White Bean Soup with Fennel and Tomatoes

White beans can fill out a soup in a variety of ways. This simple recipe has a surprise ingredient that gives the soup a distinctive taste: fennel. And since fennel lends itself to fish and seafood, some fish can always be added before serving to make it more of a meal.

The recipe is simple because this version uses canned beans, rather than starting with soaking and boiling dried beans, and everything goes in the pot and cooks for a short time.

We like our bean soup on the thick side, so for the broth for this recipe I used one of my containers of thick chicken (or turkey) stock (see 9 November 2010 for recipes) and one of regular stock. However, if using regular chicken stock, pureeing part of the soup and adding that back into the pot can achieve the same thicker effect. Alternatively, cutting down the broth to 4 cups would also make a thicker soup.

Ingredients

I medium fennel bulb

1 medium onion, chopped

6 cups chicken broth

20 cloves garlic, chopped

Pinch of thyme

Bay leaf

¼ cup chopped parsley

2 teaspoons chopped rosemary

2 cups chopped canned tomatoes

2 15 ounce cans white beans, undrained.

salt and pepper

Directions

1. Remove tops and stalks of fennel. Save fronds. Chop bulb.

2. Put chopped fennel, onions, garlic and herbs in soup pot with broth.

3. Simmer until vegetables are soft, about 15 minutes.

4. Add tomatoes, beans, salt, pepper and fennel fronds. Soup is done when all ingredients are hot.

Stock (again): The Real Deal

The real deal for making stock from beef or veal is another story altogether than dealing with poultry. Since our refrigerator was filled with the gift of three large bags of veal bones, I could see how the next cold day was going to get a lot warmer inside with the roasting of some bones.

Preparing beef/veal bones for soup requires, first of all, a HOT oven and a couple of hours of roasting. If there is anything else you can think of to cook while you are at it, then the (household) energy expended can turn out to be more worthwhile, but it has to be something that needs to be cooked at 400 (or, to accommodate baking, 450 for part of the time and 350 for the rest).

Ingredients

8 pounds veal bones

3 carrots, scraped and chopped

3 yellow onions, peeled and chopped

3 stalks celery, chopped

3 Tbsp tomato paste

2 cups dry white wine

2 plum tomatoes, chopped

2 cloves garlic

2 bay leaves

10 black peppercorns

3 sprigs parsley

4 quarts water

 

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Put bones in a roasting pan and roast for 1 hour.
2. Add carrots and onions and cook for another 40 minutes, or until well browned.
3. Remove bones and vegetables to a soup pot. Put the roasting pan across two burners, add tomato paste, and deglaze with the wine. Simmer until all particles are loose, then add to stock pot.
4. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer uncovered for at least two hours. Stock should be reduced by a third.
5. Strain stock and discard solids. The stock can be frozen in small containers to use for sauces or large containers as a soup base.

With the addition of further ingredients and more cooking, some of this stock can be converted into demi-glace, a richly condensed brown sauce that goes well on sliced steak or fillet mignon.

For us, the stock went into the making of a French onion soup, and the gravy for a sliced steak.

Portuguese Soup

In an attempt to make lamb stuffed cabbage for a pre-Thanksgiving gathering, we ended up with a kitchen full of cabbage. The impetus for this cooking was a gift of ground lamb from our son’s Longmeadow Farm sheep.

The problem was that the recipe for the Lamb Stuffed Cabbage didn’t explain in sufficient detail how to get the cabbage leaves to cooperate. The directions were to blanch the leaves and then run them under cold water. However, after cutting off the first two leaves for blanching, the rest ganged up on us and came off in pieces and hunks.

Fortunately, the market was still open and we had the resources of our computer. While my spouse went off to secure two more cabbages, I searched the internet and eventually turned up a useful bit of instruction: submerge an entire head in boiling water for 15 minutes, then douse with cold water. It worked. So we had two heads-worth of leaves… and a head in chunks.

The result was a pot full of stuffed cabbage… and a pot of Portuguese Soup, which requires a head of chopped up cabbage. This is one of our hearty winter traditions, so it was nice to have the soup for another Thanksgiving week meal while the family was here.

The recipe for Portuguese Soup was given to us by friends years ago on Cape Cod, an area with a large Portuguese population in previous eras.  It was summer when we visited the Cape, but we make the soup in the winter as a hot and hearty meal.

All the work is in the cutting up, because once that is done, everything goes in the pot at once and just cooks until the carrots and potatoes are done.

Ingredients

15 ounce can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed

28 ounce can diced tomatoes

1 medium head white cabbage, sliced

2 green peppers, chopped

1 medium onion, chopped

3 carrots, chopped

2 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed

4 cups beef broth (we have also substituted our home made chicken stock)

1 bay leaf

¼ cup wine vinegar

2 pounds sliced linguica (we have had to improvise with other sausages or kielbasa when linguica wasn’t available)

Good shot of red pepper sauce

4 cups water

Directions

Put all ingredients in soup pot.

