Smoky Soothing Soup

Soup has to be one of the best foods on the planet.  It's warm, comforting and a fantastic way to use up food in your fridge or cupboard that might be on its last legs.  Today, I have a whole pile of carrots in my fridge.  They're not quite soft and squishy, but they're heading that direction.  Thing is I'm not a massive fan of carrot soup.  Usually, I find it a bit insipid, a bit watery and boring.  Teaming carrots up with ginger or coriander helps, but it's still not top of my list of favourite soups.

So, just before lunch I considered all the ingredients I had to hand and figured what I was really looking for was depth of flavour with a comforting, rich smokiness.  Smoked paprika is my 'go-to' spice for that particularly deep flavour.  So much tastier than bog-standard paprika.  I've also been caramelising onions for lots of different recipes lately and thought, yup...caramelised onions, smoked paprika and carrots might just do the job.  I had also defrosted a litre of home made chicken stock yesterday, which would provide lovely rich flavour.

From a nutritional perspective this soup kicks some serious butt.  Carrots are rich in beta-carotene (hence the colour) and are fantastic for protecting your blood vessels from damage.  Beta carotene also improves eye health, particularly protecting the macula densa from free radical damage and reducing the risk of macular degeneration.  Home made chicken stock is full of lovely nutrients, particularly those residing in the bones of the chicken like silica, calcium and boron, important for bone health.  The fats in the stock will also help to absorb the beta-carotene.  I added half a bulb of garlic, which is rich in Allicin, wonderful as a flu & cold fighter and also remarkably good for probiotic bacteria in your gut.

Making the soup was easy peasy.  I began by slicing 2 medium brown onions and cooking them over a low heat with a little butter to caramelise.  It took about 30 mins in total, which might seem like ages, but they cook away happily without much interference, apart from the odd stir, so it's easy to work on other things while they're getting sweet and chewy.  Once they were beginning to colour and starting to stick to the saucepan, I added 2 tsp of smoked paprika and gave everything a stir.

 

If, like me, it drives you completely spare that those tall spice jars are too narrow for a standard teaspoon, then I highly recommend you invest in a set of measuring spoons.  I have a lovely 'Nigella Lawson' set that I bought years ago and they are some of my most used implements.  The 1/2 teaspoon fits those annoying jars beautifully and means I don't end up shaking half the jar into whatever I'm making.  Anyway, that's an aside...

 

Once the onions and paprika were mixed, I added the stock and some water, about 1.5l in total, about 750g carrots chopped into chunks, roughly the same size (unpeeled if organic) and half a bulb of garlic, cloves peeled and finely chopped.  Then I brought everything to the boil and reduced the heat,  simmering until the carrots were soft, about 15 minutes.  The final job was to blend til smooth.  I used an immersion blender, which saved me from transferring everything into a jug blender.  If you are using a jug blender, give the soup time to cool a little.  Boiling hot soup and glass don't always make the best of friends, so play it safe.


Season with salt and pepper to suit your own taste and serve!  If you have some bacon fry it up, chop into pieces and sprinkle on top, or as I did, crunchy onion bits (a favourite here in Sweden)  I don't bother making these myself, in fact, it was Mountain Man who picked them up originally, but these organic ones from COOP aren't bad, no nasty weird ingredients and pretty tasty.  Try it out and let me know how you get on...

   

Organ meats anyone?

I remember, as a kid, being given kidneys as part of a warm salad for dinner.  The whole notion of a warm salad was rather brave & in our part of Co. Waterford was definitely 'nouvelle cuisine', but kidneys?  Oh man, I hated them.  Even now, I'm not sure what animal they came from, but I guess it was chicken...they were really tiny.  The smell and texture made me retch and put me off all organ meats forever, or so I thought.

Thankfully, my mother had the wisdom to try other methods of getting organ meats into us.  Every now and then she would make a big batch of chicken liver pâté, freeze most of it and on special occasions present us with a ramekin of smooth creamy heaven.  Even though I knew it was called 'liver' pâté, I didn't quite make the connection with organ meats.  Even my brother loved it and still does, despite being the fussiest eater in the family.  I always thought it must be very expensive to make, as we only had it very rarely, but now I know better.  It's really inexpensive and so easy and quick to make.  If you don't mind handling organ meats and are confident that you can get them from a reputable source, then it's well worth trying.

Obviously if you're vegetarian then this recipe isn't for you.  However, if you're a meat eater as I am, using as much of the animal as possible makes me feel better about eating it in the first place, even if they look pretty unappetising in their raw state.  I'm lucky to have found a fantastic butcher in Malmö  'Vilt Specialisten' who specialises in wild game and organic pasture reared meat, which is naturally higher in all kinds of nutrients including the much talked about Omega-3.

