Green pea soup

I've been doing something like this for some time, but a friend asked me for recipes using thyme, and thyme works well here.  I started off doing this with left over veggie, but now I buy stuff specifically to make it.

Ingredients

These are terribly fluid; the method works with almost any vegetables.  I think that this particular mix of vegetables works quite well.  This will probably make 3 - 4 servings (depending on how much liquid you use).

• A 500g bag of fresh peas
• Asparagus (yes, I know.  It's not a waste of asparagus to put it in a soup, though!)
• One onion or
• One leek or both
• About 100g of smoked bacon (or half a pack)
• Olive oil 
• Chicken stock - I use the stockpots and make up to 500 mL; you could use one stock cube if you like
• A few sprigs of fresh thyme (see picture underneath)

You do need a stick blender for this (although I expect you could tip the soup into an ordinary blender).

The peas need to be podded.  This is what 500g of podded peas looks like:

And here's how much thyme to use:

You need to strip the thyme leaves from the thyme stems, but don't worry if a few soft stems are included - it all gets whizzed up at the end, anyway.

Method

• Cut the bacon rashers into 1 cm strips and put them in a cold saucepan, turning the heat on under them. 

 I do this on an electric stove that heats up slowly, so I turn it to high.  If you're using gas, I think you'd probably need to do it on a lower heat - say, medium to low.  You want the fat to come out of the bacon bits.

• When the fat has come out of the bacon bits, add a glug or two of olive oil, and add the chopped onion and / or leek. Saute until soft, stirring all the time. 

 I usually use both! I was thinking last time that it would be perfectly OK just to use the leek, though, if you have a large one.  This is sauteeing, not frying - you're just softening the alliums, and driving a bit of water off to concentrate the flavour.  It won't hurt, though, if the onions pick up brown specks.

• Add 500 mL of chicken stock and the thyme leaves, and let the mixture simmer for five minutes or so. 

• Add the chopped asparagus and peas and let the mixture simmer for another five to ten minutes.

You might want to add some more water or stock at this stage - I usually add 300 - 500 mL of water.  You need to taste if you're thinking about adding more stock, because there is a real danger of making the soup too salty.  The bacon and the chicken stock already used make it quite salty - if you're using homemade stock, though (made in the old fashioned way by boiling up the left over roast chicken carcass from Sunday), it might not be salty enough, and you'll need to add some extra salt.

You'll get something that looks like this:

It's quite thick with vegetables. 

• Use a stick blender to puree everything in the pan.  Everything.

What you will see is something that looks like this:

And that's your soup.  When I made it so that I could take pictures, I'd forgotten to get bread, so I served it with some grated hard goats cheese:

But I think it's probably best with a roll and butter.  It's even better the next day, kept in the fridge overnight and reheated.  It also freezes quite well.

Variation

I haven't done this because it seems like too much faff, but if I had the tuits, I'd take the bacon out after having fried it and before adding the onions, or some of the bacon anyway, and add the bacon bits back in at the end after pureeing the vegetables. 

More foil flavours

After the last post, a couple of people suggested different sets of flavours.  It's important to come up with the right balance of acidity and salt to cut through the potential blah-egginess of the salmon, but I've had a think.  I'll add extra flavours here as I test them out.

Salmon with rosemary in foil

Rosemary is great but you have to be careful not to add too much, to prevent the foil parcel becoming, essentially, a spa bath.  You'll also have to add extra salt.  Rosemary also needs something smooth and creamy and fatty to counteract its harsher edges; here, that's butter.

Ingredients

These are all for one serving

• somewhere between a hazlenut-sized knob of butter and a walnut-sized knob of butter.  Nearer a walnut is better, but you might have dietary considerations
• sea salt
• crushed black peppercorns
• about a tablespoon (before chopping) of fresh rosemary leaves
• a dry, lemony white wine e.g. pinotage rather than chardonnay - 50 ml
• One salmon fillet

As before, get a 30 cm^2 square of foil.  Take the knob of butter and grease the centre of the foil with about half of that; reserve the rest for later.

Put the salmon fillet on the centre of the foil, diagonally.  Put little nibbets of the rest of the knob of butter over the top of the fillet.  Scatter a good pinch of sea salt over the fillet, and a good grind or two of the pepper. 

Chop the rosemary leaves quite finely and scatter them over the top of the fillet (the 'lazy' method is simply to use a pair of scissors and snip the leaves onto the top of the fillet, but I'm not sure that this is actually less work).

