Stoking the Internal Combustion Engine with a Hearty, Smoky Vegetarian Pea Soup

With a gaggle of teenagers over during this snowy and cold school break week, I was hard at work in the kitchen flinging 3 hots and multiple snacks in their direction. Their normally ravenous adolescent appetites were further stoked by an afternoon of tubing at Willard Mountain.

What's tubing, you say? Well, it's a fancy version of sledding and a much cheaper version of skiing. One dresses in warm layers of outerwear that don't have to come from a designer ski shop, at least two pairs of socks, sturdy boots and some waterproof gloves (mittens tend to fly off on the descent). Then you head to a ski slope (we paid $15 each for 2 hours of tubing) where you get a big, puffed-up inner tube on a leash. With reggae music booming, the attendant hooks your leash to a tow rope that drags you up the mountain, dumps you off at the top and then a burly farm kid sends you down straight or spinning down the snowy incline where you brake at the bottom over piles of hay.

It's outrageously fun and even an old chaperone like me with minimal athletic skills can enjoy it. Which I did. As evidenced by all the hay sticking to my fleece jacket. Just got a couple of bruises from not remembering to keep my hind end from drooping too low in the inner tube.

All that icy air got those teenage engines roaring, so it was back to the Crispy Kitchen to make vats of ziti and a salad bar.  Dan and I enjoyed a simpler, satisfying supper of Pea Soup.  Most pea soup recipes traditionally include a ham bone or bits of chopped ham, but I added a touch of olive oil and smoked paprika for my vegetarian version, full of chunky bits of other veggies.  It was satisfying and restorative; just the thing for apres-tubing on a cold winter's night.

And did I mention that Split Pea Soup is Cheap Eats? I figure it cost $3 or $4 to make this pot of soup, and we have enough for 8-10 mug servings.

Hearty, Smoky Vegetarian Pea Soup

1 lb. dried split peas

1 onion, peeled and chopped coarsely
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped coarsely
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped coarsely
2 stalks celery, chopped coarsely
6 cups vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. smoked paprika


Pick through split peas to remove any pebbles or odd-looking peas. Rinse and drain.
Place in soup pot with onion, garlic, carrot, celery and vegetable stock. Bring to a boil. Lower heat, cover pot and simmer until peas are tender and start to break down, about 30 minutes.

At this point, you can mash up the soup with a potato masher or leave chunky as you like. I like a smooth base with bits of chunky vegetables, so I used my newest kitchen gadget (a thrift shop find for $2!), a Braun immersion blender to puree up about half of the soup.

Season with salt and pepper to taste. Swirl in olive oil and smoked paprika and serve hot.

Makes 8 big mugs of soup.

I'm sending a mug of this hearty, healthy, frugal and warming soup over to my buddy Deb at Kahakai Kitchen for her weekly Souper Sundays roundup. Head on over to Honolulu-based Kahakai Kitchen (where they go surfing instead of tubing) after Sunday's deadline to see all the great soup recipes that pour in each week for this event.

A Spicy Kale Soup Recipe from a Centenarian Azorean

A bookseller colleague sent me an heirloom recipe many moons ago when we were chatting about our mutual love of cooking. She has a neighbor, a certain Mrs. Lewis, a native of the Azores, who was 102 years old and still cooking up wonderful things in her kitchen at the time my buddy sent on her recipe for Kale Soup. I like to think Mrs. Lewis is now 103 and still stirring up pots of this wonderful soup, which is a traditional favorite in Portugal and the Azores, an Atlantic chain of islands 900 miles west of Lisbon and a Portuguese Autonomous Region.

My hardy kale plants soldier on in the Crispy garden even under the snow and after enduring several bouts of freezing and thawing along the temperature scale. Kale is a super vegetable in terms of nutrition too. Kale is high in many great vitamins and nutrients, including betacarotene, Vitamins C and K, lutein and calcium, and it makes a hearty soup for these chilly days of deep winter in upstate New York.



I am reproducing this treasure of a recipe below verbatim, (**funny typos and all, you'll see) and will just note that in deference to my Crispy spouse, Dan, who eschews meat, I substituted 1 (12 oz.) package of Melissa's meatless soy chorizo, removed from its inedible casing, for the linguica sausage called for by Mrs. Lewis.



