Cauliflower Soup with Garlic Croutons

I love this – cooking late a night when the children are asleep and the house is quiet. Using up some end of the week vegetables before they go off. But also getting a chance to create and really think about the food I am preparing.

Not that I don’t consider it now – but I don’t always take the time to break down each piece of the food equation as I go about putting the dish together. By this I mean that sometimes I just throw the vegetables in and hope for the best!

So, last night I had a cauliflower to use up….I don’t know about you but this is one vegetable that I have had a weird relationship with over the years. I like this vegetable and everything from it’s Brassica family but when it tastes a little sharp or sour I often have a hard time getting the children to enjoy it.

The dish I ended up making was a cauliflower stew - to start if off, I began with sautéing the cauliflower together with onion, leek, celery and garlic in some water to sweat it down and then a little butter.

I would not ordinarily use butter – but I wanted to bring out a particular sweet taste that I know cauliflower has when cooked in this way. It was sautéd until lightly browned and very fragrant. Then I added turmeric, thyme, cumin seeds, cinnamon, salt and pepper and a little allspice to gently spice this up.

In the meantime I washed and rinsed a few red lentils (yes I am on a lentil binge right now) and brought them to the boil in a sauce-pan. Then I added some sliced carrots and sweet potato.

Once the cauliflower mixture was ready I added it to the lentils in the pot and let it all gently boil for about 40 minutes or so – until I was happy with the consistency.

It had thickened nicely and had a lovely fragrance. This was let cool overnight – but before serving to my taste tester I blended half of it in the food processor until smooth and then added it back into the sauce pan to heat.

To make it extra special I made some croutons with a little left over nearly stale olive bread by lightly frying them in crushed garlic and butter for a few minutes. It was a hit and something I will make again.

April

Cauliflower Soup with Croutons

More Adventures in Rebel Cooking...

Today for something different I decided to try my hand at making some Biscotti - of course, I've never made this before and actually, have never eaten it either. But, that matters not - because until I started baking, cooking, growing and canning everything for myself - I never ate half of these foods! LOL

So, I dug around for some older recipes for biscotti and then thought about what it would mean when I had to adjust the recipe for spelt flour, fresh organic ingredients, goat's butter, and no sugar. This means I always end up tweaking each recipe quite a bit.

To the point that it no longer resembles anything that I might have started out with. In fact - what I ended up doing was combining the advice of several recipes to see what I might end up with. Having not ever tasted a biscotti before might have been a blessing as well....

Because then I could be fully impartial. Or at least I hoped so.

To make these biscotti I decided to have almond and orange flavours as I have this thing for orange right now and I really like the thought of nuts in any cookie. I also knew they needed to be crisp or hardened in order to dunk them in my coffee...

Here's what I did to make these cookies today....

1/2 cup almonds toasted and chopped

1 cup whole grain spelt flour

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup maple syrup

1 duck egg

3/4 cup polenta 

2 T orange rind

2 T orange juice

1/2 teaspoon gr coriander

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon baking soda

pinch salt

First I wanted to get each of the wet ingredients into one place. To do this I blended the maple syrup with the butter, added the egg and then the orange juice.

In a separate mixing bowl, I placed the flours, orange rind, baking soda, salt, spices and some of the toasted almonds. I then mixed this with a wooden spoon until it was well blended - adding the wet mixture slowly until a soft dough was formed.

On a piece of parchment paper I sprinkled some flour and the rest of the almonds. Taking half the dough at a time, I rolled it into a sausage shape taking up the rest of the almonds into the dough. I did this twice with each piece of dough.

Then I just placed each of these long sausages onto a baking sheet and into a hot oven for about 25 to 28 minutes. The oven was around 175C. Once these cookies were a little firm I took them out and let them cool for about 10 minutes or so. Then I sliced them into pieces and placed the pieces back into the oven for an additional 10 minutes.

They turned out nicely - a tiny bit crumbly but really fresh and flavourful. I think I will run through this one again to see if I can get them a little harder like a biscuit....Yummy though!

April

Almond & Orange Biscotti