Blue Cayenne

Today is my friend Norma’s birthday. You go, Norma!

Norma is a talented gourd artist whose gourd dolls and masks have consistently won ribbons at the Orange County Fair. Her jewelry is exquisite, too. She is one creative lady!

Norma also is an excellent cook.

On more occasions that I can count, Norma has delivered a tray of enchiladas on my doorstep when the going has gotten rough in my life. I am forever grateful to her for that kindness.

In honor of Norma and her affection for Mexican food, here is an adaptation of a soup recipe from Rick Bayless’ best-selling Everyday Mexican cookbook.

Recipe: Mushroom Potato Crema with Roasted Poblanos
1 1/2 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, cut into 1 inch pieces
3 garlic cloves (peeled and halved)
6 C vegetable broth
1 large poblano chile
8 oz. mushrooms (sliced 1/4 inch thick–about 3 C. sliced)
1 C. fresh or frozen corn kernels
1/4 C. heavy cream or sour cream
Salt
1/4 C. cilantro (chopped) for garnish

Directions:
Cook the chopped potatoes and garlic in 1/2 the broth over medium high heat until the potatoes and garlic are soft.

While the potatoes are cooking, roast the poblano chile under the broiler in your oven (or over the flame of your gas stove) until it is blistered. Remove from oven and put into a paper bag for a few minutes. After about 10 minutes, remove the chile from bag and peel the skin off the chile. Rinse to remove seeds. Chop into 1/4 inch pieces. Set aside.

Remove half of the potatoes from the broth and set aside. Use an immersion blender to puree the remainder of the potatoes in the cooking broth. Add extra broth to the potatoes if you need to to puree the potato mixture. Add the remaining half of the broth along with the reserved chopped potatoes, mushrooms, poblano, and corn to the mixture. Simmer for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Just before serving, add cream to soup and stir. Taste and season with salt. Garnish with cilantro and grated cheese.

Cook’s Notes: Bayless purees all the potatoes in his recipe. I chose to keep half the potatoes whole to give the soup a more chowder-like quality. It’s your call. I used fresh corn for my soup. The corn I bought at this week’s farmers market was sweet and complemented the flavors in this soup. Also, I sprinkled a few strands of cotija cheese on top of the soup at serving time along with a sprinkle of paprika.

“Ever notice that Soup For One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?”

                                                            —Elayne Boosler

Soup humor. It never gets old.

I’ve always been in love with soup. Hot soup. Cold soup. Funny soup. It’s all good. 

I’ve been making (and enjoying) this soup for a very long time. (The recipe printout I have tucked away in one of my recipe notebooks is dated 1998.)   The source of the recipe is not clear. My printout says something about geo-cities and Napa Valley. So, thank you Napa Valley!

This soup, made with butternut squash rather than pumpkin, is beautiful. The color is a vibrant, warm orange. I’ve been sitting here trying to think how to describe the pretty orange color. I’ve decided that it is “Creamsicle Orange.” (Anyone else wax nostalgic about the orange creamsicles of yore? )

Cream, added to your taste after pureeing the soup, gives this soup an extra boost and a velvety texture. I’ve served it many times as a first course at dinner parties and I often enjoy a big bowl of the soup all by itself for dinner. Today, Tony, my handyman, and I enjoyed a steaming bowl of the soup as we discussed repair projects at my home.

Incidentally, I photographed this soup in a post-WWII-era soup tureen that belonged to my grandmother. I’m named after her. She was the most positive loving influence in my life. I inherited her china many years ago. The bottom of her china pieces identifies her pattern as “Victoria” made by Fuji China in “occupied Japan.” I was amazed to find pieces of her pattern on the Replacements, Ltd. site and I was able to make a complete set. I’ll never know how my grandmother came to have this set of china. A set of china of whatever quality would have been a huge extravagance.

But, I digress. Back to the soup and the butternut squash.

Here comes the history lesson. Winter squash, a new world native vegetable, is a member of the same family that gives us cucumbers and melons.  According to food expert Harold McGee, winter squash was probably domesticated in the Americas around 5000 BCE. A number of varieties of squash developed over time and the forebearers to the butternut squash we eat today have been around in South and Central America for a very long time– typically with lots of seeds and little edible flesh.

