My Favorite Recipes

This first time I made this soup, I made it for a wine food pairing that we donated for charity.  after tasting during the cooking process, I thought it was too salty, too gritty, too thin, too thick.  You get the picture, so I tinkered with the process until I thought it would pass the minimum taste test.  During the dinner, the soup was the favorite thing of the entire meal and they wanted more.  It just goes to show you that you should taste while you cook.

Ingredients

• 1 lb dried yellow peas
• 8 cups of water
• 1 Tbl Butter
• 1/2 lb salt pork, all one piece
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 stalk of celery, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 Bay leaf
• 1 tsp Savory, dried
• salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

Wash and sort peas, looking for any dirt or stones (rare).  Melt butter in a large pot and sweat onion, carrot and celery until soft. Add peas, water, parsley, salt pork, bay leaf, savory and 1tsp of salt.  Bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer until peas are tender, about 2 hours, adding more water if needed. Discard the bay leaf.
Now comes the fun part, determining the type of soup you want to serve. Want a thin soup with chunks?  Serve as is, just add salt and pepper to taste.  Want a thicker soup?  Puree a few cups of the soup in a blender and return to the pot, add salt and pepper.  Want a thick soup?  Puree all the soup and add salt and pepper.  Soup too thick?  Strain and then add some cream, then season with salt and pepper.  See, its easy to make one recipe and easily make it the kind of soup you want it too be.

This is a soup that I got from Giada DeLaurentis and has become a staple for fall and winter nights. It has great flavor, fairly healthy and easy to modify. Don’t have chard? Use kale or any other dark green leaf vegetable. Don’t have potato? Use zucchini. No Pancetta? Use bacon. Soup to thick? Add some water. You get the idea. Look in your refrigerator and find what works.  Double the recipe and use the leftovers in the recipes that follow.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
  
• 2 carrots, peeled, chopped
  
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 3 ounces thinly sliced pancetta, coarsely chopped
• 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
• 1 Tbl of tomato paste
• 1/4 cup white wine (optional)
  
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 pound Swiss chard, stems trimmed, leaves coarsely chopped
• 1 russet potato, peeled, cubed
• 1 (14 1/2-ounce) can diced tomatoes
• 1 fresh rosemary sprig
• 1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans, drained, rinsed
• 2 (14-ounce) cans low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 ounce piece Parmesan cheese rind
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley leaves
• Salt and pepper

Procedure

Heat the oil in a heavy large pot over medium heat. Add the onion, carrots, celery, pancetta, and garlic. Saute until the onion is translucent, about 10 minutes. Add red pepper flakes and tomato paste and stir into vegetable mixtue and cook for one minute.  Add wine and reduce to a glaze, about 2 minutes.  Add the Swiss chard and potato; saute for 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and rosemary sprig. Simmer until the chard is wilted and the tomatoes break down, about 10 minutes.  Meanwhile, blend 3/4 cup of the beans with 1/4 cup of the broth in a processor (or just mash them up) until almost smooth. Add the pureed bean mixture, remaining broth, and Parmesan cheese rind to the vegetable mixture. Simmer until the potato pieces are tender, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes. Stir in the whole beans and parsley. Simmer until the beans are heated through and the soup is thick, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, to taste. Discard Parmesan rind and rosemary sprig (the leaves will have fallen off of the stem.)

Things to do with the soup

• Don’t have enough to feed a crowd? Toast some bread and put a slice in the bottom of each bowl, prior to filling the bowl with soup.
• Got leftovers? Toast some bread and line a bottom of a baking dish with the toasted bread. Pour the leftover soup over the bread. Heat in an oven at 350 degrees until hot and bubbly, and serve as a side dish.
• Got leftover side dish? Put into a sauce pan and heat, add some water to thin if necessary and now you have Ribolita. Serve and enjoy.

