red pepper & fennel soup

Every morning I stir oats into water and almond milk and let them warm until they've absorbed all the liquid, and then I sprinkle them with a healthy amount of cinnamon and a few raisins and sliced almonds, and then wander to our table oats in one hand and a mug of hot tea in the other. I sit down and while the tea steeps and I slowly start eating my oatmeal, I stare out the window at the building across the street, watching my neighbors partake in their morning routines. I like to call it being neighborly, but really I'm just being nosy.

Anyway, my breakfast routine is really besides the point, except the point I was trying to make is that I have a breakfast routine. I eat and do the same thing every morning. I love it. And that makes me wonder why I don't have a similar lunch routine. In fairness I'm not always home for lunch, but when I am I never really know what to eat. I don't love lunch. That was until I made this red pepper and fennel soup. It's taken twenty nine years for me to realize that I love warm food for lunch. Maybe it's because warm food is the anti cold-cut, a food item I have shunned since before I can remember. Or maybe it's just because lunch, like breakfast and dinner, is also a time for comfort and warmth. Either way, this red pepper and fennel soup, will be my new lunch routine, hopefully on a rotation with a few other soups that I've yet to discover (lentil? cauliflower? pea?).

Roasted red pepper and fennel make a wonderful pair. Somehow the sweetness of the pepper manages to both dampen and highlight the licorice flavors of the fennel. It is a subtle soup, with no one flavor overpowering the rest. It also takes to spices really well. As the leftovers were dwindling I started experimenting with a few shakes of cumin and a bit of paprika, and found I liked that taste even better than the original. I also started added leftover quinoa to the mix and like that too. Really, I guess, I just like this soup and I trust you will too.

Besides a few tablespoons of olive oil to warm up the pan and get the saute going, this is truly a vegetable based soup (the bread is for the croutons).

Beware of the immersion blender! A couple of years ago when I was busy prepping for dinner at our apartment, blending a gazillion cloves of garlic, I decided to stick my thumb in and unstick the garlic from the blade...and then god knows why, I pushed the on button with my thumb still in range of the blade, and voila thumb soup. No not really, but I did need a little medical superglue on my thumb. Considering I have the shortest thumbs known to man (someday I'll show you...maybe) it's a good thing I didn't slice the top right of. Anyway...so I was sure I was the only person who was stupid enough to turn it on when my finger was still in it, but then my friend's older sister told me she did the same thing, and she has the scar to prove it. So with that warning, I say, don't stick your finger near the blade.

Red Pepper and Fennel Soup

adapted from Food and Wine

- 6 large red bell peppers

- 3 tablespoons olive oil

- 6 large carrots, coarsely chopped

- 2 medium fennel bulbs, coarsely chopped

- 1 medium leek, white and tender green parts, coarsely chopped

- 1 small spanish onion, coarsely chopped

- 2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped

- 1/2 cup dry white wine

- 1 teaspoon fennel seed

- salt and ground pepper

- 2 tablespoons chopped parsley

- a tablespoon or two of cumin (optional, to taste)

garlic croutons

- 6 or so thick slices of bread

- olive oil for brushing

- garlic clove, sliced for rubbing

Heat the oven to 450ºF.

Slice the peppers in half and arrange on a baking sheet, round side up. Place in the oven and roast until skin turns brown and begins to separate from the flesh. Remove from the oven and place in a plastic bag and allow to steam for 15 minutes. This will make it easier for you to remove the skin from the pepper. Once cool enough to handle peel the peppers, discarding the skin.

While the peppers are roasting, heat the olive oil in a large heavy bottom pot (I used an 8qt pot). Add the carrots, onions, leek and garlic and cook over moderate heat, stirring occassionally until the vegetables are softened but not brown, about 10 minutes or more. Add the peppers, white wine, fennel seeds and 4 cups of water and season with salt and pepper. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and simmer until the vegetables are soft, about 40 minutes.

Once soft either use an immersion blender right in the pot, or transfer the vegetables to a blender and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper and cumin if desired. Stir in the parsley and if the consistency is too thick you can thin it with a bit of water. Garnish with garlic croutons and parmesan cheese.

garlic croutons - brush your thickly sliced bread with olive oil and put it in the oven to toast until lightly browned. Remove from the oven and rub with a garlic clove that has been cut in half. Slice and serve.

