Basa Soup

I have some Basa fillets and fancied a spicy soup ...

Take a whole bunch of interesting flavours and shred them, matchstick them, mince them and set them aside.

I went with ...

Basa Soup

Spring Onion
Garlic
Ginger
Scotch Bonnet Pepper
Carrot
Cabbage
Basa Fillets
Poppy Seeds

Into a large open pan, tip in some bone broth and drop in the vegetables to warm through.

Once warmed, add the fish and any final flavours like fresh herbs, seeds or whatever.

Your soup is ready!

Totally fusion, I know but I made a little pistou to stir in ...

Hazelnut Pistou

Hazelnuts
Parsley
Olive Oil
Sea Salt

Blend the lot together and you're done. Simply stir a spoonful into the soup.

Turkey & Prawn Pilaf Stuffed Peppers

Stuffed peppers should not be overly wet on the inside, so try to keep "wet" ingredients to a minimum.

Pilaf is a Middle Eastern, Turkish, Persian, Uzbek, even North African dish of rice cooked in a seasoned broth, a term which I'm using in the broadest of sense since the rice will be cooked in broth, but inside a stuffed pepper.

You can stuff your peppers with anything you like, but here, I went with: minced turkey, prawns and cauliflower rice.

In a skillet, brown off the mince.

Meanwhile, steam some cauliflower and add to the skillet, crushing gently as you go and expelling as much liquid as you can.

Add some spice: ground coriander, perhaps some chilli powder, a little sea salt and some black pepper.

When the mixture is good and dry, simply lop the tops off a few peppers and stuff them up.

Place the peppers into an ovenproof dish (no lid), slip the tops back on the peppers and now pour in some bone broth. Stock will do if you don't have broth.

Into the oven at, say, 170C (350F?) for maybe 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, by which time the broth is reduced and the peppers good and soft.

Serve out into a wide brimmed bowl, slicing the peppers open and pouring more broth over.

Blast from the Past! Curried Parnsip Soup

Autumn is officially upon us!

After a sharp spell of Artic breeze, we're once again enjoying that late September warm spell, but all around the office are coughs and sniffles.

Thankfully, unlike last year, I'm not affected ...

... just in case, here's a blast from the past ... exactly one year ago: Curried Parsnip Soup

Scallop & Seaweed Soup

I don't need to say that chicken broth, from bones, is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Packed full of goodness, all manner of micro-nutrients and all manner of health benefits.

Seaweed, too, with super-amounts of calcium and protein-wise, almost as rich as legumes.

Let's put the two together ...

Chicken broth is simply a case of gently simmering bones for several hours to soften and extract the goodness. As a side note, if the bones are soft enough to crush, you can make a paste out of it ... experiment with flavours, but mace is good and it's nice combined with chicken livers to make a pâté.

I digress ...

We have our stock. Seaweed, I buy dried. Reconstitute in the stock.

Now add flavours: fish sauce, chestnut mushrooms, thinly sliced carrot, garlic, ginger, chill and onion.

Just prior to serving, sauté off a couple of scallops each and drop into the middle.

Salmon Consommé

You're right ... posh French cuisine.

Reputed to be a royal pain to make, involving culinary skill gleaned only in the finest kitchens of the finest restaurants, Consommé is the reserve of gastronomes and the rich.

But, it's just stock ...

No, really ... it's just stock.

Sure, it's clarified and elevated to some lofty height, as is all French cuisine, but it's still just stock.

Wanna know how? It ain't that fancy, either ...

So, quick cruise through the supermarket while picking up some cider and I happened upon four decent salmon fillets for £1.89! They're at their "sell by" date, but by no means past their best and at under half price, it was in my basket like a flash!

They'll do for lunches next week.

Home, simply drop the fillets into sufficient water to cover, add a little bouillon in (just buy it powdered and leave all the heavy techniques to those French Chefs, eh? Check the ingredients, mind) and simmer very gently for about 20 minutes.

That's the fillets done. Remove from the liquor, let them cool, cover and place in the fridge until required. They're fine like that for a couple of days.