Pour 50 ml of the white wine around the fillet, rather than over the fillet.  You could use a little more if you can get your silver foil to contain it.  You don't want to pour it over the top of the fillet because you want the butter to melt into the fillet and into the wine to make the sauce.

What you have should now look like this:

See the butter on top of the fillet, there?  The salt crystals have already started melting in.  You can just about see the white wine, if you squint.

Fold the corners up to make a dumpy handbag, as before, and cook as before.  You might want to let the dumpy handbag sit for fifteen minutes to half an hour before cooking to let the bruised and cut rosemary release more of its scent, and to let the salmon marinate a little bit.

Eat with boiled new potatotoes, as before.

Salmon and lime in foil

Salmon in foil

This is a method of cooking salmon that can work for one serving, or ten.  The lime part of the title refers to an unusual set of flavours - fusion, probably - that I'm using in this recipe; I might do a later post suggesting other combinations of ingredients that also work well.  The foil method is perfect for all sorts of small, chunky fillets of fish and shellfish, although different species of fish may need different times.


Ingredients

• One salmon fillet per person
• One lime per two people
• Two - three spring onions per person
• Light soy sauce.  It's important to use light soy sauce here rather than dark, for the saltiness
• Sesame oil (roast is fine - it's what I use)
• Some sort of flavourless oil, such as corn oil.

What you do

First, you heat the oven to around 200 C.  To be quite honest, you could turn it down a bit.  Salmon doesn't need very much cooking.  Put a baking tray in the oven to get hot with the oven, so that the foil parcels you are going to make are put straight onto an already-hot tray.

While the oven is heating, prepare the foil parcels by doing the following:

• Take the rind off the lime.  You can do this by using a grater, or use a dedicated lemon de-rinder.  There's a picture of one underneath.  They don't cost much and they're absolutely brilliant. Put the rind to one side.
• Squeeze the juice from the lime into a small bowl or container.  Add a tablespoon (15 ml) of light soy sauce and one teaspoon of sesame oil.  This makes enough sauce for two - three fillets; you can keep any left over in a sealed container in the fridge for a few days (probably maximum three to four days).
• Top and tail the spring onion and chop the stem into 1 cm lengths, and slice the bulb into half cm slices. 

Here's a picture of the ingredients before the spring onions are chopped.  The lemon de-rinder is shown at the right of the picture.  I bought mine from Tesco.

• Take some foil - minimum 30 cm by 30 cm. 

You should probably brush a little of the non flavoured oil onto the centre of the foil at this point, just under the place where you'll lay the salmon fillet.  I forgot to do this last time I cooked salmon like this, and a little bit of the salmon had stuck to the foil when I unfolded the foil parcels; that's the reason for brushing with oil before cooking.  You can use a pastry brush, or your fingers, to spread the oil over the foil, and you'll need less than a teaspoon of it.

• Turn the corners of the foil up so that it makes a shallow dish.   
• Put the salmon on the oiled foil, diagonally,  and add two - three tablespoons of the soy sauce mixture. 
• Scatter the shredded rind of lime on and around the salmon. 
• Scatter two to three chopped spring onions, similarly. 

You should get something that looks like this:

• Now you make a domed parcel, to seal the salmon in and allow some space for the salmon to cook in the flavoured steam provided by the lime juice, soy sauce, rind and spring onion. 

I do this by bringing up the sides and folding them over. Here:

Then I bring the ends up and fold them over, making a blunt handbag shape like this:

You need to be careful to make sure that there are no little gaps where the steam can escape. 

• Now, take the heated baking tray out of the oven and plonk the parcel onto it.

The reason for heating the tray is to stop the bottom of the salmon getting soggy, especially if you've left the skin on.  You'll probably hear the parcel hiss a little, if the baking tray is hot enough. 

You can do similar domed-parcel techniques with baking paper for all sorts of fish, especially whole fish, but I prefer foil, especially for salmon, because of the immediacy of the heat transfer - I think it makes a better skin.

• Put the salmon parcel in the oven for ten - fifteen minutes. 

In my most recent cooking of this, I left the parcel for fifteen minutes, and I think the salmon was a bit overcooked.  About 12 minutes is probably best; more if you've lowered the temperature.  This is one recipe where you need to know your own oven very well and make the appropriate adjustments.

When you open the parcel (be careful - the foil will be hot), it will look like this:

The sauce is delicious.  I've served this with boiled new potatoes, but it might also go well with noodles. Use a serving spatula to lever the salmon off the foil and put it on a plate, and then tip the foil up to spill the sauce over the salmon and whichever carbohydrate you are using.

I'm pretty certain that you could also use the cook-in-foil method on a barbecue.