Soup day #4 Mushroom celery and Garlic soup

“Excusa the garlic plis” is what you would have heard while we prepared the soupe de   jour du Mercredi.

Indeed as soon as I started to collect items for the accompanying garlic bread the kitchen and indeed the whole house had the odor of garlic spreading throughout. While I was preparing the garlic by scraping and squashing the cloves I did wonder why it is that the slightest sniff of an onion I tear up but garlic only hits my nose and if I have too much of the garlicky smell,it gives me a little woozy feeling.

The soup came out a thick chocolaty color and looked very much like the photo in the book. The texture was good this time, just a very slight grainy effect ,much more to our taste. Mike gave it a 10 and I gave it a 9. However the mushroom taste was just overwhelming so much so I couldn't find a hint of the celery in it and the only garlic was floating in the air currents pervading the house. Mike didn't care for it either declaring,” I don't think we'll do this one again.” That tells you something. He usually likes everything. So it rated overall only a 7 for Mike and a 6 for me.

The bread was okay but very different from the garlic bread one usually eats at restaurants It was very crumbly and quite heavy. The crust was the best part.

(So Sally and Joe it was a good job this was not the soup day you decided to visit.)

What really saved the day was an excellent bottle of Californian red Merlot called CupCake, given to us by grand daughter Ashleye and her husband Matt and enjoyed immensely in the lovely new wine glasses given to us by Trevor and Laura for Christmas .

So we sat and drank the wine and decided next week would be a complete change and Mike would prepare some kind of chowder.

So keep in touch.

P.S. no vampires will invade this house for a while.

#3 Chicken and Almond Soup with Certainly Citron bread.

Looks lovely, doesn't it?
The photo in the Soup Bible looked good. The ingredients were certainly some of our favorites but both soup and bread were really disappointing. Maybe we were expecting too much.Try as I might, I could not get a hint of chicken flavor  even though ½ half a cup of skinned and boned chicken had gone into the mix. The blending of the soup took forever but still came out very gritty tasting which we put down to the ground almonds. So both Mike and I gave this one a 5 out of ten rating. It was edible but just too grainy to be likeable.

As for the bread this had lots of our favorite ingredients as well; both lemon and lime juice and also a fairly large dollop of  orange marmalade in the mix. However the bread did nor rise as it should have done. The flavor was okay but hardly a flavor of citron. The bread too heavy to be associated with the light feeling of oranges and lemons. I suspect the acid in the citron fruits killed the yeast or the liquid was too cold. Oh well, I'll put it down to experience in this case,---- too little!

So this soup meal we will write off,  putting suitable scribbles to that effect in the bible so we remember for next time.

The wine and company was great and provided a lot of deep discussion. !!

Borsch with Healthy Grain bread

Borsch with Healthy Grain bread

Flushed with the success of our first soup day, we decided to go grand and different  for our second event.

Mike checked his Soup  bible and said, ”What about this one? Do you know what it is?, Borsch??”.

I thought a bit and said “I think it is a beetroot based soup but I've never had it. Let's try it.”

And so we did. The explanation in the book said it was a classic Russian soup and just the thing to try if you wanted something a little different.A little different was somewhat an understatement. It was like no soup I had ever had before.

Mike started by collecting the ingredients. Most of them are easily obtained;celery, apple, beets of course, mushrooms, red pepper, onion, thyme, cumin, lemon juice, pepper. bay leaf and for finishing sour cream and dill,

“Are you sure you are supposed to peel the beets ?”I said. “Won't they bleed ?” The only experience I had with beets was with pickled beets and I know you don't peel those until after they are cooked. But the recipe says to peel and cook the beets so that's what Mike did. He didn't realize that the soup was meant to feed 10 people so he had to constantly switch saucepans to accommodate all the soup, ending up with a huge amount of steaming red liquid , smelling quite earthy and beety.

I meanwhile was making the bread to go with it. I had chosen a hearty grain bread, very healthy with lots of tasty ingredients; wheat flour, honey ,carrots, currants, bran and wheat germ. My biggest mistake was I didn't realize it would take 3 hours to make so the borsch had to simmer and mature while we were waiting for lunch.

The final result was a plentiful soup, unusual, kind of sweetish and the bread was ultra hot and  delicious.

So with butter on the bread, (difficult to cut just being cooked) , a glass of red wine, a dollop of cream to color the borsh, we sat down to a sumptious meal, just rather a little too much!!

We rated the borsch ' Mike gave it a 9  but he said the following day when he tried it again as we did have rather a lot of soup over, it had matured nicely and he would give it a 10. I on the other hand would only give it a 6. It was just too different for my taste.

However we still have some in the fridge so now maybe as it is improved and I can give it an 8. I'll let you know.

ASD or How it Started.

Out of the blue, Sally gave us an early Christmas present. Delighted and surprised, when we unwrapped the Christmas paper we found a wonderful book called,"The Soup Bible".
"I knew you'd love this book as I know you enjoy making soup" Sally said. And of course she was right.
So determined to use the book and n ot let it sit with the many other cook books we proclaimed that Wednesdays would now be ASD or Awesome Soup Day.  Mike would make a brand new soup, of course using "the Soup Bible, and Shirley would bake homemade bread . This would be a great lunch with a nice glass of wine and probably a small salad on the side. Good idea.

Green bean and parmesan soup

So last Wednesday we started. Mike prepared the green bean and parmesan soup while Shirley, chickened out with making the bread as we already had a loaf getting stale in the fridge.The new soup  turned out to be very nice and not difficult to make. It's always fun when you get the blender going to see if it will start to resemble soup as seen in recipe. We even found some fresh parsley, still growing to sprinkle on top.To that we added some home made coleslaw and a nice red wine and Bob's your uncle! Lunch.


Mike gave it a 10 ; I decided a 8 mainly because I found the texture of the cheese just a bit too gritty for my taste. 
Note to cook, get better parmesan cheese next time I think.
All in all, a good start. Fresh bread next time.