Mrs. Lewis' Kale Soup

4-6 cups water (depends on how many you're severing**)
1/2 cup chopped up onion
1 clove garlic
1 potato small
1/2 cup thin slice linguica
2 cups kale chopped
Salt to taste

Bring water, onion, garlic, salt and linguica to boil. Add greens and potato, cook until tender. Serve with bread. If you don't have linguica you can use salt pork and if you don't have meat use red beans.



This hearty recipe is my contribution to this week's edition of Weekend Herb Blogging. Weekend Herb Blogging is a weekly event that was started by Kalyn's Kitchen and has been organized by Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once for the last year or so.

I am happy to report that I the host of WHB #218 this week and will be happy to accept recipes featuring plant ingredients (herbs, vegetables, fruits, seeds, stems, flowers, etc.) until Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010. Entries must be submitted by:

* 5 pm Sunday - New York City Time (EST)
* 3pm Sunday - Utah Time
* 10pm Sunday - London Time
* 11pm Sunday - Rome Time
* 9am Monday - Melbourne (Aus) DS Time.

Your post can be informative, spotlight a particular ingredient and/or include a recipe where your chosen ingredient is one of the primary ingredients in the recipe. WHB posts must be written specifically for this blog event and may not be cross-posted in other events.



If you have a great veggie recipe to share this week, please send your posts to oldsaratogabooks AT gmail DOT com with WHB#218 in the subject line and the following details:

Your name Your Blog/URL
Your Post URL
Your Location
Attach a Photo: 250px wide

Looking forward to seeing what's cookin' in your kitchen this week. I've already had several cool WHB submissions and can't wait for more to include in the roundup.

A Tour of the Autumnal Garden and a Bowl of Soup

Things are winding down in the Crispy Garden. I'm finally getting around to weeding some of the beds, I'm embarrassed to say, but the weather has been lovely and in between weeding, I'm tucking in various kinds of garlic to harvest next summer.

Those fecund Busillus frying pepper plants are still setting fruit,



I've got a forest of kale that will keep on chugging through the coming snowdrifts,



And this prehistoric patch of Brussels Sprouts awaits our consumption after the first frost, when the little sprouts are even sweeter.



I have my herb patch still soldiering on and a couple of lonely red cabbages. A single Tatsoi plant remained from my Spring planting, at least one that hadn't gone to seed, and was shivering under some fall leaves. So I grabbed it and into the cooking pot it went!



I had been thinking about this month's round of No Croutons Required, the vegetarian foodie event alternately hosted by Tinned Tomatoes and Lisa's Kitchen. The current challenge is to make a soup or salad using the contents of one's cupboards (and maybe a nip out to the autumn garden!). Frugality is the name of the game and participants may not go to the store to purchase ingredients specifically for their chosen dish.

My lonely bunch of tatsoi was the inspiration for this Chinese-style soup. I had read that tatsoi is often a soup ingredient in Chinese cooking, but hadn't yet experimented with it. I chopped the crunchy stalks off and diced them up to add to the soup pot a few minutes before adding the leafy parts and that made a nice counterpoint. The leaves got very silky and tender and were perfect in this hot, noodly broth.

Chinese-Style Noodle Soup with Tatsoi

10.5 oz pkg. rice stick noodles

1 small bunch tatsoi, washed several times (makes about 4 cups)

6 cups water
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thinly
2 vegetable bouillon cubes (Knorr's was gluten-free, but check ingredients for other brands. Better yet, use homemade vegetable stock)
1 Tbsp. finely chopped ginger
3 Tbsp. soy sauce (check to make sure it is gluten-free)


Cook rice stick noodles in a large pot of boiling water for 6-8 minutes, or until soft. Drain and rinse under cold water for one minute to remove starch. Reserve.

Remove stems from tatsoi and dice finely. Rough chop the leaves.

Bring 6 cups of water to a boil. Add garlic, bouillon cubes, ginger and soy sauce. Return to boil and then let simmer 10 minutes to cook garlic and ginger. Add tatsoi stems and cook, stirring often, another 5 minutes. Add leaves and cook only a minute or two to get the tatsoi to soften. The tatsoi leaves get velvety soft and the stems still retain a nice crunch. Add noodles and heat through.

Serve hot. Makes 6 servings.



I reheated this soup the next day and threw in some leftover diced smoked tofu and that made it a little richer. The noodles had also soaked up more of the soup stock and got very plump and soft.

In addition to sending a bowl of this garlic- and ginger-scented soup over to Tinned Tomatoes for No Croutons Required, I am going to wing a bowl over to Deb of Kahakai Kitchen for her weekly Souper Sundays event. It was that good.

