Before asparagus goes out of season this year, make time to prepare this soup. And make a batch of the delicious savory cookies (cheese, thyme and Parmesan) to go along with it. Neither recipe is difficult – you can even make the soup the day ahead and the cookie log could be made weeks ahead and frozen – then sliced and baked before serving.

Oh yes, this is worth making. Definitely! Worth making 2-3 batches of it and freeze for a later date – when we won’t have asparagus at all. A “batch” of this requires 1 1/2 pounds of asparagus. So I’d buy 3 pounds and make one big soup pot of it, then freeze in 1 or 2 cup portions. This isn’t the kind of soup you’d use as a full meal – it’s light and there’s nothing of the stick-to-the-ribs ingredients. There are a few peas in this, just to give the soup a little more of a green-y color, but unless someone told you there were peas in it, I’m not sure you’d know. This would make a lovely lunch dish!

Do make sure you have some tarragon on hand – it’s an important flavor ingredient here. We’ve been unable to grow tarragon in our garden, gosh darn it – so nearly every time I’m shopping I look for a little plastic box of it. More often than not, it’s not there. When you need tarragon, well, you just need it. Dried tarragon will work in an absolute pinch, but it doesn’t have the flavor components (to me, anyway) that fresh has.

Then there are the little savory cookies. These are so good – rich and crumbly, and they go perfectly with this soup. Do start them a few hours before you need them (or even bake them a few hours ahead). They could easily be made a week ahead and frozen. Slice off what you need and bake them. If a cookie contains a goodly amount of butter, you’ll not have trouble slicing them when they’re frozen. That’s the case here. The savory cookies are almost like shortbread, but instead of sweetness, they contain cheese and thyme. These are the kind of “cookies,” if you will, that could always reside in the freezer for times when you suddenly need an appetizer. Years ago I used to have plenty of those things, that lived in the freezer, always at-the-ready for impromptu guests. I think today most people don’t do impromptu dropping-in on people.

Both of these came from Linda Steidel, a cooking instructor, although she got the recipes from Food & Wine magazine in 2011.

What I liked: the asparagus flavor – and it seems like the addition of the frozen peas just enhances the asparagus – the same kind of affinity that chocolate desserts have when you add a little jot of coffee or espresso. An easy soup to make, for sure. The cheese shortbread cookies are sensational too. It’s all delish. The soup could be a vegetarian one if you substitute vegetable stock for the chicken stock.

What I didn’t like: absolutely nothing. Will be making again. Both of them.

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Nothing whatsoever, in any way, shape or form, like Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Enough said!

This little recipe has, for 6 servings, just 1/4 cup of heavy cream in it. If you were to eat a bowl of it, you’d be eating about a tablespoon of cream. That’s it. And that gives it a unctuous creamy quality. Not a pale-looking creamy, but a full-blown creamy. What it also has in it is a LOT of mushrooms (a full 2 pounds for those 6 servings). And a ton of flavor. If you love mushrooms like I do, then you’ll need to do yourself a favor and make this soup. What it doesn’t have in it is a lot of stick-to-your-ribs carbs or tummy fillers like potatoes or rice. It also doesn’t have any thickener in it at all. What this contains is mushrooms, broth, herbs, and a jot of brandy, along with that little tiny bit of cream. Therefore, it’s very low calorie. 190 calories per serving, actually. Probably not enough, as it is, to fill you up for lunch of dinner. I made it the other night with several baguette slices with Parmigiano cheese sprinkled on top. Very loverly, as the saying goes. The recipe came from Food52, and was one of the winners of their contest in the mushroom soup category. It’s also in that new book I was telling you about, the The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks.

What I liked: the really strong, full-of-character mushroom flavor. There is no question this is a mushroom soup, in other words.  Those mushrooms have to be washed, cleaned, and precisely chopped (something the soup developer, MrsWheelbarrow, suggested). But they truly offer lots of flavor – the more varieties the better. This recipe calls for crimini and whatever kind of mixed mushrooms you can buy.

What I didn’t like: I’d have liked the soup to have a bit more toothsome substance – which is why I might add just a couple of tablespoons of rice to the soup maybe. With the leftover soup I added some small bites of cooked potato (that I had leftover). Or I’d thicken it with some flour just for texture. Even so, will I make this again? Absolutely.

