In a winter like this…
…can there be anything more soothing and comforting than a bowl of warm soup? For me, those creamy blended vegetable soups are the best; but if you like poultry – what about some translucent chicken broth with petite dumplings and tender carrots? To make the broth as clear and healthy as possible, we quickly boiled chicken in some water first and poured off that water.
Make this soup immediately before meals and do not leave it overnight: flour from dumplings would diffuse into broth and make it cloudy.
(Below you will also find some more winter pictures that Mom took from the window today. We always feed sparrows in wintertime, and only when it gets really cold, the cautious blackbirds visit us too).
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There’re some things from our childhood that we start to value only after we’ve grown up. Remember those novels and poetry from Literature classes back in school – a good deal of them seemed so tedious back then, but now as we’ve grown up we re-read them and finally discover all the sophistication, and the irony, and the beauty of language, and the vividness of author’s imagination. The same thing goes for food. A lot of my friends hated milk&noodles when they were children. One of the reasons might be that milk&noodles used to be a standing dish in nursery schools. Luckily, I never went to a nursery school, so I enjoyed my milk soup made by my Mom’s caring hands. And yeah, Mom always removed milk skins (the only cringe-making part about boiled milk, to my mind). Nowadays I still enjoy sweet milk soup with leftover Filinis as a comforting evening meal or lunch… just as much as I enjoy re-reading books from my teenage years. Read the rest of this entry »
Cream soup is a balsam to the palate – soothingly soft and silky, it’s usually packed with well-preserved vitamins – be it made of spinach, root vegetables or seafood. One of my favourite kinds of cream soup is sweetcorn soup with crabs. It’s sweet and very, very creamy.
But the soup we are going to talk about today is no less delicious or healthy than that made of sweetcorn. Just take that beta-carotene-loaded pumpkin and carrot, the vitamin K-packed white turnip and parsley root, kick in some vitamin C from the red paprika, finally add some iron and vitamin B6 from the potato, and potassium from the zucchini. Doesn’t this sound wonderful?
Another thing we love about root vegetable soup is that it’s very versatile ingredient-wise. You can actually use any kind of your favourite root vegetables: for example, why not try sweet potatoes in place of plain potatoes? Or experiment with the garnish: this time we served the soup with croutons, thyme and fresh chili, but it can be just as good with black olives, fresh dill, grated Parmesan, or even pine nuts.
I wouldn’t have said cream soups are very typical for Russian/Slavic cuisine, but vegetables like potatoes, white turnip, carrots and parsley definitely are very popular ingredients in Eastern European cooking.
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Borsch is absolutely the king, or better say the Tsar of soups in Russian/Ukrainian cuisine. It’s red, hot, spicy, garlicky, and only a spoon of sour cream (Smetana) can tame it!
You can never have too much Borsch: make it in a large saucepan and serve in hearty portions. Borsch can be stored in the fridge for 2 and more days with no problem, just infusing more and more.
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July is the beginning of the chanterelle season here in Latvia, and we’ve been cooking a lot of them lately. The simplest way to cook these wonderful, aromatic mushrooms is just fry them adding some finely chopped onions and seasoning with fresh dill. Or sautee them with a couple of tablespoons sour cream, turning them into a soft and mild sauce.
Chanterelle soup is not as rich in flavour as, say, porcini or even champignon soup. But it very summery, translucent and subtly infused with notes of fresh garlic. And it is quick and very easy!
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