A Culinary Tour Around the World: Mongolia

How's this for a traditional St. Patrick's Day post: Mongolian Food!

Joan over at Foodalogue is winding down the Culinary Tour Around the World event to promote Bloggeraid and world hunger issues and the current stop on this examination of culture and food across the globe is Mongolia. Foodalogue has a great post with interesting Mongolian tidbits and I took inspiration from reading that and another website about traditional Mongolian recipes.

Mongolian cooking reflects a harsh climate of extremes; hot, dry desert conditions in the summer and fiercely cold and windy winters. Reading about traditional Mongolian recipes was really interesting, but a lot of the hearty and nourishing recipes featured hunks of meat dried in the rafters of one's yurt (borts), wheat noodles and other glutinous items. I thought about trying Eezgii, or Dried Mass of Cheese, but my adventures in cheesemaking were curtailed when I couldn't find my saddle bag, the traditional container for letting these cheese curds ripen. :]

For the Crispy Cook Mongolian cuisine proved a real challenge in trying to come up with a recipe to cook for my wheat-free, meat-free husband.

In the end, I decided to make a hot soup that would be Mongolian-esque, that is, in the spirit of the nomadic farmers and herdsmen that need a hot and hearty supper to stoke their internal furnaces during frigid, windy winter season. It was a spicy, slurpy soup that we will make again, though the noodles I used were so thick they required a crazy amount of boiling, so I would go with a fettuccine or egg noodle pasta next time.




Mongolian Hot Pot

8 oz. rice noodles (I used thick ovoid rice cakes I got at an ethnic market recently, but any stout rice noodle that won't flop out of your soup spoon and splash you while eating is great)

5-6 dried shiitake mushrooms

4 cups vegetable broth
1 (one inch) piece gingerroot, peeled and minced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 bunch scallions, sliced

1 bunch fresh spinach, sliced thinly (substitute 5 oz. frozen chopped spinach if you like)
2 cups cabbage, sliced thinly

4 Tbsp. soy sauce (be sure to check if gluten-free)

Chili Paste in Soybean Oil to taste


Cook rice noodles until al dente in boiling water. Drain and rinse with cold water. Set aside.

Soak dried mushrooms in warm water about 10 minutes, or until soft. Drain, reserving mushroom liquid for soup. Slice mushrooms and set aside.

Bring vegetable broth and reserved mushroom liquid in soup pot. Add ginger, garlic and scallions and simmer 15 minutes. Toss in spinach and cabbbage and cook another 15 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Add noodles, soy sauce and chili paste and heat through.

Tofu cubes, cooked fish or shrimp, would also make good additions to the pot if you have them on hand.

Serves 4.

Joan will be publishing a roundup of Mongolian recipes tomorrow, so hop on over to Foodalogue to see what's cooking! And if you plan to submit a recipe for the Bloggeraid fundraising cookbook to benefit the UN World Food Programme, don't forget that the deadline of March 31, 20009 is coming up.

A Blasphemous Bowl of Red: My Baked Bean Chili Recipe

Over on my bookstore blog, The Book Trout, I recently reviewed the classic chilihead bible "A Bowl of Red" by Frank X. Tolbert. It was a fun and informative book, full of culinary history about the development of and different species of chili, and I would recommend it to other foodie bibliophiles. There are lots of tales about crusty chuckwagon cooks, "son-of-a-bitch" stew (it's offal), ethnobotanical aspects about hot chili peppers and "paper napkin" restaurant reviews.

With the continued cold weather forecast by that diabolical Pennsylvania groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, (Crockpot Groundhog Chili, anyone?) I was inspired to whip up a batch of chili to warm my family up. With the vegetarian emphasis among the Crispy Crew, however, I did not try to reproduce Texas minimalist chili (beef, hot peppers, spices) but a beanier variety that would clean out my cupboards and freezer. Alas, I had no dried beans or even cans of cooked beans to work with, but I did have a large can of baked beans in the pantry left over from a summer side dish I forgot to cook up when we were entertaining. I'm not a huge baked bean fan, as I don't like their sweetness, but I did a little experimenting and raised the heat factor some, and the result was pronounced delicious by my Upstate New York cowpokes, so here it is in all its glory. Just don't serve it up to any Texans.

