Harira Soup

**We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of sugar, sugar, and more sugar to bring you an actual dinner item.**

I love making soup. You just throw all this stuff in a pot and let it simmer, then it’s done and delicious. And it’s an excuse to have hearty, starchy bread. I embarked on my latest soup experiment because I had a bunch of leftover chicken from Christmas dinner, and I had actually made the effort to boil the chicken carcass to make stock. It was my first time making chicken stock, and it was super easy.

(Here’s how: Just throw the chicken carcass* into a pot with a couple of quarts of water, chop up an onion, a carrot, and a stick of celery and add them to the pot, then season with a bunch of salt and pepper. Bring it all to a boil and then let it simmer for 2 hours, uncovered. Strain the broth into a large bowl and let it cool, then refrigerate it overnight and skim off the fat in the morning. You’ll see that the stock has turned into a gel, which is kind of strange if you’re not expecting it. (Fortunately, I had recently seen Terwilliger’s mom make some chicken stock, so I wasn’t horrified when my chilled stock turned into gel. It’s still pretty weird to see, though.) *If you don’t like the term “carcass,” feel free to call it the chicken muffin or something.)

For the resulting soup, I mainly followed a recipe from Enlightened Soups for harira, a Moroccan stew with chickpeas and spices, but I varied the amount of ingredients and threw in a handful of leftover cooked kale at the end. The recipe below is my adapted version.

Ingredients:

5 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup vegetable broth
1 medium onion, chopped
1 T. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 & 1/2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 14-oz can chopped tomatoes with juice
1 14-oz can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 c. lentils
1/4 c. long grain rice
1 – 2 cups cooked chicken, coarsely chopped/shredded
1/2 – 1 cup cooked kale
2 T. fresh parsley, chopped
2 T. fresh cilantro, chopped

In a large saucepan, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add chopped onion, season with salt and pepper, and saute for 5 minutes. Add cumin and ginger and stir for 1 minute more.

Add stock, broth, tomatoes, garbanzo beans, lentils, and rice, and bring to a boil. Immediately lower the heat to a simmer, cover the saucepan, and cook over low heat for about 30 minutes, or until rice is cooked and lentils are soft.

Stir in chicken and kale and heat through. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Stir in parsley and cilantro just before serving.

Black Bean Soup with Small Batch Cornbread

Source: Enlightened Soups & Small Batch Baking
Serves: 8

Hello there. Sorry for the short hiatus; I have been busy planning for the future. Now I’m ready to take a bit of a break from planning, so buckle in and settle down, folks, because I’ve got a lot of recipes comin’ at ya.

Let’s start with soup. Black bean soup. I’m discovering that I really like to make a complex, lots-of-leftovers dinner on Sunday afternoons so that I’ll have lunch for the week. I like taking the time to follow a recipe with more ingredients than usual, more chopping and slicing and measuring and dicing, since a dwindling Sunday afternoon isn’t useful for much else. My last undertaking was this soup, which wasn’t too tremendously complex, but, man, that was a lot of leftovers. This recipe makes a LOT of soup. It says it serves eight, but I’m thinking maybe that’s eight marathoners, or mythical giants. If you make the full batch, feel free to freeze some.

So. I don’t have a lot of experience with bean soup. In theory it’s always seemed like a good idea, but in practice… that’s a whole lot of bean. But this recipe was intriguing because it uses a can of pumpkin puree to smooth and thicken the texture the of the soup. I really can’t resist anything that calls for pumpkin, and even though you can’t taste it among the spices and beans, it really does add an impressive velvety texture.

One thing that I wasn’t so much thrilled about was how despite all the sauteing and time simmering, the onions somehow stayed kind of crunchy. I was not a fan. But the flavor of the soup was quite good, and if I make it again, I’ll chop the onions even finer and saute for a bit longer.

This soup just screamed for a side of cornbread, so I whipped up a quick, tiny batch in my mini loaf pan. I overcooked it a little, so it was kind of dry, but I’d like to try it again sometime to see what it’s like when it’s properly baked. Do me a favor — give it a try and see what you think. If you have a mini loaf pan, that is. If you don’t, well, you should get one, because they’re only a couple of bucks, and they are cute.

Black Bean Soup

3 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes, undrained
2 T. olive oil
1 & 3/4 C. finely chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 & 1/2 T. ground cumin
1 T. chopped canned chipotle chiles*
2 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. salt
4 & 1/4 C. chicken or vegetable broth
1 15-ounce can solid pack pumpkin
3 T. fresh lime juice
3/4 plain nonfat yogurt (or sour cream)
Optional: 1/4 C. chopped fresh cilantro leaves (or chives)

*I couldn’t find these at the grocery store, so I just used regular canned chiles.

In a food processor, coarsely puree the beans and tomatoes with their juices. (Unless you have an enormous food processor, you’ll have to do this in batches.) If you don’t have a food processor, a blender would do just fine.

Heat the oil in a large (and I mean large) saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the onion. Cook and stir 5 minutes, or until soft and translucent. (And then cook a little longer, just to be sure it’s soft and not all crunchy-like.) Add the garlic, cumin, chiles, oregano, and salt. Cook and stir 1 minute. Stir in the bean puree, broth, and pumpkin until blended. Reduce the heat to medium low and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes.

Just before serving, stir in the lime juice. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve garnished with dollops of the yogurt or sour cream.

Small Batch Cornbread

3 tsp. unsalted butter
1/3 C. buttermilk
2 tsp. light or dark molasses (I used honey)
White of 1 large egg
1/2 C. yellow or white cornmeal
1 T. sugar
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1/8 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 450. Put butter in a mini loaf pan (or another pan with a 3/4-cup capacity, such as a jumbo muffin tin) and place in oven to melt.

In a small bowl, whisk together the milk, molasses or honey, and egg white. In another bowl, stir together the cornmeal, sugar, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir just until combined.

Spread batter in buttered pan and bake for 9 – 10 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown and the loaf is springy to the touch. Cool on wire rack for 5 minutes. Serve warm, slathered in butter.

Thai Coconut & Jasmine Rice Soup

Source: Enlightened Soups
Serves: 6 – 8

Have you ever gotten a big bowl of that steamed jasmine rice at a Thai restaurant? Where it’s all sticky and smells kind of salty and sweet and nutty at the same time? And the giant bowl is always way too full with rice, but you have to physically restrain yourself from eating every last grain because it is just so warm and good? This soup is kind of like that.

Risotto Primavera Soup

Source: Enlightened Soups
Serves 4 – 6

While Terwilliger and I were on our honeymoon up the coast of California, I had a risotto and portobello mushroom dish for lunch that was just divine. I’ve never attempted to make risotto before, always figuring it was too complicated and ripe with failure potential. But after having that lunch risotto (which I tried to save for leftovers but ended up throwing away…sad), I wanted to attempt my own. I bought some Arborio rice and then came across this recipe, which seemed like an easy way to give this creamy rice dish a try without actually making straight-up risotto (which I haven’t done yet).