Tomato-rasam soup

Puds has been busy passing along her cold to the rest of the family including me. I was feeling low yesterday and decided I needed the spice-kick of a traditional saaru but without the heaviness of the dal etc. So I came up with a new take on tomato saaru, which works wonderfully as a soup, and kicked the cold on its head!

Ingredients:
4-5 medium sized tomatoes, chopped
2-3 pieces of garlic, chopped
2 tsp rasam powder
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp oil
2 cups water
Salt to taste
Tempering: 1 tsp ghee, 1 tsp mustard seeds, 1 pinch asafoetida and handful of curry leaves

Heat the oil in a pan, pop in the garlic and stor on medium flame. When the garlic turns translucent, add the tomatoes and cook until slightly softened. Add the rasam powder, chilli powder and water and bring to a boil. Turn flame to low and keep at a rolling boil for a few minutes, then switch off and let cool.

Blend it all into a smooth soup. Heat the ghee in the pan, add mustard seeds. When they splutter, pop in the curry leaves. Add in the soup and heat. Serve garnished with coriander leaves, finely chopped.

Sweet Chile of Mine

I am re-posting this as an entry for No Croutons required, May 2010, hosted by Lisa.

I recently blogged about the terrific Chile I had at the Steelhead Diner in Seattle. So naturally when I got home I wanted to recreate it for my family, but didn't know how to make it taste different from regular Rajma chaawal, apart from the accompaniments. Thankfully I found a great recipe in Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Feasts. I made it a couple of weekends ago when we had some close friends over for dinner. I didn't want to make a typical Indian meal with half a dozen dishes and spices, because it was really too hot to live that weekend. So we had my mom's yoghurt-paneer dip with crudités and hummus with pita bread as appetizers during drinks, followed by Spanish almond-grape chilled soup:

Middle Eastern tabbouleh and Mexican Chile for dinner. The cocoa powder adds a lovely, smoky depth to the flavour of the Chile, so it was a densely flavourful main course in contrast to the light, fresh flavours of the soup and tabbouleh.We had planned to serve a fruit salad with melon and mango for desert but we and our friends were too stuffed by that point.

The Chile was a breeze to make, and I served it with sides of sour cream and salsa.

Ingredients:
Kidney beans – 1 cup, soaked for 8 hours and then cooked or cooked using the Quick-soak method
Cumin powder – 1 tsp
Coriander powder – 1 tsp
Cocoa powder – 1 tbsp
Red chili powder – 2 tsp
2 onions, finely chopped
3-4 garlic pods, crushed
200 ml tomato puree
Salt to taste
Vegetable oil – 1 tbsp
Cheddar cheese, grated – 1 cup

Heat the oil and add in the cumin and coriander powder. When they start to brown, add the onions and garlic and cook until they turn pale brown. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30-40 minutes until the mixture turns thick.

If you want to assemble it the way the Diner did, top the Chili with the cheddar cheese and bake in a 220 degrees C oven for about 10-15 minutes until the cheese melts and just starts turning brown.

Serve with sour cream ( we don't get it here so I mixed sour yoghurt with cream and whipped the two together until it was thick and tasted like sour cream) and simple salsa – tomatoes and onions finely chopped with green chilies, coriander leaves and lime squeezed in and salt to taste.

The nice thing about this Chile is that you can eat it for days – served on toast or good crusty bread or as is, heated through or cold from the fridge…

This is my entry for My Legume Love Affair 11, begun by Susan, hosted this time by Taste with the eyes.

Cauliflower Soup

Now that the weather is nice and wintry, I'm back to my favourite food - soup. I feel soups can perk up the dullest of meals and add interest. They are also a great way to get veggies into the kids, and a low-cal way to fill up. I often have soups as meal-substitutes, along with a crisp green salad.

Cauliflower is not one of my favourite vegetables, because I find its taste is so subtle that it tends to get lost in the flavours of whatever other veggies or spices you cook it with. However, yesterday when I got home from work and raided the fridge, I found a bounty of cauliflower and decided to try a new soup recipe. As always, I have freely adapted the ingredients to suit my cupboard, and the soup turned out wonderful. It has a lovely cheesy taste, for no apparent reason, and yet the flavour of cauliflower really comes through despite the spices. And it takes barely 15 minutes - all that takes for it to be a winner in my book.

