Minestrone Soup

Minestrone used to be my favorite soup as a kid. There is something festive about its bright colors and varying textures. With harvest in full swing, we have an abundance of colorful vegetables kicking around. This soup is filled with the full spectrum. I like to throw in a red onion to complement the orange and green shades in the palette. Adding the vegetables in stages allows each to cook to its own ideal texture and it also allows the flavors to layer.

Orzo gives the soup a little heft and makes it more substantial than a typical vegetable soup. Kidney beans fill out the protein side of things, making this Minestrone an excellent choice for an simple and satisfying vegetarian meal, if using vegetable stock.

Minestrone Soup – serves 6 – 8

2 T olive oil
1 leek, cleaned cut into 1/2″ pieces
1 heart of celery
5 small onions (cipolline or boilers), or 2 medium onions, peeled and quartered
1 T tomato paste
2 carrots, peeled and chopped into spoon-sized pieces
2 parsnips, peeled and chopped into spoon-sized pieces
2 medium tomatoes, diced
3 T chopped fresh oregano
1 15.5 ounce can kidney beans
1 C dried orzo
4 C vegetable or chicken stock

In a stockpot over medium heat, saute onions and leeks in oil. Add carrots, parsnips and tomato paste. Lower heat and allow to condense for 5 minutes. Add the celery, toss to coat with the tomato paste and cook another 5 minutes. Add tomatoes, toss and cover. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally to keep the bottom from browning, 10 minutes

Add stock, beans and orzo. bring to boil, lower heat and simmer 10  minutes until the pasta is cooked. Season to taste.

Serve hot with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Chicken Barley Soup

The key to a good soup is to make your own stock. This is especially true for a chicken soup intended to help ease a cold or flu. Stock from a carton or can just doesn’t have the same anti-inflammatory benefits of homemade. There’s just something about the chicken fat that gets extracted from the bones and skin that makes homemade chicken stock into something of a high end moisturizer for a sore throat.

I’m one of those people who saves vegetable trimmings and herb stems for stock. This really only works for certain vegetables, however. Potato skins, onion skins, carrot and parsnip peels are great for stock, but leafy greens will turn the pot bitter, and beets will turn it oddly sweet and blood red. Keep in mind the flavor you’re trying to achieve when collecting your trimmings.

If you’re not into saving vegetable trimmings, that’s perfectly fine. Prepare the vegetables for this soup in advance and save the trimmings to add to the chicken as it simmers. Since the trimmings will be discarded anyway, I like to separate them from the chicken pieces by using a vegetable steamer basket. This way the chicken simmers on the bottom of the pot while the trimmings steep on the top. When the stock is finished, the basket can simply be pulled out and the trimmings tossed. Another benefit of steeping the veggies on the top bunk is that they carry away some of the fat that rises to the top of the liquid as the chicken stews.

I like to chop my veggies into narrow strips the length of a spoon. I just like the uniformity of the way they look more than having little carrot wheels and celery half-moons like cafeteria soups.

Chicken Barley Soup - serves 8

4 carrots
2 parsnips
12 large sprigs parsley (about a half bunch)
4 stalks of celery, plus leaves
5 green onions
1 whole 3 – 3.5 lb. chicken
6 quarts of water
2 C trimmings from potatoes, parsnips, carrots and herbs (optional)
3/4 C barley

Start off by prepping the vegetables.

Place the celery and leaves, green onion trimmings, parsley stems and carrot and parsnip peels and optional added trimmings, if you have them on hand, into a steamer basket.

If the chicken came with the little baggy of innards and the neck, set the liver aside and add the gizzard, heart and neck to the veggie basket. (Bonus Recipe: It’ll be a long time before this soup is done and you’re most likely going to want a little nosh. While this thing simmers, take a tablespoon of butter, melt it in a small frying pan and saute the liver in the butter until it’s no longer pink in the center. Enjoy on toast with a little blue cheese and bask in the horrified stares of onlookers.)

Chop the veggies as desired. Cover and refrigerate.

Bring 6 quarts of salted water to a boil.

Meanwhile, cut the chicken into pieces. Drop the pieces  into the simmering water. Place the veggie basket into the water over the chicken. Bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 2.5 hours.