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There are a couple of secret ingredients in this soup that help to make this soup an over-the-top version. First – a tiny little glug of soy sauce. Second – a little amount of dried porcini mushrooms  that are ground up to a powder. Who’d think those two things could make such a difference?

When I made this about a week ago, I was recovering from a cold, and some good, hot vegetable soup sounded so restorative to me. And I had about a quart of turkey stock in the refrigerator, leftover from Thanksgiving. It needed to be used, or else frozen. Then I read my most recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated (the Nov/Dec 2011 issue) and there was a long article about vegetable soups. I read it from beginning to end. In it, the author labored long and hard over how to enhance a vegetable soup. He added this and that. He discarded a number of sample batches. But he finally determined that adding in a hint of soy sauce just gave the soup that umami taste we’re all looking for. And the same with the porcini mushroom powder. I’ll have to remember that idea because you could easily add some of that to almost any soup.

So, for this big batch of soup that serves at least 6-8 for a dinner meal, you add just two teaspoons of soy sauce and also 2 teaspoons of porcini mushroom powder (you make this yourself in your spice grinder). That’s not much – but I assure you, it makes a difference. The recipe also has you make a little compound butter (butter, lemon zest, fresh thyme and a tiny bit of lemon juice) which you can spoon onto the top of the soup when it’s served. The butter is hard to see it in my photo at top – it’s just to left and slightly below the center of the soup bowl. And to tell you the honest truth, I couldn’t taste the butter, but there’s only 2 T. of butter used to sweat the veggies at the beginning – that’s it. A very low fat soup! I also added some shiitake mushrooms to this soup. Those weren’t in the original recipe, but I had them on hand and they needed to be used up. Other than that one thing, the recipe below is made exactly to the Cook’s Illustrated one. The soup has a lot of carbs in it – potatoes, turnips, carrots, barley (I used farro because that’s what I had on hand) and peas.

What I liked: doesn’t it always end up being about the taste? It does for me. As I write this, we enjoyed this soup just last night but this won’t post until next week sometime. But I can’t wait to have it again. Fortunately there’s a lot of it. I may freeze one bag and eat the other one sooner rather than later. I may add some green veggies to it next time (like some sugar snaps, maybe green beans just at the end). I like a veggie-laden soup and this one is more carb-laden. Serve this with some bread, or maybe a toasted cheese sandwich. Delish.

What I didn’t like:  well . . .when I make it again I’ll reduce the amount of soy sauce by just a little bit. I could taste it. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t think I should be able to taste it! A great soup, though and worth making. It does take some time doing all the sous-chef thing with chopping, peeling, etc. Be prepared to spend at least an hour overseeing the cooking of it. If you have a kitchen helper, enlist the help to peel and chop!

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This salad was one of several at our Thanksgiving buffet dinner. Everyone liked it, as far as I know. I thought it was wonderful. It could be the main dish of a vegetarian meal. The next day several of us dipped into the leftovers and enjoyed it all over again. The watercress, however, isn’t all that nice the next day if it’s left in the salad.

The dressing is easy – apple cider vinegar, honey, oil and salt and pepper. You do need to prepare a few fresh veggies – carrots, tomatoes, green onions, and add some dried cranberries, toasted pine nuts and toasted pumpkin seeds too. The wild rice does have to be cooked (using some vegetable stock, not just water) of course. Some of the dressing is tossed with the rice and allowed to sit for an hour before you finish prepping the entire salad for serving.

The recipe is another one from the Mitsitam Café. I told you about this a few days ago when I posted the recipe for Cedar-Planked, Fire Roasted Salmon. The recipe is also in the Museum’s cookbook, The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook: Recipes from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Worth making.

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Lately I’ve been on a roll making Aarti Sequeira’s recipes from the Food Network. On this particular show she made a vegetarian meal (a fruit salad, a lentil and rice dish [the main course] and this eggplant salad). They all sounded delicious. I had a beautiful eggplant in my refrigerator which needed to be used (given to me by a friend, Roberta, from her garden). With just one relatively small (globe type) eggplant, I knew it was going to need some additions to make it stretch to serve more than just the two of us. We’d invited a friend over for dinner, so I needed enough to serve 3. That’s just about how much this made, half of the below recipe. Maybe it could stretch to serve 4, but that would be it. The regular recipe would serve at least 6. In the Indian language this dish is called Baingan Bharta. I’ll never remember that – that’s why it’s just “Indian Eggplant Salad.”