Ingredients:

1 cauliflower, cut into large chunks

1 large red onion, cut into large chunks

1 large garlic clove, cut into half

900 ml veg stock

2/3 cup milk

1 tsp mustard powder

1/2 tbsp coriander powder

Handful coriander leaves, chopped fine

Sour cream

Simmer the cauliflower, together with the onion, garlic, mustard powder ( didn't have any so used a tsp of colman's mustard), roast coriander seeds powder, salt and pepper ( I used red chilli powder) in the stock for 10-15 minutes until the veggies are cooked through.

Cool and blend in batches. I'm notoriously bad at blending liquids and can't wait to batch process so I strained the veggies and pureed them and added the stock back.

Put back on heat and add the milk and bring to the boil.

Adjust salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot, garnished with coriander leaves and stems ( I hate to waste coriander - it's so aromatic) and a swirl of sour cream. I didn't have sour cream so added a dollop of whisked yoghurt on top, which worked very well.

This soup is going to get added to my repertoire for a wonderful mix of taste and ease of preparation. I'm sure it'll go well with crusty bread, toasted with a little butter, too.

Chilled Soup

I'm a big soup fan and winter meals at our place typically center around soup and salad. But up until a few years ago, I had never heard of chilled soup or had one, apart from Gazpacho. Soups usually bring to mind a brothy, steamy cup - something to warm both the body and the soul on a cold winter's night. Cold soups were an interesting discovery for me, because it meant I could have one of my favourite food forms - soup - even during India's hot and humid summers. I have experimented with quite a few chilled soup recipes over the years, including a Hungarian one for sour cherry soup, which tastes quite luscious on a hot May afternoon in Delhi.

Recently I was watching Planet food on Discovert T&L and I saw an episode on Spain hosted by Padma Lakshmi. Complete aside here - but why would anyone get her to host something about food? First of all, she doesn't look like she can taste any food without bringing it back up soon thereafter. Second of all, she doesn't sound either knowledgeable or enthusiastic enough. thirdly, she doesn't seem to build up any empathy with the various people she is meeting/ helping with their cooking. Fourthly, the channel makes her help out various people while they are cooking, and these interludes are pure comedy - she's so awkward in the kitchen. Fifthly - and i will stop ranting after this and get back to cold soups - she always has the same pat expression when she tastes anything - first she'll put a tiny bit in her mouth, then she'll make those 'wine-tasting' type of movements with the lower half of her face while the forehead screws itself up in an attempt to make it seem as if she a. knows something about food and b. is thoughtfully assessing its taste, whereas she is more likely to be thinking - where can I quickly spit this out before the calories get me; and then she always, always says, "Mmmm..." - it's very annoying to watch a fake foodie!

Anyhow, to get back to Spain, PL met up with an American journalist who is settled there and writes about Spanish food who made her a batch of Gazbacho and a cold almond soup. It had been a while since I had made that at home so I whipped up a batch this weekend, to satisfy my need to cook and my son's love of soup. It's a nice, velvety soup and very light despite the almonds.

Ingredients:

1 cup blanched almonds

5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1.5 tbsp sherry vinegar

3-4 cloves garlic

1-2 slices of day old bread

3 cups cold water

salt and pepper to taste

Garnish - bunch of muscat grapes

1. Put the bread to soak in 2/3rds cup water

2. While it is soaking, puree the almonds and garlic in a blender until finely blended

3. Squeeze the bread to release most of the water.

4. Add the soaked bread to the almond-garlic mix and blend

5. Add the olive oil little by little, blending after each addition, until you have a fine, smooth emulsion.

6. Then add the sherry vinegar and blend once more.

7. If you have a large blender, add the water and blend everything until nicely mixed and smooth. otherwise you can scrape out the mix in the blender into a tureen, add the water and whisk/ beat together for a couple of minutes until everything is finely mixed.

8. Add the salt and pepper to your taste.

9. Chill for 2-3 hours, or if you're not a pre-planning person, just make the soup with cold water and a few cubes of ice.

Serve garnished with halved grapes - you can go to the trouble of peeling them as well, if you wish but I like to save myself the bother. You can also add toasted almond flakes to make it richer.