Filed under: Main Dish, Rachelle Mee-Chapman, Soup, quick fix | Tags: beans, Main Dish, rachelle, Soup
Last night was our Annual Fall Chili Fest for the Autumnal Equinox. I try out a different chili every year, and this one got rave reviews from our guests. It goes well with easy Pineapple Salsa and Buttery Cornbread, both of which can be found here. Have yum!
Jamaican Black Bean and Rice Soup
(serves 10)
1/4 olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1-2 red bell peppers, finely chopped
2 tsp each cumin and oregano (adjust to taste)
2 tsp salt
4-5 cloves minced garlic
2 cans black beans, rinsed and drained
4 c veggi stock
1 can stewed tomatoes
1 1/2 cup cooked brown or white rice
2-3 T red wine vinegar (I use balsamic)
Toppings: sliced radishes, sour cream, limes, pineapple salsa
1) Saute onions, bells peppers, spices and salt in a large pot until onions are tender.
2) Add veggie stock. Add beans and tomatoes. Heat thru.
3) Right before serving, add cooked rice and heat thru. When soup is steaming add vinegar and adjust salt.
Tip: Only add enough rice to the amount you are planning to eat right away. Store rice and soup separately to avoid the rice breaking down into starch in your leftovers.
Carrot Ginger Soup with a little freshly ground black pepper
Another recipe from Low Carb 1-2-3 by Rozanne Gold. This soup is bright, both in flavour and in colour. It sort of glows in my white bowls. I made it the other week and brought it to my friend’s house to eat with her grilled salmon dinner. She said it was great carrot soup – very enthusiastically. I left the remainder of the soup with her and got a nice clean container back a couple of days later.
Ingredients
1.5 lbs carrots
5 inch piece of ginger
4.5 Tblsp cream
Peel carrots, slice into 1″ pieces, boil in 4 cups of water with 1/2 teaspoon salt until tender (about 35 minutes). While carrots are cooking, peel and grate ginger on the large holes of a box grater. Wrap grated ginger in cheesecloth and squeeze it to extract the juice – you want about a tablespoon. Puree carrots and cooking water in a food processor, strain into cooking pot (to remove big lumps). Heat soup up, add ginger juice and stir in. Add cream and stir in. Add salt and pepper to taste, and serve.
The ginger juice is a little odd. It has a white substance in it that separates and sticks to the bottom of the cup – a little like cornstarch when you are are mixing it with water. I stir up the ginger juice and scrape up the cornstarchy stuff with it and mix it all together into the soup. For all I know all the vitamins (or taste) are in it. I have a feeling that the ginger flavour in this soup is so warm and bright because of this unusual ingredient of ginger juice. Enjoy!
There is a very interesting cookbook called Low Carb 1-2-3 by Rozanne Gold. It has a lot of great recipes in it and, in particular, I keep making her soups. This soup is easy and delicious and tastes more complex than the recipe would suggest. It is an unusual combination of ingredients that, surprisingly, go together really well. A friend of mine enjoys this recipe and says it always gets a good reception when she makes it for her friends.
Ingredients
6 oz Bok choy (2 smallish bok choys), sliced to the size you like
3 oz Chorizo, sliced paper thin
3 Tblsp White miso
Add miso to 4 cups of water and bring to a boil, add bok choy, return to a boil, and simmer until bok choy is tender. Add sliced chorizo, return soup to a boil and serve.
There is a school of thought that claims it is important to not boil miso. I have heard this is because there are beneficial microbes in the miso (like yogurt has beneficial microbes) that you don’t want to kill by boiling. My mother says to stir the miso into the soup at the very end just before serving to accomplish this lack of boiling. The instructions for this recipe say to bring the miso and water to an almost-boil and then sequentially add the last 2 ingredients, cooking the chorizo for a short time. Personally, I don’t think that there is much difference between an almost-boil and a boil when it comes to killing microbes so I just boil the miso. It doesn’t seem to affect the flavour (to me) and I would rather boil the chorizo and make sure that the pork is cooked. I love chorizo!
My mis en place for Miso Soup with Bok Choy and Chorizo