This recipe has a significant amount of onion in it. And it’s mixed up at the end with Greek yogurt. And oh gosh, is it ever fantastic. The sweetness that comes from long, slow cooking of the onion, the eggplant, which is roasted in a 500° oven for about 45 minutes, and a few Indian spices. I can already tell you I’m going to be very unhappy when the little bowl of this is gone. I scraped the big frying pan clean with my finger to get the last little bit of residual eggplant.

The onions are cooked in peanut oil until they’re really golden brown. Not burned – watch that carefully – but nicely golden in color. Then you add in the roasted, peeled and cubed eggplant. Add in the spices last (garlic, turmeric, ground cumin, fresh cilantro, salt and pepper – – and if you can handle the heat, add in a serrano or jalapeno pepper).  It’s cooked very briefly, then you add the Greek yogurt (I used Fage non-fat – make sure you DO use Greek yogurt – it’s strained and quite thick – regular yogurt would make this dish far too thin) and it’s finished. You can serve it while it’s warm, or cool to room temp. It has the consistency of Greek yogurt (obviously) but the eggplant is very soft, and so are the onions.

What I like about it: the textures – soft (the eggplant, onions and yogurt), sweet (the onions), spicy (turmeric and cumin) all in one bite. It’s easy to make too, although it does take more than an hour to bake and prepare everything. Next time I’ll be making a double batch. It’s that good.

What I didn’t like: not a single thing. You do need to like soft food, though. Because the eggplant is thoroughly roasted, it’s almost a mush, but not quite. There isn’t anything chewy or crunchy here. A lovely side dish to serve with something more substantial. I served it with Tandoori chicken and Aarti’s lentil-rice dish you’ll read about in a day or two.

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Will you just trust me on this one? Make it, please. Providing you like tomatoes. And cheese. And fresh corn. And pie crust. Oh, it’s so utterly delicious.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you may remember that I posted a similar pie two years ago. It was called a Savory Tomato & Gruyere Pie. And, in fact, this one is also savory, also full of tomatoes, and gruyere cheese. But after I made that pie in 2009 I also made another one – a Tomato & Corn Pie in a Biscuit Crust. I particularly liked the corn in the 2nd rendition. But I thought the first one had better taste. So this time I had both recipes handy and decided to make some changes. All for the better, I assure you! I think this recipe has all the best of both recipes in it. If you’d prefer to use the biscuit crust, by all means do so.

I made a short crust tart shell (you can either roll it out and place in the pie plate, or press it in if you’re piecrust-challenged) and put it into my 9-inch pie dish. I sautéed some onion, added the fresh corn cut off the cob, and a little bit of Sriracha sauce. After the pie shell baked for awhile, I spread the bottom of the crust with about 3 ounces of garlic-and-herb Boursin cheese. It’s a protective layer to keep the moist veggies from soaking into the tender, flaky piecrust. And I used Boursin because I didn’t have any cream cheese in the refrigerator. This worked just fine. The pie shell was still fairly warm, so the cheese really softened a lot. Then I poured in the onion-corn mixture and spread it around. Meanwhile, I’d cut up about 2 1/2 cups of fresh heirloom tomatoes. I cored the tomatoes, cut them in wedges, then squeezed the dickens out of them and put them on some paper towels. Then I squeezed them again to get almost all the juice out of them but still keep the pieces intact. Then I cut the tomatoes into pieces and placed them in the pie and sprinkled the top with a small handful of sliced basil. Then I mixed up the Gruyere cheese, mozzarella cheese and mayonnaise (sinful, I know) and dabbed little pieces all over the top of the tart. There isn’t enough to really spread; besides, the mixture is very sticky, so I used my hands and dropped little bits of it all over the top, then used a spatula to sort-of spread it more evenly. There will be a few holes here and there.

That’s it – bake for about 30 minutes – until the cheese is bubbling away. I let it sit for a few minutes (letting it rest for about 10 minutes would be best – it will cut better), slice and serve with a few more bits of fresh basil on top. I made a green salad with some soft butter lettuce and my latest Lemon Sherry Vinegar Salad Dressing. Perfection. My DH raved.  And raved. I cut us each one slice for dinner and it was all we could do to keep our forks out of the pie plate to have more. We were good. But I had it for lunch the next day, heated in the microwave for about 45 seconds. More perfection!

