« Dining Out and About: When in Rome… | Home | Introducing: Trading Tastes »
Two soups
By Ann | March 4, 2008
Welcome back to another edition of Cooking the Books: The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics (every time I type that title I think how boring it is).
I have been industrious the past few days, making not one, but two, soups from the book’s “Soups and Stews” sections. The first, spiced red lentil soup with crispy fried ginger (pictured top), was a rave. Fragrant with cumin, curry powder and ginger, I loved the exotic yet soothing Indian flavors of this healthy soup. My only quibble is that the soup was slightly too thin — in the future I will reduce the liquid to seven cups. Full confession: I was too busy (lazy) to make the fried ginger, but it would provide a delicious, crunchy contrast to the soup’s velvety texture.
Soup number two, broccoli soup with cheddar toasts (pictured bottom), was a bust. The recipe calls for 3 1/4 lbs broccoli and I had broccoli exploding from the pot. If you check out the recipe link, you will see in the photo that Martha’s version is a bright green. Unless she used some sort of dye, I have no idea how she achieved this. The broccoli tops are supposed to be cooked briefly, to maintain their color, but there is no way they could soften enough to be pureed and still remain bright green. My soup is an unappetizing khaki brown.
The biggest problem with the broccoli soup is that it just tastes like… broccoli. Considering how our cruciferous friend composes about 98% of the soup, this is no surprise. But despite being pureed, there is no disguising the sheer broccoli-ness of this soup, and no cheddar toast can hide the fact that the flavor is flat. It needs something, but what? (Sriracha, probably.) I have at least a quart of this stuff in the fridge and every time I see it I heave a sigh. Of course, my colon is delighted. But — at what price?!
Topics: Cooking the Books |
One Response to “Two soups”
Comments
« Dining Out and About: When in Rome… | Home | Introducing: Trading Tastes »
March 4th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
1. Deep fried crispy ginger is a fantastic chip; you can make it ahead of time (days ahead) and have it on hand. It’s like a potato chip but spicy.
2. Freeze your broccoli soup. Next time you make broccoli pasta, you have a natural sauce which you can use instead of pasta water.