Cook for approximately 40 minutes or until all vegetables are done.

Talking Turkey.... Soup

For years the soup I regularly made from the turkey carcass was, to say the least, boring. That was before I discovered recipes that consider what the day after Thanksgiving would taste like if the Pilgrims were from France, China, or Italy.

Whether the soup is going to have a French influence, Chinese style, or Italian flavor, the first step is to make a stock from the bones. The longer this can cook, the better it will be; anything from two to four hours should do the job.

Basic turkey stock ingredients:

the carcass, broken up to fit into a soup pot, but getting rid of small, loose pieces of bone 

1 large onion, coarsely chopped

2 ribs of celery, coarsely chopped

2 carrot, scraped and coarsely chopped

The liquid added to cover the above ingredients depends somewhat on the direction the soup will take. Enough water to cover all of the above is one possibility.

Once the bones are removed, and any meat taken off the bones, the stock can be used strained, or the vegetables can be pureed and added back into the stock. Any meat can be used in the soup, or can be used to make croquets.

French Version

12 cups liquid: a combination of chicken stock, white wine, crushed canned plum tomatoes, and water. Cook for two hours over medium heat. Remove bones but keep any meat that has fallen off the bone.

Add:

1 chopped fennel bulb

2 cleaned and chopped leeks

1 tsp chopped garlic

½ tsp thyme

Cook 15 minutes.

Add:

½ tsp cumin

1 Tbsp anise flavored liquor

Any leftover sweet potatoes cut up,  ‘et ‘bon appétit.’

Italian Version

2 cups chopped fennel

4 ounces sliced pancetta chopped

1 pound cherry tomatoes

1 15 ounce can canellini beans, rinsed

4 cups turkey strained stock from basic recipe above

1 cup leftover turkey, chopped

1 cup leftover turkey gravy or puree of the vegetables from the basic stock

¼ tsp dried crushed red pepper

½ cup chopped fresh basil, or I tablespoon dried.

Cook fennel and pancetta in a soup pot until pancetta starts to brown

Add tomatoes and cook briefly

Add all other ingredients and cook 15 minutes.

Chinese Version

For this soup, the stock is strained so it can be used without the vegetables.

For six servings, figure six cups of the strained stock and the following:

6 ounces uncooked Chinese noodles

1 Tbsp to toasted sesame oil

5 tsp grated fresh ginger

4 Tbsp oyster sauce

6 Tbsp chopped cilantro

3 cups diced cooked turkey

¾ cup thinly sliced scallions

Heat the strained stock.

Cook noodles according to directions, drain and toss with sesame oil, ginger, oyster sauce and cilantro.

Divide the noodle mixture among 6 bowls and top with turkey and scallions.

Pour broth over noodles.

Sweet Potato and Red Pepper Soup

1 jar roasted red peppers, drained, or two small red peppers roasted and peeled

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

½ tsp thyme

2 cups leftover mashed sweet potatoes

4 cups stock (from basic recipe). The pureed vegetables from the stock can also be used, but will moderate the color of the soup.

¼ cup orange juice

pepper and salt to taste

Heat olive oil in soup pot. Add onion, thyme, salt and pepper. Cook over low heat until onion is soft.

Add remaining ingredients and cook for 20 minutes.

Puree in blender.

Taking Stock

What do you do when you are given the gift of feet from fifty chickens? This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  Instead, it is what happens around our house from time to time.

Our farmer son comes by every once in a while, after processing a batch of chickens, with bags of chicken feet for making stock. There used to be necks, too, but after a recent trip to France where he inspected numerous butcher shops and found meat sold ‘avec la tête’ (with the head), he compromised and left the necks on the chickens he sells.

Meanwhile, what happens to the feet of the fifty chickens? They get a bit of a spa treatment: they are submerged in a sink full of lukewarm water and undergo several rinsing. Any loose pieces of skin are removed and dark spots scrubbed. After three rinses the water is clear.

The next step is dividing the feet up between two large soup pots. Into each pot go three scraped carrots, three quartered onions, plus the leaves and upper third of a head of celery, divided between the pots. If I have any fresh herbs around, such as parsley, cilantro, tarragon or dill, those might go in, too. Lifting these pots is good for building upper body strength.

I add water until the feet and their accompaniment are well covered.  Once the mix is brought to a boil, I lower the temperature and cook the stock-to-be for two to three hours.

After the mix has cooked, I get rid of the feet as soon as it is possible to handle the contents. There is no point in putting the stock out to cool so that fat can be skimmed off because pasture raised chickens have no fat. They are athletes.