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If you’d like to try my short crust shell, this is the recipe I use most often (and that isn’t often because I rarely bake pies, but when I do, this is my go-to recipe). It’s one I got from a Joanne Weir cooking class eons ago (probably 10-15 years) and once I saw how easy this was (even for me who is sometimes piecrust-challenged) I’ve made it many, many times. Sometimes I roll it out, other times I use the press-in technique in the recipe.

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On Thanksgiving Day our daughter-in-law Karen brought over a container of this soup for us to enjoy as we all stood around the kitchen cooking. Her sister Janice had made it (thanks!). It was so delicious. She also sent along the recipe (from Cooking Light, 9/2009). Janice uses soy milk, and says that she is able to buy soy half and half. I’d never heard of it until now. Will have to look for it!

This is the kind of soup that sticks to the ribs. Would be great for a cold night, even New Years’ Eve around the fireplace. You could alter the proportion of corn and potatoes to suit your tastes. You’d swear it has bacon in it and there is none. The natural sweetness of the corn just shines through. I’d make this anytime.
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A year ago: It’s December (a list of things I like to bake most Christmases – maybe not this year)
Three years ago: Cardamom Crumb Cake

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You know about cravings, right? I get them often for chocolate. But this time I just got a hankering for some Indian food. We could have gone out to eat it, but I decided I wanted to make something. I’d been looking for another recipe for a luncheon I was planning and as I was leafing through one of my cookbooks, Secrets from a Caterer’s Kitchen, (by Nicole Aloni) I saw this recipe for Vegetable Coconut Curry. I read the ingredients – tons of fresh vegetables in a coconut milk gravy. It didn’t look hard.

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That photo doesn’t tell you a whole lot about how good this was. Brown food is kind of hard to photograph, period. And brown food doesn’t always look that appetizing. That’s a Portobello mushroom with the stem and gills scraped out, filled with arugula butter then topped with ample grated Parmesan cheese.  And grilled.

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Have you heard about the new Cooking Channel? It’s run by Michael Smith and is a sister channel to the Food Network. Among some new chefs it also shows some older foodie TV series. Like Julia & Company and Nigella Lawson when she was much younger. So I’ve set up my Tivo to record Julia and Nigella both. And in the first recorded show that I watched of Julia she was creating a baked creamed corn and scoffed at the work required to scrape the kernels off 12 ears of corn. I nearly laughed out loud since I was just writing up another post and was scoffing, myself, at most of Julia’s recipes. And the time it takes to make one of her recipes – like Beef Bourguignon, for instance. So why she would not scrape 12 ears of corn, I don’t understand!

A week or so ago my friend Cherrie and I went to a cooking class about more of Julia Child’s recipes. Phillis Carey did the cooking, and made four dishes at the class. These crepes, a pork roast, quenelles and a lemon soufflé tart. To tell you the honest truth, I’m not sure I’d make even one of them. They’re just too darned much work. And although I like pork roast, I didn’t think Julia’s recipe was all that great. And the shrimp quenelles – oh my goodness! You know what they are, right? Little French kind of oval-shaped dumplings. They are nothing short of a labor of love. And they were just okay, served with a very rich chive beurre blanc sauce, but would I make them? No. The lemon soufflé tart was good. Very good, actually. But the different steps, the different pans and bowls required, the mountain of dishes deter me from even thinking about making it. I will give you the recipe for it, in case you’d like to make it.

The only one of the four dishes that I really liked was the crepes gateau. But oh, are they a ton of work. Maybe Cherrie and I will pool our resources, divide up the labor and make it once for our husbands. Cherrie and I both thought the spinach overpowered the mushrooms, so we thought we might use twice as much mushroom filling as spinach. But whichever, Phillis told us it’s a first course. Not like a main course. I think we’d have to make it a main – no way would I want to make something else other than a green salad, perhaps, to go with it. With an appetizer maybe and dessert, it would have to be a complete meal. It also would make a lovely brunch dish, I think. For that matter, just look at the calorie count – nearly 1000 calories for a wedge!
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One year ago: White Gazpacho Soup
Two years ago: Asparagus – everything you ever wanted to know

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