By this point the meat will be falling off of the bones. Remove the vegetable basket and discard contents. Carefully remove the chicken pieces with a tongs or a slotted spoon. Strain the stock if necessary to remove any runaway bones.

Allow the chicken pieces to cool enough to handle. The bones should slide right out of the meat. Go through each piece to remove any cartilage or other gristley bits.

Chop any larger pieces into 1 – 2 inch cubes. Cover and refrigerate.

You should now have a big pot of dense, fragrant stock. Add the barley to the stock and simmer 15 minutes. Add the prepared vegetables to the pot and simmer for another 15 minutes. Add the chicken to the pot and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Serve hot.

Kohlrabi Root Vegetable Soup

We are very fortunate to have a very generous neighbor with a very productive garden. This season, she has bestowed upon us kale, spinach, sorrel, lettuce and, most recently, kohlrabi. After this week’s rain, and today’s cloudy sky and cool temperatures, now seemed like a good time for a pureed soup. In addition to being warming, pureed soups are great for a light meal, especially after a few days of dining out.

In this case, I had class all weekend after returning from an absolutely torturous trip from New York. Our wipers quit in a storm while driving north on 84 through Connecticut, forcing us to stop by the side of the road and wait 45 minutes for roadside assistance. All told, the incident cost us three hours on a trip that was already pocked with traffic delays. On the bright side, the Belle and Sebastian concert – the purpose of our pilgrimage – was fantastic, not rained out as we feared it might be, and we had a great time with our friends in Brooklyn. Thank you guys if you are reading this!

Ten hour drives and wonderfully fun and nostalgic concerts that make me feel like I’m not that old aside, this is a lovely soup for a chilly, damp evening. Isn’t it nice how nature offers us exactly what we need at exactly the right time of year? Berries in spring, tomatoes in summer, and root vegetables and tubers in the fall when our internal clocks tell us to beef up for winter.

While vegetable stock would be a fine replacement to make this soup vegetarian, I find that chicken stock adds a nice layer of savory flavor to counter the kohlrabi’s deep mellow sweetness. Carrots add color and parsnips keep things honest.

Kohlrabi Root Vegetable Soup – serves 4

2 T butter
2 kohlrabi, peeled and diced
3 parsnips, peeled and diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
4 C chicken stock
1/3 C heavy cream
salt to taste

Melt butter in a stock pot over medium heat. Add kohlrabi and saute for 2 minutes. Add parsnips and carrots and cook for 2 more minutes. Do not brown.

Add chicken stock. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 5 – 7 minutes until vegetables are fork-tender.

Remove from heat and, working in batches, puree the soup in a blender or food processor until smooth.

Return the soup to the stockpot. Bring to a light simmer and stir in cream.

Remove from heat and serve.

Gazpacho

Hot. Humid. Availability of fresh, local vegetables. Yup. Perfect conditions for gazpacho.

As you may be aware, tomatoes are best served fresh from the vine at the height of summer, because they taste like – brace yourself – tomatoes! Sweet, juicy, luscious tomatoes. Freshly picked summertime tomatoes are completely different from the crimson, grainy guys found in supermarkets. Fresh local tomatoes have that deep, almost gleeful magenta color throughout the fruit and a happy-go-lucky sweetness too. They’re just joyous little beings, like doughnuts ready to be snacked.

Fortunately, it is now the height of summer. If you have a garden, great. I advise that you check for plump red tomatoes. Go now. I’ll wait. If not, perhaps you live in an urban area, make friends with the nearest neighbor with an urban garden or one of those upside-down hanging tomato planters. Do what you need to do in order to get in on freshly picked perfectly ripe tomatoes while their hot – or still warm from the afternoon sun.

Gazpacho is a great way to showcase the sweetness of fresh tomatoes. I also used fresh local cipollini onions, garlic, green peppers and a cucumber, all of which were generously bestowed upon us by a friend whose cup runneth over with CSA produce. Always happy to help a fellow locavore, we gladly accepted the veggies. Thank you, if you are reading this!

Some like to blend gazpacho. I do not. Because a blended soup is a wonderful, light treat. A cold soup is a wonderful, refreshing treat. A blended cold soup is a cold vegetable smoothie eaten with a spoon. Not my idea of a fabulously satisfying meal. If it is going to be served chilled, the least it can do is provide a little tooth.