We have the liquor left ...

Easy enough just to add some veggies and serve as soup. Very good, very flavoursome, very micronutritious!

Better, and so easy, simply sieve the large bits out then pass the liquor through a sieve with a piece of kitchen towel. Pass it again through two sheets and again if you want it really clear.

There you have it: Consommé! No complex, faffy processes ... just Consommé, done well enough.

To serve, you're supposed to pour it really gently over a bowl of perfectly cooked bits and pieces - mushrooms is a popular choice, and if I'd had the foresight to pick up a box of exotic mushrooms, this would have been especially spectacular ... but I didn't, so a bowl of simple Consommé it is.

Naturally, you can do the same thing for bone broths or any boiled, or poached meats.

Voilà! C'est tout.

Spring Garlic Chicken Broth

Two poussin carcasses, the cooking lemons, a splash of cider vinegar and get it on a low simmer for several hours ...

Several hours later ... the carcasses will have released all their goodness and you'll be left with a very flavoursome and VERY micronutritious broth.

More flavour? I shredded three leaves of wild garlic into it.

Wow! WOW!!!

Lamb Broth

When it comes to soups, there are no rules!

You need some liquor, some meat and some vegetables. Put it all together and that's soup. Rustic soup.

The catalyst for this soup was a lovely piece of lamb fillet that I found in the reduced section at the supermarket at a seriously knocked down price.

If that's all I had, I could simply pair it with vegetables and make up some stock ...

... but in the freezer, I had gold!

Some weeks ago, we'd had a Lamb Stew with a load of pieces on the bone. The lamb had slow-cooked all day and after serving, we had loads of liquor left over so the bones went back in for a few more hours of cooking. That was frozen.

So, from the freezer, we have some lamb bone broth.

I also collect all sorts of trimmings, stalks and what-not from vegetables to go into soup, which is usually puréed. All I'd collected was some tenderstem broccoli and asparagus stalks so they were easily topped, tailed and cut into small pieces.

Add some onion and garlic to the broth along with a carrot.

The lamb fillet needs almost no time to cook, so just slice it up and drop it in.

Reduce to taste, adding sea salt, black pepper and parsley for aromatics and flavour.

Last minute, brainwave ... it's spring ... Spring Greens! Shred some up and chuck 'em in.

Serve out into a wide bowl and get in there! Seriously nutritious broth full of goodness, full of texture and full of flavour.

Total cost? £1.24 for about half a pound of lamb, some trimmings, some leftover cooking liquor and a few veggies. Now that's good, frugal eating!

Healing Soup [Pre-emptive Strike]

It's 'flu season.

Is everyone around you coughing and sneezing? Time for a pre-emptive strike!

Chicken broth is the foundation and must be made from bones, slow cooked for at least 24 hours - this is the real goodness of the soup.

For some protein, you could drop in some pieces of chicken ... or fish. Something light and easy to eat. I went with sea bass.

Now, fill it out with cold-busting food!

Chillies, red peppers, green peppers, turmeric, spinach, onion and garlic.

Flavour with spices: coriander and cumin, black pepper and sea salt to taste.

You're done ...

Drink deep and stay well. Hopefully.

Sea Vegetable & Enoki Mushroom Soup

Here's a quick and easy way of getting your iodine, unsupplemented ...

Dried sea vegetables, procured from the supermarket Japanese section, steeped in bouillon (or bone broth if you have some) and spiced up with ginger and chilli. Make more interesting with some mushrooms - enoki variety in my case.

Mushrooms are packed with yet more antioxidants, making is one seriously heart-healthy starter.

Sea vegetables are not only a fantastic source of iodine, but possibly a unique source of vanadium. Reading up, vanadium appears to play a multi-faceted role in regulation of carbohydrate metabolism and blood sugar.

If somebody with a better grasp of biochemistry than me (that's everyone, then) can offer further insight, I'd be very grateful. Let's hear from you in the comments.

