The Anna Roundup: Cabbage Soup, Pampushky, Pierogi and and a Giveaway, From Belarus with Love

As noted here in my post last month, my creative mother, Carol Marie Davis, recently published a book about her maternal grandmother, Anna: Heart of a Peasant.

It tells the story of our intrepid ancestor as she made a new life for herself in America after being banished by her family in her small village in Belarus. Anna's story is not a tragedy, however. She emigrated to a new home that she cherished, married, raised a family of her own, and nourished and healed them with vegetables and herbs grown in her garden. There are some beautiful illustrations and even a few heirloom recipes at the back of the book

As a surprise Christmas present for my mom, I sent copies of her book to five of my blogger friends from Cook the Books, our online foodie book club, to read and review, and they very kindly obliged with great posts about the book as well as their forays into some pretty tasty Russian cooking.

My Australian expat buddy Alicia blogs in England at Foodycat. Alicia is always an adventurer in the kitchen and like our heroine Anna, is expert at putting up the garden harvest. Her Anna post led to a glorious pot of borscht studded with chunks of vegetables and short ribs, accompanied by some pampushky, a sort of savory doughnut rolled in garlic and salt. Where's my spork!

Traveling halfway around the globe, we find ourselves next in Hawaii at Claudia's blog, Honey from Rock. Claudia felt a bit of kinship with Anna and her gardening, preserving, wine-making ways, and notes "Peasants rule!" She took up the challenge of making Potato and Cheese Pierogis and they came out quite splendidly, bathed in a little emerald green parsley butter.

Heather the Girlichef is a blogging dynamo with a big heart and a great writing style. She immediately said yes when I approached her about reviewing this book and her phrase about resonating with Anna's "hands in the earth growing food" is just beautiful prose. Heather set about making a pot of Garlicky Chicken Soup and reports that this foodie medicine may have warded off a few colds that were brewing around her home.

The rest of our book reviewing band fell in love with Anna's Cabbage Soup, though all three pots of soup came out quite differently:

Simona of Briciole, is an Italian-born California resident, and used Savoy Cabbage and home grown Red Russian Kale (how appropriate) topped with a dollop of homemade kefir in her rendition of this hearty vegetable soup. Simona writes that she may be inspired to start recording some of her father's many stories and I can enthusiastically second this idea! Perhaps we will have another interesting memoir to read soon?.....

My Cook the Books co-founder and co-host, the effervescent Deb of Kahakai Kitchen in Honolulu, also tried out a cabbage soup recipe a la Anna, though her version was a little less sugary, a little more lemony and enhanced with a scoop of brown rice. Deb may also be providing us with some future recipes and/or memories of her Scandinavian immigrant forbears at her blog. I sure hope so!

Finally, there's my version of Anna's Cabbbage Soup from the recent archives of The Crispy Cook. Like Deb, I cut down on the sugar, lessened the cooking time (I like my "kapusti", or cabbage, more al dente) and made up a pot of love at my own little dacha.

Thanks to all my wonderful friends who helped celebrate the publication of my mother's new book. I offer you my heartfelt thanks and am glad that you enjoyed Anna's stories and recipes. My mom has been excitedly reading all your posts and even stirred herself to learn how to leave comments on your awesome blogs, no mean feat!

Giveaway Announcement: 

To keep the book party going, I will be offering a copy of Anna: Heart of a Peasant to one of you now. Just leave a comment below (for an extra entry LIKE The Crispy Cook on Facebook ) and leave a comment below telling me about your action, and I'll  randomly pick a winner and send out a copy of my mom's book to you, anywhere in the world. I will pick a random winner from the comments below after a deadline of Feb. 29, 2012.

And for all you readers who can't get enough cabbage soup, please feel free to join us at Cook the Books as we read and cook from Roald Dahl's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Deb of Kahakai Kitchen is the host for this round, in which we find our central character, Charlie Bucket, staving off hunger with his family in a cold house with meals of cabbage soup, boiled potatoes and bread with margarine (on a good payday!) before Charlie wins the lucky Golden Ticket in a bar of chocolate that allows him to tour this fabulous Willy Wonka candy factory.  Cook the Books submissions are due March 25, 2012 and you can find out all about how to join in the fun with our book club regulars over at the Cook the Books website.

Creamy Black Bean Soup with Roasted Fennel

Certain members of the Crispy household  have been having some tender tummies and medically-authorized restricted diets as of late. This has presented a bit of a challenge to the Crispy Cook, who, in addition to having the gluten-free diet to consider, has had to produce low-acid, low-fat , tomato, onion and garlic-free meals. I have even had to bone up on the liquid diet in preparation for one of us to have some medical tests.

