Poco-Cocoa

Last week we got some beautiful sweet potatoes in our Farmhouse Delivery bushel, and I decided to use them in a soup. I found an interesting recipe for a pumpkin soup in Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries (my favorite book EVER, by the way), and swapped out sweet potatoes for the pumpkin.

It’s such a warming soup… the freshly ground spices add so much heat and flavor, and the meaty chunks of bacon are the perfect topping. Our apartment still kind of smells like cumin, though. 🙂

I also found this awesome online application called Eat Your Books. It’s an online index of recipes from cookbooks. You add the cookbooks you own to your bookshelf, and then you’re able to search them all by ingredient or recipe. I can do a search for “spinach” and come up with a hundred recipes, each one with a list of the main ingredients for the recipe and the book that it was published in. So rather than sitting on the floor surrounded by all my cookbooks, checking each index to see if it has a spinach recipe in it, I can search online and go directly to the book I need. I’m using the trial version right now, but a lifetime membership is only $50, and I’m seriously considering doing that when my trial membership is up.

Anyway, soup!

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Spiced Sweet Potato Soup with Bacon

• 1 small yellow onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, sliced
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
• 2 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds
• 2 small dried red chile peppers, crumbled
• 5 cups vegetable or chicken broth
• 4 slices smoked bacon
• 1/2 cup heavy cream

Cook onion and garlic in butter in a soup pot until soft and translucent. Add the sweet potato and cook until golden brown at the edges.

Toast the coriander and cumin seeds in a small pan until fragrant. Cool slightly, then grind with a mortar and pestle (or in a spice grinder, if you have one). Add with the chiles to the onions and sweet potatoes. Cook for a minute or so, then add the broth. Simmer uncovered for 20 minutes, or until sweet potatoes are tender.

Fry the bacon until crisp. Drain on paper towels and cool slightly, then chop into small pieces.

Puree the soup with an immersion blender (or in small batches in a blender or food processor). Pour in cream and season to taste with salt and pepper. Bring almost to a boil. Serve with bacon sprinkled on top.

Makes 6 – 8 servings.

Adapted from The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater.

So last night’s soup was just as delicious, if not even more so, today at lunch. Justin even happily ate it again! And he usually does NOT like leftovers. Thankfully, the greens kept their firm bite, and the flavors melded together but didn’t get lost in each other.

I changed up my cooking plans for tonight because the broccoli was ready to eat, and I was afraid it wouldn’t keep until Saturday. So I roasted it up and served it with pasta and a browned butter sauce. This is one of Justin’s favorite ways to eat veggies, and the roasting/sauce works well with just about anything (asparagus, zucchini, carrots…). I would rather have used something like farfalle or ziti for this, but I wanted to use up this random box of tubetti that we had in the pantry. The browned butter coated the pasta and broccoli perfectly, and was nutty and delicious.

We also had a salad with romaine, carrots, avocado, and Israeli feta. Yum.

I’m not sure what we’ll be making tomorrow night… I might be changing up the menu. Anyway, it’s just nice to be in the kitchen again.

Roasted Vegetables with Balsamic Browned Butter

• 4 broccoli crowns (or a bunch of asparagus, or a few zucchini), separated into florets
• Kosher salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon water
• 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 400F. Arrange veggies in a single layer on  a baking sheet. Spray with cooking spray or drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 10 – 12 minutes, or until tender.

Melt butter in a small skillet over medium heat; cook 3 minutes or until lightly browned, shaking pan occasionally. Remove from heat and let cool a bit; stir in soy sauce, water and balsamic vinegar (if you add the other liquids while the butter is still on the flame or is still really hot, it will pop and sizzle a LOT). Drizzle over veggies, tossing well to coat.

Note: I just tossed the sauce with the roasted broccoli and about 8 ounces of cooked pasta.

Makes 4 – 6 servings.

Adapted from Cooking Light magazine.

We got our Farmhouse Delivery bushel today! Lots and lots of gorgeous produce.

This week’s bushel included: A jar of lemon-zucchini marmalade (I can’t wait to try this tomorrow morning on toast), collard greens, spinach, romaine lettuce, cilantro, turnips, avocados, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, green garlic, key limes, and one random citrus fruit (orange? not sure).

So I stopped at Central Market after work to pick up everything else we needed for the week.

And then I made this:

Caldo Gallego. It is so wonderfully delicious. I wasn’t sure whether we’d enjoy the turnips, but they were perfect in this soup. It’s so bright and full of life! Now I can’t wait to dig into the rest of my produce…

Caldo Gallego

• 1/4 pound thickly cut bacon, cut into 1/4-inch dice
• 1 (14-ounce) can white beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 1 large baking potato, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 1 large turnip (or 6 – 7 small Farmhouse turnips), cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 1/4 pound Spanish chorizo (NOT Mexican chorizo… Spanish chorizo is already cooked), diced
• 1/2 pound collard greens, stemmed and coarsely chopped

In a large soup pot, cook the bacon over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the fat is rendered.

In the meantime, chop all the vegetables. Add the potato, turnip and onion to the pot along with enough water to cover and a teaspoon or two of salt, and simmer for about 20 minutes or until almost tender but not falling apart.

Add the beans, chorizo and greens and continue simmering until the greens are tender (about 5 – 10 minutes). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Top with grated Parmesan cheese.

Makes 6 – 8 servings.

Adapted from seriouseats.com.