Today’s fleshy butternut squash was developed in the 1940s in Massachusetts by a man named Charles A. Leggett whose primary occupation was selling insurance for the John Hancock Life Insurance Company. An illness in the family caused Leggett to buy a house in Stow, Massachusetts, with 94 acres of land. Leggett’s subsequent efforts to earn a little extra money growing corn were less than successful, and he turned his attention to growing squash. Looking for a profitable cash crop, Leggett crossed a gooseneck squash with other types of squash and eventually came up with the butternut. “Smooth as butter and sweet as a nut,” the butternut squash was born.

Leggett’s squash is good for you. It is rich in beta-carotene, magnesium, manganese, calcium and potassium. It is rich in dietary fiber. It is low fat, too. A cup of butternut squash has only 82 calories. Talk about a super food!

It is versatile, too. This sturdy squash holds its shape when sautéed but when cooked in soups can be pureed to a silky fine consistency. Roasted, the butternut takes on a rich sweetness. Steamed, it preserves most of its inherent nutrients. Because this squash is moderately sweet, it can be used in both sweet and savory dishes. This soup recipe, for example,  is a wonderful example of the use of pureed butternut squash, but I also have had a spectacular chili with chunks of butternut mixed with the beans and spices. In writing this, I also came across references to butternut squash custards spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. I’ve  put squash custard on my to-do list.

Then again, you could make a centerpiece out of it.

If, like me, you have a tendency to buy food ingredients in anticipation of cooking, something that may or may not happen quickly, butternut squash is a good deal. While it is at its peak in the fall, it lasts for months stored at around 55 degrees F. and kept dry. Choose a butternut that is heavy for its size and large. Heaviness is an indication of high moisture content. A large butternut is likely to have a more developed flavor. The squash you choose should also be hard. When nobody is looking, press your fingernail into the butternut’s flesh. If your fingernail penetrates the flesh, look for another squash. The one you’ve just tested is immature. (As it is with men, immaturity is not a good thing.)

So, make this soup even if you are the only guest at your table.  You won’t regret it and your soup-for-one may just turn into a party.

Recipe: Israeli Pumpkin Soup
4 t. olive oil
2 lbs. butternut squash (peeled and chopped)
1 large onion (chopped)
4 cloves garlic (peeled and chopped)
1 chile (seeded and chopped)
2 tomatoes (chopped)
8 C. vegetable broth
Salt and Pepper to taste

Cream (to your taste)
Paprika and Chopped Cilantro to Garnish

Directions:
Heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Saute squash, onion, garlic and chile in hot oil until it just begins to brown. Add tomatoes and cook for 3-4 more minutes. Add vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and cook for an hour until the solids in the soup are soft. Cool and puree. Add cream to your taste. Serve hot garnished with chopped cilantro and paprika.

If you have been reading this blog regularly, you know by now that I have yet to meet a soup that I don’t enjoy. This South Indian lentil and vegetable soup is no exception and always conjures up a wonderful travel memory for me.

I’ll tell you the story.

My husband and I were fortunate to travel widely. India–beautiful, exotic and often exasperating– was one of our favorite destinations.

On one of our trips there, one of our stops was in Madras (now Chennai). We arrived very late at night after a harrowing flight from Calcutta on Indian Airlines. Advertised as an easy two-hour trip, our trip had taken a soul-crushing 10 hours.

Once at our hotel,  we wearily arranged to have a room service breakfast and fell into the bed exhausted.

When the breakfast cart was wheeled into our room the next morning, rather than eggs, toast and whatever, our cart carried a steaming tureen of spicy coconut-flecked lentil soup accompanied by pungent steamed rice cakes. There was also a small bowl of a coconut-cilantro-jalapeno chutney that could knock your socks off if this weren’t breakfast and your socks hadn’t been flung into some deep dark corner under the bed.

This was our lucky day!  Room service had gotten our breakfast order mixed up,  

Any moral dilemma we might have entertained about eating another guest’s breakfast quickly evaporated as the aroma of the lentil soup filled our room and our imaginations. It wasn’t our place to tell anyone. Right?  Right.

As the room service waiter served our breakfast, he ladled the spicy soup over the steamed rice cakes and then offered the bowl of chutney as a condiment. Dixon and I exchanged conspiratorial glances. Clearly, we weren’t in Kansas anymore–not even Delhi. Foodie paradise. That’s where we were. 

Later, we learned that our breakfast entree was called idli (the rice cakes) and sambar (the stew-like soup) and was a widely-loved breakfast in India’s steamy south. There were even restaurants, like The New Woodlands in Madras, that specialized in making the “lighter than a pavlova” rice cakes that accompany this tasty lentil soup.

