Tomato soup, twice

This would be my last MoFo post - didn't make it to 15 recipes this time, but at least I dared to try:) This time I've got two tomato soup recipes, one classic and one mine: quick and spicy.

Tomato soup is omnipresent in polish houses: this would be the most popular soup too. Everybody makes it and there are various kinds that people swear to be the only original ones: the basic questions is, do you use pasta or rice? Then: sweet or salty? white (=with sour cream) or not? Parsley on top? 

This is my family recipe, with rice, not sweet (I never really understood how people can add sugar to a soup with a carrot cooked in broth in it!) and without sour cream, with parsley on top. Enjoy!

Classic Tomato soup for 6 people

veggie broth, 2 l

2 medium carrots

a quarter celeriac root

 one parsley root (save the leaves)

 one medium leek

3-4 allspice berries

1-2 bay leaf

5-6 big ripe tomatoes

a big handful of rice

salt

Boil the broth and cook whole carrots, celeriac, parsley and chopped leek in it with allspice and bay leaf. In a separate pan cook peeled tomatoes until they fall apart and blend. Take out of broth all the veggies except a carrot and discard (=eat apart if you like it). Mix in the tomato puree and boil again; when boiling add rice and salt to taste. The soup is ready when the rice is cooked.

Now my fast food version. I especially enjoy making it at eleven PM when you're not supposed to eat anything, but you're hungry anyway and maybe a little cold too. Great to warm up in a snowy day (do you have snow yet? Too much in here)

1 cup tomato puree

1 cup veggie broth

2 spoons olive oil

1 teaspoon powdered garlic

1 teaspoon powdered sweet chili

1 handful of tiny, quick-cooking pasta

salt and pepper to taste (I use cayenne pepper for better kick)

Boil the broth, add tomato puree and olive oil and boil for 5 minutes. Add spices to taste and pasta; the soup is ready when pasta's ready. Simple and so good.

I'm really glad I started this blog again and that I participated in MoFo. I promise to not disappear next month and show you some delicious Christmas recipes.

Ogórkowa

A classic wintertime comfort food: cucumber soup made out of pickles. To clarify things, I found this article on Wiki and repeat that for this soup we use cucumbers pickled in salt water. In Poland, we have three ways to make pickles and each one is used in other recipes:

- konserwowe: pickled in vinegar for a few days, can be bought in a jar as "swedish salad", used for salads and herring dishes. Also some degenerates like me eat them out of jar while watching movie, especially when I run out of popcorn
- kiszone: pickled in closed jars or kegs , in salted water, for a few weeks. Used in salads, raw, as a side dish, to eat with vodka, for soups or stuffing
- małosolne or kwaszone: pickled in salted water for a few days, usually in an open dish. Have mellow taste, are not that sour as kiszone and much lighter in colour. Eaten raw in summer, with crackers or between vodka shots:)

In here, we use that second type. The soup is sour and rich due to potatoes that are cooked in broth, releasing starch to the liquid. Some people add sour cream to it before serving: I leave that up to you, personally find it disgusting.

Pickle soup:
2 l veggie broth
2 big carrots, peeled
1 big parsley root
4 medium potatoes
a quarter celeriac root (optional, I don't like the taste it brings)
3 large pickles
3/4 cup pickle juice (the liquid pickles are floating in)
some allspice and pepper, salt
optional: sour cream, chopped dill to garnish

Cut the carrots in cubes, shred the celeriac and parsley roots. Add to broth, salt a bit and begin to cook till carrot is al dente. Then add peeled & cubed potatoes, cook till tender again. Finally add shredded pickles and coo for 10-15 minutes more. Pour in pickle juice and turn off the heat.

If you want to serve the soup with cream, wait till it cools down a bit and first mix the cream with a cup of soup liquid, then add to the pot. Traditionally served sprinkled with fresh dill.

Fancy a little touch of spring?

First, I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts; I promised myself to write one entry per week, but so far it didn't work. I was very busy at work, then I went to Spain and the vision of wonderful Spanish food limited my culinary horizon :) But now I'm back with a fresh spring soup I made last week and I hope you'll enjoy it.

Usually the winter weather in Poland is oscillating between lots of snow and a complete lack of it, and the temperature is between +5 and -15 Celsius degrees. Last week it was -20 in my city. There were spots of dirty snow around, but generally the world was gray and sad with no sun and no hope. I went shopping and all the fresh veggies were so expensive it was hard to believe somebody buys it at this price; I went for canned tomatoes, frozen peas and then I saw a jar of salted sorrel.

(If you're curious, it took me so long to write the post cause I couldn't find the name of that herb :P )

As wikipedia can tell you, sorrel is a tiny herb that grows in the garden (rather grows itself than is cultivated), or in meadows, rather in places that are shadowy and have a lot of water. It looks kinda like spinach, but the taste is completely different: sorrel is sour, a bit lemony, with a slight taste of chives and something else, maybe spinach too.

Sorrel is commonly used in Poland to make a spring, green, refreshing soup and actually just for that; I don't think I've ever seen it in salads or used as a stuffing. The original recipe uses 1 egg per portion, to boil it hard, cut in half and put the peeled halves in the soup where they turn green and look suspicious. We just won't use it and that's all.

