I was in the mood to make broccoli soup last week. It’s tasty and healthy and wonderful in general. Here:
Cream of Broccoli Soup
This soup is very similar recipe to the Creamy Cauliflower Leaf and Potato Soup I made a while ago, and I think that a lot of different vegetables could work really well in this form–stuck on top of a soffrito of onions and garlic, boiled with potatoes, blended, and with milk or cream added.
To make it vegan, nix the butter, sugar, cheese rind, and sour cream garnish, check the wine label for animal-derived finings, and replace the cream with your favorite non-dairy milk.
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 teaspoon sugar
3 large cloves garlic, minced
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese
2 cups dry white wine
1 cup (more or less) vegetable stock
3 medium potatoes, peeled or scrubbed and diced
1 large carrot, peeled or scrubbed and diced
500 g broccoli, fresh or frozen
1 cup milk or heavy cream
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup parsley, chopped coarsely
1/4 cup sour cream
Melt the butter in the olive oil in a saucepan over low heat. Saute the onion with the sugar until caramelized. Add the garlic, and saute until fragrant. Add the cheese rind, wine, and stock, and stir over medium heat until simmering. Add the potatoes, carrot, and broccoli, and simmer 20-30 minutes or until potatoes can be crushed with a fork against the side of the saucepan. Liquefy the mixture with a stick blender, and stir in the milk or cream. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice, and garnish with parsley and sour cream.
It feels like summer in Nizhniy Novgorod. The sunlight lasts from 4 a.m. until 10 p.m., the trees are thick with green leaves and the babushki have shed their shawls for brightly colored silk scarves.
Now is the perfect time for minestrone.
The photo is from the day after I made it, when the taste is even better and the soup even thicker. Enjoy!
Minestrone
There’s absolutely no set recipe for minestrone, and I don’t know if I’ve ever made it the same way twice, but most cooks would agree that there are a few key ingredients that distinguish a minestrone: tomatoes, pasta, beans, and vegetables of various kinds. Since I love cooking with onions and (lots of) garlic and always have some of each on the shelf, those are also essential in my minestrones, but the rest–most of the rest–and the way you combine the rest–is optional.
If you’re using different vegetables, add them at the same time as the cabbage and zucchini. Fresh herbs are always tastier than dried; if you’re using them fresh, use about three times as much as the dried ones I’ve called for, and add the basil and parsley at the very end, about five minutes before adding the lemon.
To make it vegan, nix the cheese rind, grated cheese, and butter, and choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings. And be careful to not chop your fingers into the soup, that’s def. not vegan (:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
3 medium onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced finely
1 cup dry red wine
3 tbsp tomato paste
1/4 head of cabbage, chopped
1 medium zucchini, cubed
1 can whole peeled tomatoes with liquid, roughly chopped with a table knife directly in the can
1 can chickpeas, rinsed
1 can red beans, rinsed
1 cup dry pasta, broken into small pieces
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese (I used Grana Padano)
1 carrot, grated
3 bay leaves
2 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried parsley
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh chives, chopped
hard cheese, grated
In a soup pot over low heat, melt the butter in the olive oil. Saute the onions until transparent, add the garlic, and continue to saute until fragrant, but not until the garlic has burned. Add the wine and scrape the browned garlic and onions from the bottom of the pot. Add the tomato paste and stir until homogeneous; add the cabbage, zucchini, tomatoes, and enough water to just cover the vegetables. Simmer until zucchini begins to soften. Add the chickpeas, beans, pasta, cheese rind, carrot, and spices, and simmer until the pasta is cooked. Add the lemon juice just before serving. Garnish with chives and grated cheese.
Like any good Russian, mine has a huge soft spot for fried cauliflower–so when we got back to the city from a two-week camping/kayaking trip, his mother had a giant head of cauliflower waiting for us to fry up as soon as we got our clothes into the wash. I made the fried cauliflower that day (simple: chop the cauliflower, coat pan in oil, fry until completely brown), and we ate it all very happily, but for some reason, I just didn’t want to throw away the leaves that I peeled off the cauliflower. Call me crazy. So I decided to make a creamy soup from them and just about everything else that remained in the fridge and on the shelf when we got back, and it turned out to be a nice tasty dinner accompanied by homemade hot flaky garlic rolls (yep, that recipe’s at the bottom too).
