From Suq to Shuk

What to do with leftover roasted vegetables... make a soup.

Yesterday afternoon I suffered a bout of hunger and decided to recycle my left overs rather than eating them for a third day in a row.  The bulk of what I had left over was the roasted vegetables from Saturday's Mexican dinner, and I had yet another butternut squash in the fridge.  Furthermore, I had some of the spice mixture with which I prepared the roasted vegetables in the first place, and thus reinforced the flavours further in the soup.   Leemor, who had missed the first part of the Mexican dinner, joined me to eat this soup yesterday afternoon and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.  Because funds are low, I had the soup for dinner as well as lunch yesterday, at which time Tal also tasted it and remarked that it tasted just like the roasted vegetables I had prepared.

The soup was a bit spicy but nothing compared to the beef prepared several days before.  The squash was intensely sweet, which was met perfectly by the heat from the spice mixture, the fat from the cream and duck fat and the salt I added.  Altogether, it was a very satisfying soup and excellent way to make use of leftovers.  If you've got some left-over roasted vegetables, you could easily make a variation of this recipe with your own spices.  Enjoy!

  

Ingredients:

1 butternut squash, cut in half lengthwise and seeded

1 tbls olive oil

1 tbls of duck fat or butter

1 onion, diced

2 large cloves of garlic, minced

1 red chilli, seeded and minced

1 tbls of tomato paste

1 cup of cointreau

2 cups of chicken stock

1 tbls of the last dinner's spice mixture

about 1.5 cups of the left over roasted vegetables from the last dinner

250 ml of 15% cream

S+P

2 tbls lime juice

a few sprigs of cilantro, chopped, for a garnish

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 190C/375F.  Line oven tray with tinfoil, brush on olive oil, then place the butternut squash flesh side down on the olive oil coated tray.  Move the the squash around a bit so that the bottom side is fully coated with the oil.  Leave in the oven for 40 minutes.

Heat the duck fat in a dutch oven over medium.  Add the onion and sauté for 10 minutes, having turned down the heat to medium-low and stirring once a minute or so.  Add the garlic and chillies, sauté for another 3 minutes, then add the tomato paste.  Add half the cointreau, allow to reduce almost entirely.  Add the spices, mix in well then add the rest of the cointreau, allow to reduce mostly.  Add the chicken stock and bring to a simmer.  Add the roasted vegetables, then pour in boiling water to cover.

Remove the squash from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes before peeling it (don't burn yourself).  The peel should pull away very easily, after which, cut the squash into large chunks.  Enter into the the pot, then pour over more boiling water to cover.  Turn the heat down to somewhere between medium-low and low, and allow to simmer for another 30 minutes.  Blend very thoroughly, then mix in half the cream with S+P and lime juice.

Ladle into a bowl and swirl some cream for presentation and top with you cilantro garnish.  B'Teavon!

What to do with left over green curry

This will be just a very quick post as another is due later today and many more are coming.  I'm happily back in Tel Aviv where I'll be back on schedule to write daily.  I spent a good deal of time going over ways to edit my photos with my dad, who was a great help.  Due to his tutelage this blog should be seeing higher quality photographs with clearer colours.  So here's come a few attempts on my own and manipulating the image...

The green curry was served as one of many dishes for the party, so if you've got a bunch left over there's probably no rice left to go with it.  It was almost soup like in the amount of liquid left, so here's what I did:

Prepare a large package of japanese rice noodles (pour over boiling water and allow to soak for 15 minutes - or follow the instructions on the package), and then mix it with some snow peas.  Makes a great addition and the snow peas are add a nice crunch.  When you put the curry in the fridge the sauce will solidify, and I always find it fun to let things slip out of a container and allow them to maintain their form a for a bit (i.e. American cranberry sauce out of a can at thanksgiving).

Real recipes coming later today and my apologies for the infrequency of posts.

Enjoy!

  

What to do with left over roasted chicken

So if you've made the lunch from two posts ago you now have leftovers for dinner.  What I did not include in that post was the recipe for Vichyssoise soup whose leftovers will also contribute to today's post.  Vichyssoise is a cold potato-leek soup invented at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan about 100 years ago.  It's a perfect soup for a summer's day, but could be served warm in the winter and would be equally delicious.  The recipe I make includes celery and pear.

