Oookay..." so I give him my name and head off to pay for the tomatoes, some cilantro, and a few chives. So, I guess, look out for me in The Washington Post, probably Wednesday, in a story about tomatoes. I'm the one with the big cream colored Ray Bans with my hair in pigtails, and oh yeah, NO MAKEUP. Goddammit.

*UPDATE: The Wapo in all its wisdom decided not to use me as the poster girl for the tomato story. Which actually is kind of good, because the story was all about how awful it is for snotty ass yuppies like me to be buying crazy expensive tomatoes during a recession. Not that I'm not a snotty ass yuppie. I just don't want to be enshrined as one in the local paper.*

Anyway, after picking up my produce, and with only a slight detour to the gelato stand, I head home and start cooking. Oh, and brought my husband more coffee filters from the grocery store, which is a good thing, as I walked in on him trying to brew coffee with a NAPKIN. I mean seriously. Husbands.

First sweat the leeks in 4 tb of butter (mmmmm), then add the cubed up potatoes, then the chicken stock. Bring to a boil, and let simmer for 35 minutes.


"The next part," says Tony, "is tricky." We must now slowly, and in small batches, transfer the mix to the blender to puree the soup bit by bit, never filling up too high, unless we want a face full of boiling starchy, sticky hot potato-leek puree. This, according to Tony "hurts like a motherfucker," and is one of the more frequent professional kitchen accidents.

Well OK Tony, I GUESS that is tricky, unless you have a HAND HELD BLENDER like I DO which will puree the soup WHILE IN THE POT IN ONE GO. Haha, sucker!

Looks pretty artistic with the cream being swirled in!

Once pureed, the soup gets a hefty dose of cream, simmers for another 5 minutes, then goes into an ice bath to cool. Once cold, serve with a chive garnish.


I'm happy to report that everyone loved the soup, which was definitely the least healthy thing on the menu what with all that butter and heavy cream. Both B and husband J declared it to be the best thing on the menu for today's lunch, while M and I preferred the corn salad (less rich, more cilantro), but scraped our soup bowls clean anyway. There's about two more bowls left over, lucky for us, as it's a soup that gets better over time. As J, resident food critic said, it's a hearty enough soup that it fills you up, but it's refreshing enough that it doesn't feel too heavy while eating in hot weather like this. Another success for the Les Halles Cookbook!

We also had two nice bottles of white wine, and some brownies courtesy of M and B, as well as some berries and whipped cream (the latter left over from the soup, so easily whipped for dessert) and some fun conversation with friends who we haven't seen in way too long. Seriously, already this project is making me all kinds of happy to have a good excuse to force people to come over and eat some damn food. It's a ton of fun!

And yeah, I promised B that we'd invite them over sometime when the menu was not so vegetarian, particularly since he shares my passion for boudin noir (blood sausage--we have almost convinced M to try some of its delicious, fatty bounty).

Lessons learned: I need some cheesecloth to strain stock, since it tends to rip coffee filters. Vichyssoise takes more than half an hour to chill to proper temperature. That hand held blender is one of the best purchases ever, useful for both the soup and blending the vinaigrette.

Next week: Grilled lamb steaks; blueberries with lime sugar.