LENTEN SOUP SUPPER

I posted this online today, asking folks to guess what was for dinner tonight. I lied.

I didn't start out to lie, really - we stopped at Wegmans coming home from the welcome home dinner, and Neil , sort of out of the blue said : Let's do the Lenten Dinner at St. John's tomorrow night. Brain goes into soup mode. Since we have been doing our best to work more vegan into our diets, and it being Lent and all - let's do that.

Then I remembered a soup that a fb pal had posted the other day, so last night, I started out to make this:

Haitian Corn & Sweet Potato SoupServes 4 – 2 liter

This soup is loosely inspired by the traditional Haitian pumpkin soup ‘Soup Joumou’ – a pumpkin and beef soup oozing of clove. We used sweet potatoes instead of pumpkin and replaced beef with corn. The soup is soft and creamy with a nice sweet flavor, a hint of clove, and cabbage and carrot chunks for chewiness.

1 onion
1 large sweet potato
5 dl/330 g corn, thawed frozen works great
4 cups/ 1 liter vegetable broth
2 carrots
1/4 cabbage
1 small chili
1 lime, juice
1/4 tsp ground clove or more to taste
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp sea salt

Serve with yoghurt and fresh thyme

Peel and chop onion and sweet potato into small cubes. Place in a saucepan, add corn and vegetable broth. Bring to boil, lower the heat and let simmer for 10 minutes until the sweet potatoes cubes are tender. Use a hand (immersion) blender to puree completely smooth. Peel the carrots and slice into 1 inch / 2 cm slices. Cut the cabbage into the same size. Add carrots, chili (whole), lime juice and the spices. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove the chili from the soup and add the cabbage, let simmer for 2 more minutes. Taste and adjust salt and ground clove. Serve in bowls with a dollop of yogurt and some fresh thyme.

Looks and sounds really good , right?

Cooking with Kyle

aka

I have trouble with recipes.

• First thing is , I always swap out hominy for canned or frozen corn in recipes, I just like the taste and texture better. I also did not puree it with the sweet potatoes, again - I really like it.
• I got my Mise En Place all set, looked at it - and just had to add more flavor. Out came the Ginger and Garlic....
• Again on the flavor front, and this did add a tiny bit of olive oil fat - I cooked my onions /garlic and ginger ( with some added carrot ) a bit before adding the sweet potato. You should make this soup, it is really good - try it either way. If there is no sweating first, this soup takes no time at all.
• I am deathly afraid of cloves, really. I ruined a whole beautiful ham once going the full out treacle coated clove studded diamond pattern of your 1965 House Beautiful. Tasted of nothing but strong clove, so I was meek with it at first, don't be.
• Also, this is a different brand of veggie stock than I normally use, it had a very good flavor, but my regular one is just a sort of bland backdrop for me to play with , this had a real robust flavor, so my spicing would be a little different.

Cooking with Kyle

aka

I have time management issues

( have we met ? )

• The cabbage and fresh thyme did not make it into the soup, which was just just fine
• I also forgot the lime

Cooking with Kyle

• Two Onions, one large carrot ( more carrot would be good ) - cook it down, 6/8 min.

• Add a good thumb size of grated ginger and three garlic cloves, cook out - a always add a little bit , couple of teaspoons of water with ginger and garlic to keep from sticking too bad . 

• Add your chunked sweet potatoes ( pumpkin or butter nut squash would work as well ) stir to coat

• I added 4 regular size cans of veggie stock, and a little more water, and a tablespoonish of apple cider vinegar This is all the ground clove I added at first - looks like even more than it is, a large pinch I would say. I did end up adding about the same about again, if not more . I boiled the potatoes about 20/25 min, just till mushy, will depend on how big you chopped them, and lacking a hand blender, I just used the normal one. One the last batch of blending, I added the extra cloves.

This is surprisingly good, and the texture is great. I cut some pretty big carrots on the bias, thin - boiled them in a little bit of water, added the carrots, a little bit of the cooking water and the cans of hominy to the soup and re-heated. Everyone really seemed to like it, something different. The cloves add a very delicate heat - not heat hot or christmasy at all - just a good deep well rounded flavor. I did add a dollop of plain yogurt with was yummy with it...

After all that , I mostly had Alice Wells damn good beef and cabbage soup for dinner.