You’ll notice that soup #35.5, Crab and Corn Chowder, doesn’t get a whole number to itself, though it got some pretty great raves from the crowd.That’s because it’s really Soup #35, Crab Confetti Soup, reinvented as a chowder. Continue reading →

I scored a one pound tin of crab meat at Shoppers Food Warehouse while shopping and wanted to see if I could improve on the last Crab Bisque I made, which was pretty good, but left room for improvement. Of course, all soup leaves room for improvement, or being taken in a different direction. Today’s direction is away from a crab bisque and into a confetti of onions, peppers, carrots and bacon bits. This isn’t actually a bisque, BTW, because it uses a flour and butter roux for thickness.

We’re currently hosting a vegetarian nephew, but he’s willing to concede that crabs aren’t animals for the purposes of today’s adventure. Bacon, even minced up is, unfortunately, but I suppose we could leave that out. I suppose.

Crab Confetti Bisque

• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
• 1 medium onion, minced
• 1 cup celery, minced
• 1 cup carrots, minced
• 1 poblano pepper, minced
• 1 red pepper, minced
• 1/4 cup of salted butter
• 1/2 cup general urpose flour
• 1 qt of chicken stock
• 1 tsp Old Bay Seasoning
• 1/8 tsp cayenne
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 pint of half and half
• 1 lb can of crab meat

This soup isn’t going to be blended, so the size you cut to is the size you’ll get. We’re looking for a colorful bunch of little bits here, somewhere between a 1/4 and an 1/8th of an inch square.

Add the vegetables into the oilve oil medium low as you cut them, and I suggest the order listed in the ingredients. When they’re all in, cook the collection until they’re slightly soft and add in the stock.Set it to smmer.

Now, let’s make a roux. Heck, let’s make a white sauce.

A roux is what you get when you cook oil and flour together in roughly equal quantities (by weight) until the flour is cooked to the desired degree.We’re looking for a “white” roux, which means we just want the flour to lose it’s “raw” smell, but if you went further you’d get a darker roux with interesting flavors. A blond roux on one end of the spectrum tastes a little toasty, while the coffee colored roux used in Gumbo tastes like toasted nuts. You can use any cooking oil for a roux, though French cooking leans heavily on butter…as we will.

Melt the butter in a medium saute pan over medium heat. When it starts to foam, shake the flour in a bit at a time while whisking it in so that it doesn’t lump up. Stir this mixture for about three minutes, which cooks the flour so that it loses a “raw” flavor. The consistency should be about that of a cake frosting.

Now, blend in the pint of half and half by whisking it into the roux in a slow stream.  When it’s all in and reaches a sauce-like consistency, that’s it. You now have a (very) basic white sauce, which you can take in any number of directions, including adding cheese into it to form a cheese sauce, which is pretty much what we did in the Beer and Cheese Soup.

Blend this into the soup. If it’s too thick to blend easily, take some stock out and add that to it in the saucepan first.

Add in the spices and let them cook on low for about fifteen minutes. While the soup is coming along, drain your crab meat and chop it into whatever size you like, probably somewhat larger than the vegetables, on the order of 1/4 to 1/2 inch cubes.

Add the crab to the soup and continue on low for twenty minutes.

Add water (or milk) to adjust thickness. Remember it’s not a pudding…it’s a soup. Adjust salt as required and shut it down until you’re ready to serve.

Beer and Cheese Soup - It's really, really, good. Here I've garnished it with a slice of bread and a sprinkling of cayenne...not enough to make it hot, but just enough to add a little bite.

Beer and Cheese Soup. Sounds like a joke, right? If so, then you probably haven’t had any, or (even worse), it wasn’t as good as it could have been. This is, hands down, one of the best soups I’ve made, but considering the ingredients maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise.

Just as the iPad is just a bigger iPod, you can say that soups, especially cream soups, are just bigger batches of sauces. In both cases it’s a perfectly reasonable observation, but that doesn’t diminish the goodness of the antecedent item. Raquel Welch could be thought of as just a bigger Twiggy too. Continue reading →

After roasting pumpkin halves and scooping out the pulp, the empty shells were quite hard...and just the right size to fit a soup bowl into.

I love it when October and Halloween roll around each year, not because of the spooky stuff or candy treats, though I can’t deny enjoying a bit of both…but because of all the pumpkins suddenly waiting to be turned into soup.

I’ve made soup out of our used Jack-o-lantern on occasion, and despite their being bred for size and sculptability, I’m happy to say that the generic store bought pumpkin works just fine in soup. This year I picked up a smallish four pound Sugar Pumpkin at Trader Joes, thinking it would be bursting with flavor. Unfortunately, as I was cutting my way through it, I realized that the best pumpkin in the world still needs to be ripened to get its flavor out, and this one wasn’t quite there yet. Roasted alongside the butternut squash and a few poblano peppers it came out all right, but not as right as it might have been. Lesson learned.

What with one thing and another, it’s been a fairly rough few weeks recently, and the Year of Soup part of my blog has suffered as a result. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been making soup though, as a matter of fact I’ve made several…I just haven’t written them up.

Let’s see. Sunday before last I made a Roasted red pepper soup with chicken and corn. The other day I made a white bean and chicken chili on the spur of the moment, and a couple of times, including today, I made chicken noodle soup. Chicken soup, whether it’s a chowder, chili, noodle or (as s the case in tomorrow’s planned soup) barley, is a special kind of comfort food, and if lfe has thrown you a few curves lately, making chicken soup is a good response. Especially if you share it with friends.

Here’s the chicken noodle soup I made for lunch today for me and my gal in between running errands. Total prep time was probably about fifteen minutes. Then I left it on a low simmer for half an hour while we ran another errand and it was perfect when we got back.

Chicken Noodle Soup in a hurry

yield: four 10 oz servings

• 1 quart chicken stock
• 1 cup noodles (I used a mix of bowties and rotelle today, but often I like thin strands)
• 1 carrot – cut into quarters the long way and choped into one third inch slices)
• 2 stalks of celery (sliced the long way into thirds and cross sliced like the carrots)
• 1 baby bella mushroom, halved and sliced
• 1 skinned chicken thigh (diced)
• 1/4 tsp thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp flour (I use Wondra here because it’s desgned not to clump)
• Salt as needed

I put the stock into a saucepan and turned up the heat, then added each ingredeant as it got cut up. No saute, no special ceremony, just chop and add. The last things to go in were the spices and the flour, after which it all got stirred up to mix them in and the temperature lowered to a slow simmer. Then I covered it and walked away. Actualy, I drove, since we were taking my wagon in to have a noise looked at before I take it on a road trip next week.

When we got back from dropping off the car half an hour later, the place smelled great, which is where a lot of the psychological benefit of chicken soup comes from, thanks to some linkages between smell and the older parts of our brain, the ones that decide whether we should fight for our lives or put our feet up on a log and kick back.

We sat down and each had a bowl, leaving just enough for two bowl sized servings to be put up in the fidge. It was excellent and just what a dreary fall day after a hard weekd needed. I could have used white meat in the soup, but it wouldn’t have been as tender, so in general I really prefer using thighs over breast.

Can a good bowl of soup change the world? I wouldn’t bet against it, but I’m certain that it can make the world easier to take. Chicken soup for the soul doesn’t have to be a metaphor…the real thing does a fine job on its own.