*quinoa is also great with this soup - either in it, or with a bit of soup served on top.

Oh, and this is my new favorite snack/lunch...avocado on toast or cracker with salt and pepper. I could eat an entire avocado without even blinking...the same goes for a chocolate bar, which unfortunately is not source of 'good' fat, but I'm still able to convince myself it's healthy as long as it's dark chocolate. Speaking of healthy, if you are planning on spring cleaning your diet, this soup would be a great addition, perhaps a substitute for that chili you've been eating all winter long.

The weather has been phenomenal this week. I've been outside as much as possible, taking long walks just to feel the sun on my face. I'd forgotten how much I like walking around the city and exploring new neighborhoods. Forget the trams, I'll walk! Snow is apparently headed our way next week (ugh) so you can be sure I'll be sitting on a bench near the lake with my face in the sun all weekend long.

talley & julia....french onion soup

I'm watching Julie & Julia for the third time, this week. I initially turned it on because after hunting on youtube for the hilarious onion chopping scene - Julia fumigates her husband right out of their apartment with all of the onion gas - and not finding anything besides the generic movie trailer I decided to turn on the movie. The pile of chopped onions was in the pot, on their slow journey to caramelization, and Julia was on the screen, keeping me company. It was a great, sweet, wine-infused, journey.

Enchantè Julia!

A lot of people have asked me if I'm familiar with the movie. It makes sense. I'm an expat, I cook, I blog. But now after seeing it three more times, I wonder if maybe all those people weren't asking simply if I'd seen it, but rather if it meant something else, if perhaps there was a little 'je ne sais quoi' about the movie. And you know what? I think there might be. Not with the Julie bit, (I find her particularly self important, whiny, and annoying), but with the Julia bit. It makes me laugh and it also makes me appreciate living abroad and the time it has given me to learn to cook. As Julia says, "I'm in heaven here." If only I had her collection of copper pots....and spoke French...

Onion soup, like Caesar salad, was one of my first forays into grownup food. I would eat spaghetti with plain tomato sauce at home, but when we went out to eat I'd order onion soup right alongside my parents. The Burns have eaten a lot of onion soup over the years. If it is on the menu we are likely to order four. My dad taught me to love the cheese that burns and gets all crispy on the sides of the pot, but I learned to love the broth soaked bread and the sweet soft onions all on my own. Thankfully Zach is also an onion soup connisseur. We've come to judge restaurants on their onion soup. It seems fair considering that it's a fairly easy soup to make, hard to screw up, so if you do, we are likely to notice.

Besides onions, one of the essential ingredients for onions soup is a set of little oven safe ramekins. The other day when I was window shopping on Bahnhofstrasse (have I mentioned Zurich is insanely expensive?) I came across a little kitchen store that was selling these Staub mini pots for 5.50chf. In Zurich terms that is basically free, so I bought 4. Thank goodness, because I can now make onion soup all the time.

So this isn't Julia Child's recipe, but she does have one, and you can watch and follow her on youtube. I started this soup with the Tartine recipe in front of me and the cream already in the pot, before I turned on the movie and before I was in love with Julia Child.

onion soup, adapted from Tartine

- 6 large yellow onions (I used 3 large onions and 8 - 9 small ones - they are cheaper) cut into slices 1/4 thick

- 1/2 cup heavy cream (Tartine calls for 1 cup, but the onions were cooking too slowly in all that liquid, maybe I'm too impatient)

- 2 tablespoon unsalted butter

- 1 teaspoon salt

- 2 cups dry white wine

- 6 cups stock (veggie or chicken, I used veggie - see end of post. Tartine calls for 8, but I like my soup a bit denser)

- sliced and toasted bread for top of soup

- Gruyère cheese sliced for soup.