The soup is simple to make (and very cheap!), but the flavor of cauliflower is delicate, much more so than it would have been had we used the actual cauliflower–and the garlic and wine bring out this flavor pretty well, while the lemon gives it something light and fresh. In general it would have been nicer if the color had been more green, so I think that next time I’ll add something like spinach–but this wasn’t bad for a mix of what was on the shelf at the time!
Creamy Cauliflower Leaf and Potato Soup
The cauliflower leaves should be washed and chopped, with particular attention to the thick white stems in the middle, since they contain strings that can easily foil a cheap stick blender like mine (400 roubles at the market!). The stems alone taste a bit like cabbage, which they absolutely should, since cauliflower as a plant is classified as a crucifer, just as is cabbage. In fact, the Russian word for cauliflower translates directly to “white cabbage”! I discarded about half of the white stems since I’m not quite Russian enough to like too much cabbage in my soup, but if you don’t mind a more cabbagey taste, leave them in, just chop them finely enough so that the strings don’t do any damage.
The potatoes can be peeled or not, depending on your preference. I leave my potatoes washed and with the peels on whenever I can, not only because I think it’s more flavorful, but also because there are more nutrients in the peel, of which vegetarians need all they can get.
To make it vegan, replace the cream with twice as much soya milk (or with the same amount of soya creamer), nix the cheese, cheese rind, and butter, and choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings.
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
250 mL white wine
1 L vegetable stock
1 tsp salt
leaves from one head of cauliflower
5 large potatoes, chopped (peeling optional)
rind from one large wedge of parmesan cheese
1/2 c heavy cream
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 c chives
1/2 c grated hard cheese
Melt the butter in the olive oil over low heat, add the garlic, and saute until fragrant, around two minutes. Cover with the white wine and vegetable stock, and add the salt, cabbage, potatoes, and cheese rind. Keep the heat medium until the soup bubbles, then cover and simmer for 30-40 minutes, or until potatoes are soft. Remove the cheese rind, add the cream and parsley, and liquefy the mixture with a stick blender. Just before serving, add the lemon juice, and garnish with grated cheese and chives.
Flaky Garlic Rolls
If I’d had a better oven (the boy’s is a gas oven without a thermostat), I would have made these rolls crusty like they should have been with this kind of soup–only mine were starting to burn instead of bake, so I took them out while they were still flaky. They’re good either way.
To make them vegan, replace the butter with Earth Balance or your favorite margarine, and if you’re concerned about bone char filtering, nix the sugar altogether or replace it with the same amount of mashed potato flakes (it’s just to give the yeast something to eat while they’re becoming more active).
50 g active dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 c warm water
1/4 c olive oil
1/4 c butter
10 cloves garlic, chopped not too finely
dash of freshly ground pepper
4 c flour
2 t salt
Mix the yeast, sugar, and water in a large bowl, and let stand for about ten minutes. While you wait, melt the butter in the olive oil, and sautee the garlic until it’s fragrant. Remove the garlic from the liquid, and save both. At this point, the yeast mixture should be bubbly and spongy, so add the salt and mix well, and then add the flour, the reserved sauteed garlic, and half of the oil/butter/pepper mixture (reserve the rest to glaze the rolls before baking). You’ll probably need to ditch the spoon in order to get it mixed into a dough after adding the flour. After it’s mixed, knead the dough until it gets stiff, then coat the inside of a plastic bag with oil, put the ball of dough in, and set it in a bowl behind the refrigerator, or in another warm place to rise for an hour. After the first rise (the dough could be doubled in size, but it doesn’t have to be), knead again, and divide into nine small balls. Using a rolling pin, flatten each ball into a circle, roll up into the roll shape, and place onto a baking sheet. Brush the rolls with the remaining oil/butter mixture, dust some flour on the tops, and using scissors, put a slice across the top of each roll. Cover the entire baking sheet with oiled plastic wrap, then set in a warm place to rise for at least another hour, until the rolls have at least doubled in size. Bake in a 220C oven for fifteen minutes.