Here is a stock photo from the Internet of what an idli looks like. White. Pillowy. Wonderful.

Later that week, we were driven farther south towards Tiruchirappalli and on to Cochin in what was then India’s version of the Model T car, the ambassador.

The ambassador car is a story in itself. In India’s controlled economy before the 1990s, the ambassador was pretty much the only car you saw on the road.

In production by Hindustan Motors from 1958 until 2014, the ambassador’s design was based on the British Morris Oxford car. The simplicity of the design appealed to India’s fledgling auto industry so much that they kept the car pretty much the same over the fifty-six years it was produced. The car you bought in 1958 looked pretty much the same as the car you bought in 2014.

Although it’s repair record was appalling, there were waiting lists to buy the car that stretched to as much as eight years. Inevitably, jokes abounded about the car: “The only thing that doesn’t make a sound in an Ambassador is the horn!”

The car understandably insinuated itself into popular Indian literature, too. For example, H.R.F. Keating, in his wonderful Inspector Ghote series, always has the rumpled Bombay detective tooling around in a beat up ambassador. I’ve always wondered which came first–Inspector Ghote or Peter Falk’s Colombo.

During the remainder of our stay in South India, we made a point of ordering any number of variations on that first revelatory bowl of idli and sambar. Some sambars were more spicy hot. Some had more vegetables. Some idlis had cashews and spices embedded in them like jewels. It was all good.

Once, when we asked our driver to stop and let us out to walk and take photographs of the rice paddy-strewn countryside, a group of workers in the rice fields engaged him in an animated conversation.There was a lot of pointing and gesturing and giggling. Obviously, they were talking about us. When I asked Krishna, our driver, about the conversation, he told me that the workers wanted to know what we ate for breakfast. Was it rice, they asked hopefully…rice with sambar? By then, we could honestly say (through our guide) that we did indeed have sambar and rice for breakfast and enjoyed it very much. Our answer brought smiles and nods of approval all around.

I’ve always remembered that day. On that bright Indian morning, on the edge of a rice paddy and seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the workers in that rice field had felt a need to find some small human connection with the foreign strangers in the ambassador. And then, there it was. We ate the same breakfast–a bowl of hot soup and a rice cake.

I can’t help but wonder whether, in the fractured and often violent world in which we increasingly find ourselves, we might benefit from a shift in focus away from the things that separate us to the things that we enjoy in common, however small.

I found this recipe many years ago in a magazine left behind on a table in an Artesia, California, Indian restaurant. The magazine is called India Currents.

Recipe: Broccoli-Cauliflower Sambar
1 1/2 C. cauliflower florets
1 1/2 C. broccoli florets
1-2 C. chopped Tomatoes
2-3 C. water
3 C. cooked pink lentils
1 T. fresh or frozen grated coconut (unsweetened and optional)
1 T. sambar powder
2 t. ground coriander
1/2-1 C. coconut milk

Herb-spice infused oil topping
1 1/2 T. mild oil
1/2 t. black mustard seeds
10 fresh kari leaves (optional)
1/4 C. chopped onion
1/8 t. turmeric

Directions:

Put cauliflower florets, broccoli florets, chopped tomatoes, and lentils in a large soup pot. Add water, optional coconut, sambar powder and 1/8 t. pepper. Stir to mix and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 10-12 minutes. Stir in coconut milk. Cook until hot for 4-5 additional minutes and then turn heat off.

Put mild oil in a skillet. When the oil is hot, add black mustard seeds and cook until mustard seeds begin to pop. Be careful here, although the mustard seeds are small, they can burn if they pop out of the pan and land on your skin. Add the kari leaves (optional). Stir in the onion and turmeric. Cook until onion just begins to brown. This should take about four minutes. Remove pan from heat and add the oil mixture to your soup. Stir. Garnish with chopped cilantro and chopped tomatoes.

Cook’s Notes: Sambar powder and kari leaves are available in Indian markets. Indian markets also carry many idli mixes. Gits brand is a good one. There is a special idli steamer that Indians use to make the rice cakes but I’ve found that my egg poacher does just fine. If you live in Southern California, there are a few South Indian restaurants in Artesia’s Little India. You can get very good idli and sambar at Udipi Palace located at 18635 Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia.

I will post a recipe for coconut chutney soon.