Curried Parsnip Soup

Gah! I've got a head cold ... sneezing, coughing and generally feeling grotty :(

What better than a warming soup?

Quick and easy to make, I simply shredded a leek, a little ginger, minced a few cloves of garlic, cubed a large parsnip and a Scotch Bonnet pepper.

Kill or cure!

Add some ground coriander and a sprinkle of turmeric (the medicine).

Boil that lot in a large pan with some bouillon, blend, reduce and thicken.

If only I had some chicken bone broth ...

Pour in some cream if you like (I didn't), serve and garnish with some fresh herbs - more coriander.

Hot! Hot! Just right for a healing soup.

Leftovers? Next time, stir in some spinach ... after that, drop in some shredded ham ... or some scallops.

Beef, Spinach & Egg Broth

Leftovers are great!

All manner of fun, fast combinations can be made from leftovers and this was one such dish.

With some beef left over from the previous Sunday and some poaching liquor reserved from the previous day's salmon, I set about putting together a quick, nutritious broth.

Use whatever broth you have to hand - bone broth would be excellent, poaching liquor, or just make up a stock on the fly.

Finely slice some pieces of meat and drop these in - for me, it was beef ... which worked curiously well in the fish stock!

Add some bulk to the broth with seaweed, spinach, shredded greens, kale, something green anyway. I love the combination of beef and spinach, and spinach is right in season at the moment, so spinach it was.

Flavour up with finely sliced chilli and fresh ginger chopped into thin sticks.

Make up a Japanese omelette.

One egg, touch of water, whisked thoroughly and poured out into a frying pan to make a thin, almost crêpe-like omelette. Set aside.

Once the meat has softened, greens wilted and flavours combined, serve out into a bowl.

Roll up the omelette and slice up, dropping the little rolls into the broth.

Scallops with Sea Vegetables

Having boiled down the carcass of chicken or poussin from a previous meal and made beautiful healing broth, a second boiling can be made for a more delicate, subtle flavoured soup.

Something like this ...

Take some seaweed, packed with iodine, magnesium and other goodies which be elusive in paleo food sources picked from modern farming, and immerse in the broth.

Dried seaweed is perfectly good, and you will find bags of such produce in the World Foods section of your supermarket.

Once the seaweed has reconstituted, clean up a couple of scallops.

Scallops are a further source of magnesium, an excellent pack of vitamin B12 and concentrated source of selenium, particularly.

Warm a little butter in a frying pan until it just browns and drop the scallops in. Scallops should need little more than a half a minute on each side to just colour up and warm through, while retaining all the softness.

Set the scallops into the soup, maybe hinting with a drop of walnut oil for heady aromatics.

Drink deep and partake of all that nourishing goodness of rare micronutrients.

Bone Broth

Reserve the bones from chicken, turkey, beef, lamb, whatever it is you've just eaten.

In my case Poussin.

Bone broth is an old wives' remedy for the common cold, an immune booster and mineral store. We can get our calcium from leafy greens, but bone broth delivers so more than that - calcium, magnesium, phosphorous; not to mention gelatin and collagen.

You can read so many articles about why bone broth is so good, so I won't repeat those verbatim or in paraphrase here - go hunt, go gather!

My recipe is so simple. I don't flounce it up at all other than the inclusion of a small amount of cider vinegar which assists in the breakdown of the bone, releasing all the goodness.

Other than that, it's just a case of cracking the carcass into a few pieces, breaking the joint in the leg and wing bones and pouring hot water over to just cover. Pour in a tablespoon of cider vinegar.

Bring to the boil and simmer for a while.

Feel free to add in some peppercorns, maybe cloves, garlic, herbs, whatever goodness you want to put into the initial stock. I chose to keep it really plain.

When you're about ready to serve, bring the heat up to a boil and reduce.

Ladle out into a bowl and add in whatever you want. No reason not to drink it as is, but mushrooms, a little ginger, maybe some chilli, whatever ...

I went with enoki mushrooms, spring onions and ginger.

Drink deep and be healed!