Then I remove the vegetables. I puree the vegetables in a blender with stock from one pot. This gives me two different kinds of stock: one is a thicker, opaque blend, and the other is a clearer, thinner liquid. These I freeze in gallon ziplock bags, 4 cups to a bag, labeled for future soup making.

Recently, the thicker mix became part of the base for a white bean soup and a curried cream of vegetable, while a bag of the clearer stock went into a mushroom velouté.

No antibiotics, no checking labels for salt content, these bags are like money in the bank.

"Orange" Soup

The title “Orange Soup” refers more to the color of this remarkable dish than to the contents, although orange as a flavor does enter into the mix. This is a soup that can only be made at the end of the summer when the special ingredients can be assembled. We have eaten it hot, but it could probably be eaten cold with a dollop of sour cream on top. Think of it as orange borscht.

From your local farm stand you need to collect yellow or orange tomatoes, striped or yellow beets, and red/orange peppers. With this assortment, and a few other ingredients, what results is a rich soup with a slightly offbeat flavor. Since the soup will be pureed, the ingredients can be chopped coarsely.

Hungarian style peppers are a recent discovery. I saw some beautiful small yellow/red/pale green peppers and asked if they were spicy. The farmer said, “Not really.” But apparently she was not that familiar with this species, because I chopped up a whole pepper and dumped it into our dinner one night, and it was too hot for us to eat. When I asked a Hungarian friend about the peppers, she said that a quarter of one would have been more than enough. But in a whole pot of soup, one small pepper is probably just about right.

Ingredients

6 medium to large yellow and/or orange tomatoes, chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

2 Tbsp butter or vegetable oil

4 medium striped or yellow beets

3 yellow/orange peppers, chopped

1 small yellow/red Hungarian style pepper

4-6 cups chicken or vegetable stock (depending on how much juice the tomatoes give off)

3/4 cup orange juice, or 2 tablespoons condensed frozen orange juice

Directions

1. Cook beets until just tender, then slip off outer skin and chop beets.

2. Saute onion in butter or vegetable oil until soft,

3. Add peppers and cook until soft.

4. Add tomatoes, beets, stock, and orange juice. Cook 30 minutes and puree.

French Onion Soup

Since this recipe calls for 3 pounds of onions, plus a little more at the end, I like to use the giant sweet onions that show up at farmer’s markets in the early Fall. About three of those big ones weigh in at three pounds.

Slicing all those onions can cause a lot of grief, but I have learned a trick that seems to help in avoiding tears. Someone once told me that if the cutting board is first wiped down with vinegar, all will be well. When I asked the person whom I thought gave me this tip, he looked blank, but it seems to help, so I continue to use a little white vinegar rubbed over the cutting surface before I launch into the onions.

It is a little harder to have homemade beef stock on hand than chicken stock. Any time a chicken has been cooked, the remains can be thrown in a pot with some vegetables to cook up broth, but steak and chop meat don’t give a cook anything to work with. The true French way is to roast bones and vegetables for hours, then deglaze, add further ingredients, and cook down. Another possibility is to put marrowbones in a soup pot, along with onion, carrots, celery, parsley, cook and skim.

The simplest way is to use a prepared stock. As always, this requires some careful reading of labels to check out salt and sugar content. A recent survey of a supermarket assortment showed that salt could range from 17 to 40 % of daily requirements.

Traditionally, French Onion Soup comes with toasted bread and shredded Gruyere cheese on top (which requires putting the already heated soup, with its decorations, under the broiler). But there are other possibilities. For instance, sautéing an onion lightly and adding that at the end, plus a little grated parmesan, will give the soup some extra body and flavor without having to worry about getting individual bowls of boiling soup in and out of the oven.

Ingredients

6 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp olive oil

3 lbs. yellow onions, peeled and thinly sliced

1 tsp sugar

Salt (depending on broth)

1 Tbsp flour

8 cups beef stock

2 cups dry white wine

Pepper

Baguette

1lb. Gruyere, shredded

Directions

1. Melt 3 Tbsp butter over medium-low heat, add oil and onions and cook covered 30 minutes.
2. Increase heat to medium-high, add sugar and cook uncovered until golden brown.
3. Sprinkle flour, and cook for 3 minutes uncovered.
4. Add 2 cups of stock and stir to blend.
5. Add remaining stock and wine. Adjust salt and pepper and simmer 20 minutes.

For Serving with Gruyere

1. Put oven on broil (low)
2. Slice and butter bread
3. Toast in oven until just golden brown on both sides
4. Add toast and soup to (ovenproof) bowls
5. Spread shredded Gruyere on top
6. Put bowls on a baking sheet and broil until cheese bubbles and begins to brown.