If you're not sure about organ meats, let me try to convince you.  Organ meats like liver, kidneys and heart are rich in many nutrients, particularly fat soluble ones like Vitamin A & D, minerals selenium, zinc and iron, B vitamins and Vitamin K2.  B12 is particularly rich in liver, as that's where it's stored (unlike other B vitamins) and is hard to get if you don't eat much meat or animal products.  Deficiencies in B12 can lead to issues with cell division and blood volume, mood disorders, depression and anxiety.  Also found in organ meats is a nutrient called Co-enzyme Q10, which is essential for energy production and is often lacking when we are fatigued or suffering from conditions like chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue or long term stress.  All of these nutrients are essential for very active people and are often lacking in our diets, even if we feel we are eating healthily.  This pâté recipe includes grass fed butter (organic if you can get it) which really helps us to absorb the fat soluble nutrients in the liver.

Convinced?  Well, I reckon that's quite enough theory, here's the recipe

Chicken Liver Pâté

Ingredients:
125g organic grass fed butter (easy to get in Ireland, not so easy here in Sweden!)

1 medium onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Small handful of thyme leaves (rosemary or tarragon work well too, I find sage a bit strong)
500g fresh, free-range organic chicken livers
Unrefined sea salt (like Maldon)
Freshly ground black pepper
40ml orange juice (ideally freshly squeezed)
60ml brandy (or just more orange juice)

Optional - 200g of butter and extra herb sprigs to seal the pâté.

What to do:

1. In a large frying pan or wide saucepan, add 2tbsp of the butter over a low heat.  Add the onion and garlic and 1/2 tsp of salt.  Let this cook slowly and gently until soft and translucent, but not brown.
2. Add the brandy, thyme and orange juice, simmer for 2 minutes to cook off the alcohol and reduce slightly.
3. Add the chicken livers.  Cook them gently, turning regularly until they are opaque on the outside but still burgundy on the inside.  Take off the heat.  
4. Transfer the liver & onion mix to a food processor (a blender may also work, but the blade is smaller so you will probably need to do it in several batches).  Add another 1/2 tsp of salt, a good pinch of pepper and blitz for 1 minute until almost smooth.  Cut up the remaining butter and add piece by piece with the processor running.  Taste and add more seasoning if you think it needs it.  Now, to get it really smooth, process for another 2 minutes.
5. Transfer the mix to a large ceramic terrine dish, or as I did, several ramekins which makes it easier to freeze some and eat the rest.  If you wish, you can seal the pâté with the additional butter, by melting it first with a few rosemary or thyme leaves then gently spooning over the pâté.  Once this butter sets, it acts as a seal and helps to prevent oxidation of the precious fats inside.
6. Put it in the fridge and leave to set for a few hours, ideally overnight.  Freeze most of it (covered with clingfilm or a lid to protect from freezer burn) and tuck into whatever you keep in the fridge.  It's lovely spread on veg sticks or on sourdough toast for breakfast or lunch. 

What do you think, will you try it?  I'd love to see photos if you do, share them on my facebook page!

Mojito for Dinner Anyone?

When we moved into our new apartment, Mountain Man made me a promise (or threat, depending how you look at it).  'If you don't cook from every single one of those cookbooks while we're here I'm burning them'.  Oh...oops.

The poor man carried them from our house in Cork into a van and then from the same van in Sweden into an apartment in Malmö and then, into and out of another van and up 2 flights of stairs into our new-new apartment.  In my defence, I gave away at least half of them before we left Cork and I have read through lots of them.  And fondled their pages, particularly the pretty ribbons that some of them have, but I can't say I have cooked that many dishes from them.  Point taken. 

Yesterday I pulled out one of my more recent purchases, Donal Skehan's Good Mood Food and selected 3 recipes I would cook from it this week.  The first appealed because it reminded me of the cocktails we had on our wedding day just over a year ago - sigh.  Lime & Mint Mojito Chicken.

What a gorgeous recipe and so easy to make.  Basically, you marinade 4 chicken breasts (butterflied for faster cooking) in the juice of two limes, 2 cloves of garlic finely chopped (Donal said 1, but I like garlic) a handful of mint finely chopped and 5 tablespoons of Rum.  Bung everything in a ziploc bag and put in the fridge for the day.  When you get home from work (or in my case when I retired from working on my laptop at the dining table) put on some rice or cous cous and fry up the chicken breasts and more lime quarters.  The chicken developes a lovely caramely crust and the limes are turned into sweet juicy nuggets of gorgeousness. 

 

Serve with rice or cous cous or maybe some herby quinoa (I wasn't entirely happy with the rice I made, it was a bit boring) and a side salad.  Really quick and particularly delicious, even for plain old chicken breasts!  It is that simple.  Cooking takes, oh...about 10 minutes, so total prep time is as long as it takes to cook your rice/cous cous/quinoa and um...make a mojito to sip on at the hob.  Tough work this cooking business.