Blasphemous Baked Bean Chili




Baked Bean Chili

2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 medium onions, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 Tbsp. ground cumin
2 Tbsp. ground coriander
1 zucchini, trimmed and sliced into half moons

3 Tbsp. hot pepper sauce
1 tsp. dried red pepper flakes
2 cups frozen or canned corn
1 (28 oz.) can baked beans
1 (28 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds, roughly chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in heavy pot or Dutch oven. Add garlic and onions and saute until softened, about 5 minutes. Add green pepper, cumin and coriander and cook, stirring, another 3-4 minutes. Add zucchini slices and cook, stirring, another 5 minutes.

Add remaining ingredients, except for pumpkin seeds, and bring to boil. Cover and let simmer about 20 minutes to blend flavors. Season with salt and pepper and extra hot sauce to taste. At the last minute, add pumpkin seeds and serve.

Garnish with sour cream, grated Cheddar cheese and a squirt of lime juice.

Serves 6-8.

A great chili to slap together on a busy night from the pantry and freezer. Some of the beans melt into the chili sauce and thicken it up nicely and some stay whole for texture. If I had a can of green chiles I would have added them too.

I'm sending over a bowl of this chili to my Cook the Books blogger buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchen for her weekly Souper Sunday roundup and a second bowl to Gloria of Foods and Flavors of San Antonio for her February Chili Cook-Off, both convivial and satisfying food blog events.

Cream of Ratatouille Soup

Ratatouille is a great summer casserole that we make quite a bit when the tomatoes, zucchini and peppers (and sometimes those slow-growing eggplants) are popping out of the garden like firecrackers in August and September. I usually make some up at least once a week for dinner with some melted cheese on top and then freeze the rest to pull out in the winter when we need a little garden remembrance.

This recipe caught my eye and I actually was so "homesick" for ratatouille during our January Arctic-style weather that I went out and bought fresh zucchini, peppers and a lovely little eggplant to whip up this lovely soup.



Being the style of cook that I am, of course I fiddled with the recipe: I didn't peel my eggplant, I used vegetable broth instead of the chicken stock called for, used dried thyme and basil from my garden preservation stores and substituted 1 (14.5 oz.) can of diced tomatoes and their juice for the fresh tomatoes. Half-and-half was used instead of heavy cream, so my version of this soup recipe is posted below.

Cream of Ratatouille Soup

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 unpeeled and chopped eggplant, diced
2 medium onions, peeled and diced
1 red pepper, seeded and diced
1 zucchini, diced
3 large cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 (14.5 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 cup vegetable stock
2 tsp. dried thyme
1 Tbsp. dried basil
2/3 cup half-and-half
Salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Saute eggplant, onions, red pepper, zucchini, and garlic, stirring, for 10 minutes, or until vegetables are softened. Add tomatoes and their juice, vegetable stock, thyme, and basil. Bring to a boil, lower heat and cover. Simmer 20 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.

Take half of vegetables from pot and puree in food process or blender. Return to pot, season with salt and pepper to taste and add half-and-half. Heat through and serve.

Serves 6-8.

**I plan to make this soup again, but I think I would modify it further as it was kind of tangy from the eggplant:zucchini ratio. Next time, I would triple the number of zucchinis. I would imagine that one could also just thaw out some frozen ratatouille and puree it in the food processor to form the basis for this same type of soup.

This delicious soup is my contribution to Weekend Herb Blogging #166, which is being hosted by me this week. Weekend Herb Blogging is a food blog event that focuses on recipes featuring herbs and plant ingredients or which inform readers about the nutritional qualities of herbs and plants. Haalo of Cook (Almost) Anything Once is the present hostess of Weekend Herb Blogging and you can find out more about the event, who some upcoming guest hosts will be, as well as WHB roundup archives on her site.

I have already received some interesting and toothsome WHB entries already this week and will be posting a roundup on Monday. The deadline for submitting a Weekend Herb Blogging post to me is tomorrow (3pm Sunday - Utah Time, 9pm Sunday - London Time, 8 am Monday - Melbourne (Aus) Time).

Thanks for stopping by....

Smoky Sweet Potato Soup

Leftover roasted sweet potatoes were the inspiration for this hearty winter soup. Sweet potatoes were on sale at the market last week and I grabbed a bagful to roast up in the oven. It's easy to do: I prick them with a fork several times and then pop them onto a cookie sheet for 40-50 minutes at 350 degrees F. You can turn them once if you like, but that's not necessary.