--------------------------

Vichyssoise

Ingredients:

2 tbls butter

4 large yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced

2 leeks, white part only, sliced in two and pulled apart (absolutely no green)

2 green pairs, peeled, cored and diced

3 branches of celery, peeled and minced

3 cups of chicken stock

water to cover

1/2 cup cream

S+P

Directions:

Heat butter over medium low, add your leaks.  When leeks are soft, after about 3 minutes, add chicken stock.  Raise heat to medium and add celery and pear, stir in.  After 3 minutes (stirring once every minute), add chicken stock, bring to a boil and add potatoes.  Add boiling water to cover the potatoes, and boil on medium until soft.  You can tell when the potatoes are ready if when pierced with a fork, they immediately fall off the fork when pulled out of the water.

Blend your soup, then pass through a chinois strainer.  Reserve the contents of the chinois after straining.  Put soup back on the stove, bring to a boil then turn all the way down, add cream salt and pepper.  Allow to cool then place in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.  Serve with a good bitter olive oil and garlic toast.

--------------------------

Now you have the left over braised vegetables and chicken and the solids from your soup. I decided to make a risotto with the left over soup solid. Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

Soup solids

20 grams of butter

1.5 cups arborio rice

2 cups white wine

3 cups chicken stock

Directions:

Melt the butter in the pan over medium-low.  Add your soup solids and heat them up, about 2 minutes, then add the rice.  Add one ladel of liquid, alternating between white wine and chicken stock.  After adding a ladle of liquid, constantly stir it in until it has all been absorbed into the rice or evaporated.  Repeat this until the rice is the appropriate texture.  If you run out of wine and stock, add water.  Once desired texture has been achieved, turn off the heat (if using an electric stove, move to a cool element).  Stir in salt and pepper and serve.

Glazed Carrots (a variation of my mother's recipe):

Ingredients:

1 tsp of pepperoncino

25 grams of butter

1 tbls of thyme

3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch thick pieces

1 tbls of honey

S+P

Directions:

In a large frying pan, melt butter over medium with the pepperoncino.  Add carrots to pan with a flat side down in hot butter, evenly spaced (do not crowd the pan)!  Allow carrots to carmelise, about ten minutes, then add the thyme.  After 30 seconds, add the honey, then 2 tbls of water, and cover the pan.  Cook for about 5 minutes, or until all the vapor is gone.  If the carrots are not fully cooked on top, add a little more water and repeat until cooked.  Add S+P and serve.

For the left over chicken:

Peel the skin of the chicken and shred the chicken with two forks, place in a sauce pan and combine with

2 tbls mustard

25g butter

heat over low heat, stirring in all ingredients.  After about 6 minutes, add salt and pepper, plate and top with a basil leaf.

Reheat your braised vegetables, and you have an excellent dinner made from lunch's left overs.

B'Teavon

Open face turkey sandwiches with kumquat chutney and basil butter

So along comes the accompaniment to my kumquat chutney from the last post.  As I said, I created this dish to accommodate my Thanksgiving left over.  I've had a number of guinea pigs on whom to test this recipe and all responses were nothing but positive.  I highly recommend you try this one at home.

Basil Butter

Ingredients:

30 large basil leaves, about 15-16 grams

50 grams of butter

1 small, or 1/2 of 1 large raw clove of garlic

1 tsp mustard

salt and pepper

Directions:

Wash your basil and dry it well!  In a mortar, pound the leaves with a pestle until they begin to break apart, then move your pestle around the mortar to grind the basil leaves into a paste.  Add your garlic to the mortar and pound it hard, so that it as much breaks up as possible with each pound.  Once the these strikes have left the garlic in multiple pieces, grind circularly again to encororate the garlic into the paste.  Add your teaspoon of mustard, and work it in.  Then add your butter, salt and pepper.  Work the mixture until perfectly smooth and uniform.  If you'd like, you could now pass this through a tamis, or leave as is.

Turkey.

Ingredients:

Left overs from the entry "Thanksgiving, Part 2"

Directions:

Place your turkey, two or three slices of carrots, and all the juices in which they were sitting into a sauce pan.  You may discard the rest of the vegetables or find another use for them.  Over a medium heat, heat up your turkey and with two forks pull away along the grain of the flesh to get strings of meat.  Mash up your carrots.  Reduce this mixture until the turkey has comfortably absorbed most of the liquid remaining in the pan.

Assembly

Directions:

Place slices of bread in the oven or toaster and toast to your preference.  Spread on basil butter, slice some cherry tomatoes and put them atop your basil butter.  Top with turkey and finally the kumquat chutney, and enjoy!