Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

I may be a retired chef, but I do not spend every day and night preparing gourmet meals for my family.  

 

For one, gourmet gets expensive- salmon; foie gras and oysters are not exactly priority on my shopping list. For another, I don’t exactly see Alex and Beth happily sitting down to a plate of chive butter sautèed Salmon with hollandaise sauce, not to mention a pile of oysters, blanched, gratineed or en en flagrante.  Besides, what luxuries do we treat ourselves to if we can eat gourmet every day?

 

Some days I don’t even bother with using more than one pot to cook in: at least one night every week I cook up a pot of soup that is so thick and yummy that I don’t bother with considering the pyramid of a balanced meal.

 

This particular soup is also popular with the girls.  Although Alex sort of puts a pained expression on her face at the idea of having soup AGAIN, she eats it up complicitly.  For Beth, I think it is one of her favourites, because often she doesn’t even wait for us to all sit down and say grace before tucking in.

 

Lastly, it is cheap and easy to make, especially as I now have to keep most of the ingrediants in my fridge, in order to make the meat we buy edible.  (Friends back in South Africa, you have access to some of the most delicious meat at very reasonable prices.  Bleat as much as you want to about the inflation and cost of food.  For us to enjoy meat that is delicious, I either have to braise it for hours in a aromatic stock, or spend more than double what we are already paying.)

 

Once a week I roast a chicken.  Sometimes I focus on the process, sometimes I just throw salt on it, and leave it in the oven until it is cooked through.  1 chicken will feed us one tradtitional Sunday roast with the trimmings, and with the rest I might make chicken-mayo on crispy baguettes, or more often I make this soup.  

 

The key to any soup is stock, so once we have had or meal of roasted chicken, I strip the rest of the meat off-pop that into a container to put into the fridge, and then place the carcass into a biggish pot, throw in an onion chopped roughly , a carrot, a stick of celery, the green tops of a leek if you have it, perhaps a bay leaf if you have those on your spice rack and lastly a sprig of thyme.  (I miss my garden with its thyme that growed happily,and it saddens my soul when I have to buy thyme.)  

 

If at all possible, I add a cup of white wine to the roasting pot, place it onto the stove on a low heat and bring that to the boil.  This should strip the sticky juicy leftover bits and pieces from the roasting pan, where there is alot of yumminess.  Once the roasting plan is ‘clean’, pour these juices over the chicken carcass and aromatic vegetables.

Pour cold water over that, bring it to the boil, turn the heat down and let it simmer for about 2 hours, being careful not to let all the liquid evaporate.  Once you have simmered it for 2 hours, cool it down, strain it into a container you can place in your fridge or freezer (you could pack it into plastic tubs and pop those in the freezer for emergency meal purposes, but I keep the stock-about 1.5l-in the fridge for a week, or make a soup the next night.)

 

Chicken soup is good for the soul.  It has always been the meal I made when I was feeling full up with flu, and its especially easy if you have stock at hand.  Once, when I was working at the Michelangelo, the Food and Beverage Director was moping around with tissues in her hands, a cherry red nose and streaming eyes.  She asked the Exec Chef for something to eat, and I offered to whip up a quick soup for her.  Chicken stock was always on the go there, which made it easy, and I am pretty sure she felt alot better after that soup!

 

Since soup is hardly considered a proper meal, I have added legumes to my flu-soup recipe, in order for it to full us up at dinner time, and it goes a little something like this:

50ml cooking oil

200g Onions, diced

300g Carrots, grated

100g Leeks (cut the leek up its length, into quarters, and then slice it on its cross)

100g celery (cut the same way as the leek)

1 big clove of garlic, chopped (or use 1 teaspoon  of crushed store bought garlic)

1 stick of thyme (don’t chop this, you can throw it in and remove it later)

100g barley (or stampkoring)

100g brown lentils (*I prefer the brown lentils to dhal or pink ones)

1 handful of parsley, chopped

 

Optional extras, depending on if little kids eat or not:

250g potato, grated

100g baby marrow, grated

100g sliced mushrooms

 

1.5l Chicken stock

1.5l water (you can use only stock, but the aromatic vegetables-onions, leeks, celery and carrots give the soup enough flavour on their own)

 

** Cooked chicken meat- as much as you prefer.  If you don’t have any meat left from the chicken carcass, you can poach/grill/bake raw chicken, chop it up and add it to the soup just before you serve the meal.  

                                         > An appropriate size portion would be 150g of raw meat per adult, but as you  are using lentils, you could decrease this to 100g

 

Pour the oil into a 5l cooking pot, add the carrots, leeks, celery, onions, garlic and thyme, and start sweating them off on a medium-high heat, stirring it occasionally to spread the heat.

 

Add the lentils  and barley, (as well as the grated potato and mushrooms if you are using them) and cook for a further 5 minutes before adding your stock.  

                                       >Be careful to stir constantly if you use potato, as the potato starch is prone  to sticking to the bottom of the pot.

 

Allow the stock to come to the boil, and then turn the heat down to just above simmering point.  Allow to simmer for an hour, which will be enough time to cook the lentils, barley and potato.

 

You can now the grated baby marrow (if you are using it), and the cooked and shredded chicken meat.  

 

Cook for a further 10 minutes, add salt and pepper to your preference- you will need to taste the soup before you add this, and lastly, thrown in a handful of fresh parsley.

(These ingrediant weights are enough to feed us as a family of 2 hungry adults, and 2 young girls.)

My kids are very weary of green floaty parsley, and I sometimes leave it out, but I do think it adds just a teeny little bit of a finish to the soup.

 

This soup is not glamourous- although it can be, if you want to serve it to guests as a starter.  In that event, I would not use potato and barley, and I might actually cut the carrots and baby marrows ala brunoise style (teeny tiny little diced pieces).

However, I find it very family friendly, easy, healthy and filling.  I make crutons with leftover baguettes, or we just use a fresh baguette cut into sticks.  Alex is very au fait with dunking bread into her soup (although she won’t do the same with rusks and tea.)  

The mere fact that my girls eat a meal of so many vegetables, plus lentils makes me really happy.  Although I would not happily drop them off at a friends house for lunch, for fear of them rejecting their hosts cooking, I do know what my girls are capable of, and that is fine with me.