Tomatoes contain plenty of vitamin C, vitamin K and lycopene. Onions and garlic – originally consumed for medicinal purposes – also contain vitamin C and are said to offer antibacterial and cardiovascular benefits. Despite the heavy glug of olive oil in this recipe and the bread, I consider gazpacho to be a supremely light. Refreshing, light and nutritious – the perfect food for summer.

Gazpacho - serves 2 – 4

4 fresh medium tomatoes
1 green bell pepper
1 clove garlic
1 cipollini onion (small to medium in size)
1 t ground cumin
1 t balsamic vinegar
1/4 C olive oil
1/4 C water
3/4 C cubed baguette
1/2 t salt

Finely dice all of the vegetables. Combine in a large, non-reactive bowl. Add cumin, vinegar, olive oil, bread, and salt. Salt is important because it will draw the liquids out of vegetables to make the  gazpacho more soupy.

Refrigerate for one hour. Using a masher or the back of a slotted spoon, mash the soup until the bread bits are broken up and the juices are rendered from the vegetables.

Serve cold.

Yankee Cook’s Chicken Soup

Somehow, whenever I’m feeling under the weather, no matter how tired I may feel, I find myself in the kitchen making this soup. Partly because for me, cooking is a relaxing activity and I hardly notice the effort, but also because I see chicken soup as a valid cold remedy. Honey doesn’t hold a candle to schmaltz in soothing a sore throat.

The thing with using chicken soup as a cold remedy is that not just any chicken soup will do. Opening up a can of chicken soup isn’t going to cut it. It has to be homemade. Simmering fresh vegetables and chicken into a stock creates a deep steep of flavors, fat and chicken essence that will clear the head better than any over the counter decongestant. Boneless, skinless chicken breast isn’t going to cut it either, because the end result misses the beneficial extracts from the chicken’s skin and bones.

I like to use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs to get the benefits of simmered chicken bones, but ease of removal once the stock is complete. I also like to utilize larger, tougher vegetables for the stock and save the smaller, sweeter ones for the soup. The thinner carrots and inner ribs of celery are much sweeter, more tender and make for a better texture in soup. A quick ten minute simmer once the soup is assembled, rapidly braises the vegetables without cooking all of the vitamins away.

Noodles add texture and act as a vehicle for all of the goodness, and along with hearty morsels of chicken and sweet vegetables, you have a what may be the closest thing to a cure for the common cold. Up next, Yankee Cook creates a recipe for world peace…

Chicken Soup -Makes 8 – 10 servings

2 lb bone-in, skin-on chicken thigh
4 celery ribs – two tougher outer ribs and two soft inner ribs
1 celery heart (the inside of the celery bunch, leaves and all)
3 carrots – 1 large and 2 thin carrots, if possible
2.5 quarts water
1/2 cup chopped yellow onion
6 sprigs of parsley
1 t sea salt
2 cups fine egg noodles

Begin by making the stock. Loosely chop the two outer celery ribs and the large carrot. Rinse the chicken if desired and place in a large stockpot. Add the chopped celery, carrot, three sprigs parsley, salt and water.

Cover and bring to a simmer. Lower heat and adjust the lid so that steam can escape. Simmer for 1. 5 hours.

While the stock simmers, prepare the vegetables for the soup. Peel the two thinner carrots, split lengthwise and cut into 1 inch strips. Split the celery ribs and also cut into 1 inch strips. Remove leaves from the last 3 sprigs of parsley and finely chop.

Using a slotted spoon, transfer the thighs from the water to a cutting board to cool for 10 minutes. Meanwhile uncover the stock and simmer on medium for an additional 15 minutes. Remove vegetables and discard. Season to taste. Allow to rest off heat for about 5 – 10 minutes to allow the excess fat to rise to the top.

Remove the skin from the cooled chicken thighs and discard. Harvest all meat and loosely chop.

Using a ladle or spoon, remove any excess fat from the top of the stock. Raise heat to medium. Add chicken, noodles and vegetables. Simmer uncovered for 10 minutes.

Serve hot and feel better.

Ingredient origins: Organic Chicken – unknown; Organic celery – unknown; Organic carrots – California; Onion – unknown; Parsley – Massachusetts; Sea salt – Maine; Egg noodles – Missouri