This is a recipe I got from Eating Well Magazine. Its a great way to add some fish to your diet. The original recipe called for prepared potatoes, but its too easy to roast your own. I also added my own touches by adding some pepper flakes to give the broth just a touch of heat and adding some wine to help release the flavor of the tomatoes. If you make the Chipotle shrimp, save the shells and make a shrimp stock and use that stock in this recipe.

• 3 Tbs Extra-virgin olive oil, divided
• 1 cup finely diced onion
• 1 cup finely diced cored fennel bulb, plus 2 tablespoons chopped fronds, divided
• 2 Tbs minced garlic
• 2 tsp Italian seasoning blend
• ¼ tsp Red Pepper flakes
• 1 Tbs Tomato paste
• ¼ cup White wine
• 1 can diced tomatoes (I use Muir Glen)
• 1 tsp salt, divided
• 1 tsp freshly ground pepper, divided
• 2 cups chicken, vegetable or shrimp broth (use 2 cups homemade)
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 potatoe, diced medium
• 1 lb pasteurized crabmeat, drained if necessary

1. Preheat oven to 425°
2. Toss diced potatoes with 1 Tbl of olive oil, ½ tsp of salt and ½ tsp of pepper. Place the potatoes on a sheet pan in a single layer and roast in the oven until golden brown. Shake the sheet pan occasionally to ensure even browning. When done remove from oven and set aside.
3. Heat the remaining oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, fennel bulb, stirring often, until the vegetables are just starting to brown, 6 to 8 minutes.
4. Toss in the garlic, italian seasonings, red pepper flakes. Stir into the onion and fennel. Cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Clear a space on the bottom of the pan and toast the tomato paste for a minute and then stir into other vegetables.
5. Deglaze the pan with the white wine, until wine is reduced to a glaze.
6. Add tomatoes and stir into the vegetables. Cook until bubbly.
7. Add broth and water; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook until the vegetables are tender, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in potatoes, crab and fennel fronds. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Return to a boil, stirring often; immediately remove from heat.

As my cooking skills have improved, my desire to have quality ingredients has increased and I find myself on the weekend not cooking gourmet items, but making the basics that make cooking easier and tastier for the rest of the week. I decided to share some of my favored recipes and the first one is about as basic as you can get, chicken stock. As I said before, the better the ingredients the better the final dish. Since most recipes require chicken stock, I thought I should tackle this one first. This version of chicken stock comes from Cook’s Illustrated and their public TV show America’s Test Kitchen. This makes a full flavor gelatinous stock that improves the flavor of every dish where it is used.

Chicken Stock

Ingredients:

4 lbs Chicken legs each hacked into two pieces
1 onion roughly chopped into big pieces (so they don’t fall through a strainer)
2 bay leaves
2 quarts of boiling water

Process:

Put a large stock pot over medium heat with one to two tablespoons of olive oil. Once hot, add the onions and cook for about five minutes until soft and beginning to brown and remove onions to a bowl.

Add 1/2 of the chicken pieces and brown on all sides. Keep the heat high and turn after five minutes. The pieces will smoke and stick, just pry up and rotate or stir. Remove batch to the bowl with the onion and brown the second batch of legs. Once browned, add onion and first batch back to the pot, turn the flame to low, cover and sweat for 20 minutes.

Raise the heat to high, add boiling water, bay leaves and stir, scraping the bottom of the pot for all those chicken pieces that stuck to the pot during the browning. Bring to boil, then cover, lower the heat back to low and simmer for twenty more minutes. After 20 minutes, turn flame off, and let cool. Discard the big pieces and strain ( I use a mesh strainer then a finer mesh strainer) and then pour into plastic containers. I use some 2 cup and 1 cup sizes and freeze. The two cup is about the size of the can of stock, and the one cup is the size of those juice box stock boxes.

You can de-fat before you freeze or after you thaw, or just use the fat, its up to you. You can also add some salt when you add the water, but I would rather salt my final dish rather than the stock.

I will add some recipes later that I love that use this stock as an ingredient.