Now, we love us our spice, alliums, acids and fats in our family, so this is new territory for me. I've been consulting my cookbook library in an effort to keep everybody happy and healthy during this new food adventure. While some of  us would be perfectly content sucking down Italian ices and popsicles 24/7, this is hardly a nutritious diet, so I've been constantly referring to the list of approved vegetables, fruits and seasonings, to try to come up with restorative and satisfying edibles.

There is good news that more and more, you can find grocery coupons for healthier foods. Enter this tasty cup of black bean soup. Not the most photogenic of potages, but this batch was so yummy, I will be making it again when we are back to eating our regular menu. It is soothing, full of vitamins and is pleasantly sweet. Though most other black bean soup recipes feature lots of spice, this variety is flavorful in a botanical, herbaceous kind of way.

The home run ingredient was roasted fennel. I chopped up a large bulb of fennel, feathery fronds, chunky stems and all, doused it with 1 Tbsp. of olive oil and a pinch of salt in a covered ceramic baking dish, and then baked it at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes. Then I uncovered the baking dish and roasted it another 10 minutes to let it brown up. We ate some of that as a side dish for our supper and then the next day was dedicated to a liquid diet, so I decided to add the leftovers in with some sauteed carrots and celery to a simple vegetarian black bean soup and the fennel joined with the fresh taste of its celery cousin and the whole thing was really sublime.

Black Bean Soup with Roasted Fennel

2 cups dried black beans, soaked in water to cover for several hours
(you could also use 2 (14 oz.) cans of cooked black beans, undrained)

1 large bulb fennel, roasted (see above)

1 Tbsp. olive oil
2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
3 stalks celery, finely chopped

5 cups vegetable stock

Salt to taste

Drain beans and cover with fresh water. Bring to a boil and lower heat to simmer. Cook until softened, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, in another large pot heat olive oil. Add carrots and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 7 minutes. Add roasted fennel and vegetable stock and bring to boil. Cover and simmer while beans finish cooking.

Add cooked black beans to the soup pot. Stir together to blend and add salt to taste. I then stuck in my immersion blender to puree the soup. You could eat it like that or go further and strain out any vegetable bits if you are on a liquid diet, like we were this past week.

Serve hot. Makes 8 servings.

I am going to send a cup of this luscious black bean soup over to my blogger buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchen, for her weekly Souper Sunday roundup and another cup over to Sweet Artichoke who is this month's host for My Legume Love Affair, a blog event created by Susan the Well-Seasoned Cook. Disclaimer: I received compensation for adding the link to the third paragraph of this post.

Pop on Over

Trying to make popovers proved to be a difficult challenge for me for this month's Gluten Free Ratio Rally baking project. Despite the fact that these allegedly tall, crusty and pockety muffiny things are made from only a few simple ingredients, (milk, eggs, flour, butter, a little salt and some xanthan gum), my popovers were flop-overs.

The two batches of popovers I made were edible, but they certainly didn't resemble the gloriously puffy popovers I aspired to on the cover of Nicole Hunn's great GF cookbook, Gluten Free on a Shoestring. Now that is a popover!

What I got from my experiments were sunken in the middle, height-challenged flopovers, though I switched around flours and baking cups. I don't own popover tins, but having read in several different cookbooks that popovers can theoretically rise to majestic heights in regular muffin tins, ramekins or even coffee mugs, I tried all three ways. Sadly, something was amiss with my flop-overs.

My first batch was based on Hunn's basic popover recipe, though the first time around I used equal parts potato starch and white rice flour instead of the 1 cup of all-purpose gluten-free flour called for by Hunn because I thought that might make for a really light popover that would rise and rise and rise.

This is what I got from that first batch:

 They were nice and brown and CRISPY on the outside and somewhat moist and pudding-like on the bottom, but they were definitely concave in the middle. We ate them hot with blackberry jam and enjoyed them, but they needed improvement.

Flop-over batch #2 were baked with a half and half mixture of Bob's Red Mill all-purpose gluten-free flour and corn flour (with 1/2 tsp. celery seed for added flavor) for a savory and corny tasting popover. Again, edible, but decidedly concave rather than convex in the middle. Hmmm.

So, what should I do differently? Place them in a cold oven rather than a preheated oven as some cookbooks suggest? Bake for a longer time or at a higher temperature? Go ahead and splurge on real popover tins? I am open to suggestions.

I am going to keep at it, because I love the idea of an airy, crisp popover, and I am really looking forward to seeing what my fellow Ratio Rally-ers have come up with. Mrs. R. of Honey from Flinty Rocks will have links to a variety of sweet, savory and spicy popovers back at her blog so be sure to join me in hopping over there to see what successful gluten-free popover baking is all about.