We're gonna need a big handful of fresh sorrel for 4 portions of soup; if you can't find it fresh or frozen, look for pureed sorrel in a jar - you'll need 1 overfilled cup of it. If you have fresh sorrel, sautée the leaves on sunflower oil (the basic oil for polish kitchen) - it will reduce visibly - and then mash/blend it to a puree


Sorrel soup

200 ml (1 overfilled cup) of sorrel puree
1,5 l (8 cups) of vegetable stock
1 garlic clove
some onion if you like it
3 potatoes if you like the potatoes
100 g (1/4 pound) of regular firm natural tofu (the more solid your tofu is, the better for the aesthetic of your soup)
salt & pepper % some chopped fresh dill if you like it
some egg salt for the tofu

maybe some soy cream (I don't like it that way, maybe you will)


If you're using the potatoes first you have to take care of them: peel, cut in cubes and boil them, then leave apart.

Chop and sautée the onion and the garlic on sunflower oil, then pour in the stock and make it boil. Add sorrel puree and stir well; make it boil, then reduce the heat to minimum, cover leaving some uncovered space for the steam and let it simmer for half an hour.

Break the tofu in chunks and dry it well. Boil some water and pour the tofu chunks in the boiling water; wait till tofu starts to emerge on the surface, then reduce the heat and let it boil for 2-3 minutes. Then take it off the heat, get rid of the water and sprinkle the chunks while hot and steaming with egg salt if you use it.

Now get back to the soup; add the salt and pepper and taste it; if the soup doesn't taste like water or broth and you can clearly distinguish the sorrel taste - which means sour - the soup is ready.

Portion the soup and add tofu chink and potatoes (if using) to each bowl; sprinkle with fresh dill and decorate with soy creamer if you fancy so.

Here you can see my version, with tofu chunks only:


It wasn't as good as made with fresh herb, but still gave me a little hope in this wintery, people-unfriendly weather.

Kutia - a welcome post :)

Hi everyone :)

I wanted to start this blog for a very long time and I started thinking about it seriously about a month ago, hoping I start it before Christmas. It didn't work. This way my first recipes will be post-christmas christmas dishes, but nobody says you can't try it for New Year's Eve :)

I'm a big food blog fan and my goal - as well as my friend's Kassandra - is to promote polish kitchen among vegans and others sympathizing :) Our kitchen has lots of recipes that even don't need veganizing, as well as some amazing food that require just few modifications. I hope you'll find here some inspirations; we'll be posting traditional recipes as well as some not-so-original ones that are popular in Poland (like tomato soup; I can't imagine how is it possible to cannot make a tomato soup, but it seems there are some people unaware of it's existence).


The first recipe is a classic Christmas sweet treat: kutia. It's originated in eastern part of Poland and for so I didn't know it for a very long time (I'm from the western part) till I started my studies and my flatmates taught me make it. From then on, it's my favourite and I always make lots of kutia and eat for breakfast for a week :D

What do we need: the base is cooked wheat, the whole grains, not flour or bran. Other basic ingredients are poppy seeds, soaked in hot water and crushed, then some nuts and dried fruits of your choice - my recipe calls for dried fruits traditionally used in Poland, but don't let it stop you from adding your favourites (my kutia always contain some papaya cubes). The last traditional ingredient is honey; I substitute it with artificial honey, a communist-times mercancy that had survived till our times to my vegan joy. If you can't buy it, which is very probable, you can mix half maple syrup and half agave nectar - that will give you a similar flavour - or just forget it and use any liquid sweetener you have.


The Recipe:

1 cup dry wheat grains
1/2 cup dry poppy seeds
1/2 to 1 cup of nuts of your choice - traditionally we use wallnuts and hazelnuts
1/2 to one cup of dried fruits - prunes, apples, pears, peaches, raisins, orange zest and apricots
2 to 5 T of artificial honey ar any liquid sweetener
optional: 2-3 cups of soymilk

First you soak the wheat overnight in a large bowl. Next day you cook it till it's edible - the grains shouldn't be soft in the outside nor sticky, but while chewing they shouldn't taste like flour. Drain the wheat and pour some cold water to prevent it from sticking; let it cool.

Take 2 cups of water/soymilk and make it boil; take off the oven and pour the poppy seeds into, cover and let it sit for one hour, it will make them softer. After and hour drain it well and blend. There will surely be a problem with blending, but it actually depends of you, how crushed you want the seeds. I like it almost uncrushed, so I never care about blending; just try some and tell if you like the feeling of poppy seeds scratching between your teeth or not :)

Chop the nuts and cut the fruits into tiny pieces, like in a fruit cake.

Mix everything altogether: the wheat, poppy seeds, nuts & fruits and add half of the honey; cover everything with it and try. If you want your kutia sweeter or there's not enough honey to cover everything, add the rest of your sweetener. Done!



You can eat it right away or store in a cool place (a fridge is the best option, just cover it well, if you don't want it to smell of other food); keeps a week to 10 days. Kutia is a great and quite cheap party food; also easy to turn raw, if you're sure that the wheat can be eaten uncooked (poppy seeds surely are).