Our family likes them as is or with the insides scooped out, mashed and mixed with butter and a little brown sugar and then popped back into the skins for another 10 minutes of cooking time.

I had three baked sweet potatoes left from our supper, so I decided to make soup to have on hand during our cold January weather. I grabbed some frozen vegetable stock from the freezer, sauteed up some onions and veggies, and threw in a couple of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce from my seemingly inexhaustible little can in the fridge, and a smoky, spicy and slightly sweet soup was born:

Smoky Sweet Potato Soup

3 sweet potatoes, baked until soft

2 medium onions, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
4 stalks celery, peeled and chopped
4 Tbsp. butter

2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped (substitute 1 tsp. hot red pepper flakes for heat, but you'll miss the smoky taste of the chipotles)
6 cups vegetable broth
Salt to taste
2 Tbsp. chopped Italian parsley for garnish

Scoop out sweet potato flesh and mash. Set aside.

Heat butter in heavy-bottomed soup pot. Add garlic and cook 1 minute, stirring, being careful not to scorch. Add onions and cook another 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add celery and carrots, and keep stirring and cooking until vegetables are softened, about 5-10 minutes.

Add vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and add sweet potato flesh and chipotle peppers. Let cook another 20 minutes. Season with salt to taste. There is no need to thicken the soup with any kind of flour or cornstarch, as the sweet potatoes add a nice, thick texture. I like the soup chunky, but if you prefer a silken texture, go ahead and puree in a blender or food processor.

Serves 8. Garnish with chopped parsley.



I am sending this recipe on over to Honolulu where my friend Deb of Kahakai Kitchen hosts a weekly "Souper Sundays" event rounding up soups and stews from great cooks all over the map. Be sure to stop by tomorrow at Deb's blog to see what everyone's cooking up!

Soup in the Leaves

Though the nights are frosty, we have so far resisted turning on our heat and stuffing our precious wood into the fireplace because: a) we haven't cleaned out the chimneys yet, b) we are cheap, er, frugal, yeah, that's it, and c) we have plenty of sweaters and furry friends to keep us toasty at night. It is definitely soup and stew season, and I used my day off to peruse my cookbooks for a new soup recipe for "No Croutons Required", a monthly soup and salad cooking event alternately hosted by Tinned Tomatoes in Scotland and Lisa's Kitchen in Ontario. This month's challenge is to create a hearty vegetarian soup that would stand alone as a filling meal on a chilly day, and I came up with just such a soup.

Inspiration was divined by "Chef on a Shoestring", edited by Andrew Friedman (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001) and based on the CBS Early Show feature in which top chefs produce budget-friendly meals. I was hooked on a recipe Greenwich Village chef Jeanette Maier served at her Herban Kitchen restaurant for Hearty Root Vegetable and Lentil Stew with Three Herbs. Perusal of the Crispy larder came up rootless, veggie wise, however, and I didn't have a couple of other ingredients, but with a little substitution here and there I concocted this satisfying, hearty, and vegetarian pottage:

Autumnal Peasant Soup

2 Tbsp. 0live oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. dried rosemary, crumbled
1/2 tsp. caraway seeds

12 oz. small lentils, picked over and rinsed (I used a beautiful autumn blend of brown, grey and orange lentils from my health food store. They look divine dried but all turn the same shade of brown when cooked).

1 (28 oz.) can crushed tomatoes
2 qts. vegetable stock, homemade if possible
5 small potatoes, peeled and cut into small dice
4 stalks celery, diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced (I used a small bag of baby carrots that had been hiding in the fridge and were unappealingly dessicated to eat out of hand, but were fine cooked)

1/2 head medium cabbage, chopped (next time I would chope more finely)

Salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot. Add onions and garlic, and cook, stirring frequently, about 5 minutes, or until onions are translucent. Add herbs and caraway seeds and cook another 2 minutes.

Add lentils, tomatoes, vegetable stock, potatoes, celery and carrots and bring to boil. Lower heat, stir, cover and simmer on low heat about 40 minutes, or until potatoes are fairly well cooked. Add cabbage, stir and cook another 10 minutes, or until cabbage is softened. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 4 main dish servings, 6-8 starter servings.

This is the last day for the Hearty Vegetarian Soup No Croutons Event, so I am squeaking into eligibility, but check back on Lisa's Kitchen later in the month for a satisfying, seasonal roundup.