Combine the butter and cream in the bottom of a 5-8 quart pan/pot. Let it heat over medium heat until the butter is melted and then add the onions. Cook and stir occasionally until the onions have softened and are transparent. This might take a while because there are so many onions. Be patient. Turn on a movie. Once transparent, let the cream and onions cook at a slow boil. Cook the onions, without stirring, until the bottom of the pot begins to brown. Again this could take a while, depending on the size of your pot. Stir the onions with a wooden spoon, adding 1/2 cup of wine to deglaze the bottom of the pot, stirring quickly, scraping the bottom of the pan and then leaving the onions to cook until the bottom of the pot browns again, about 6 - 8 minutes. Repeat the process two more times, until the onions take on a deep caramel color. All in all this process took me over an hour, the first part taking me the longest time.

Poor in the stock and bring to a simmer over medium heat, cooking for 15 or so minutes until the broth is well flavored by the onions. Taste and season with salt if needed.

Preheat the oven to 400ºF. Toast the bread, until dry and brittle, about 10 minutes. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil, ladle the soup into your little oven safe pots, top with bread and cheese and bake until the cheese is bubbly and caramelized, 20 - 30 minutes.

This soup is ridiculously good. So good that I sent this email to Zach's work email after I first tasted it....

holy *****

this is the best thing i've ever made

ever.

want to bathe in it

you will too

that is word for word, asterisk for asterick, lack of punctuation for lack of punctuation, exactly what I wrote. I guess all of that cheesy goodness impaired my judgement about what is appropriate to send to your husband's work email. whoopsy daisy. But hopefully that will convey to you just how **** good it really is.

. . . the stock. . . As Julia says homemade stock is an essential ingredient for onion soup - why bother making soup from scratch if you aren't going to use homemade stock. I agree.

I recently read An Everlasting Meal, I wonderful book my Tamar Adler, that helped me change the way I approach cooking. Before I read the book I threw away a lot of food; the leafy ends of celery, the ends of onions, the butts of carrots and pretty much any part of a vegetable that I wasn't going to use. Now I throw all of those tails and ends and butts into a pot, cover them with water and let it boil until it's stock. It's pretty much magic. And in Switzerland where you can't buy liquid stock of any kind, it really is a miracle, completely revolutionary.Vegetable stock

- throw whatever ends, tails butts of veggies you have into a pot. If carrots and celery aren't already in the mix then add some, especially the leafy parts and the bulb. Also add an onion, sliced in half, and a head of garlic sliced in half. Sprinkle in some black pepper corns. Poor in water until it covers the veggies and then bring a boil over high heat. Turn down to a simmer and allow to cook until the water has absorbed the vegetable flavors. Taste and season with salt as needed. Strain the veggies and poor liquid into jars and place the jars in the fridge.

The color of the stock will depend on what veggies you use. In the pictures above, in the recipe section, you will notice that the stock is two different colors and that is because it is from two different batches, one had the skin and ends of a butternut squash in it and the other one, well I can't quite remember. Really it's just about feel and whatever scraps you have lying around.

As you can see from the above pictures I saved all the onions ends and skins from the onions that went into this soup and threw them into a pot of stock. I try not to throw any vegetables away at this point. It can always be stock, and you always need stock. Especially with thanksgiving coming up!

* * * *

Bon Appetit !

autumn soup (with bacon and cheddar!)

This past weekend wasn't particularly fall-ish, with it's muggy days and hazy skies, but then again it wasn't especially summery either with daylight fading before dinner was even served and chilly nights that make you thankful for a cozy comforter. The weather seems to have a hold on me these days. I think I've probably mentioned it in every post since I first 'felt' fall. No matter what the weather, it was a perfect weekend to spend exploring the city with our visitor! We went on a day trip (more on that later), we explored the flea market, we had a beer by the side of the lake and we went on a couple long walks. It was heavenly. Heavenly until I had to walk Kerry to the train and say goodbye. Off she went, towards the airport and eventually Kenya, and here I am still in Zürich. And of course she had to leave on a a Sunday, one of the more depressing days in the Swiss week, when everything is closed and the city feels deserted (aside from that weird bike/balloon fair that was happening alongside the Limmat). Obviously it was time to do some cooking, but what to cook? Ker and I had chatted a bit about our similar lunch conundrum, which is basically, 'what on earth to eat for lunch?' We both love yogurt with honey and muesli for breakfast and hot savory meals for dinner, but aren't especially keen on the cold sandwich or salad that typically make up lunch. I'm generally not a huge leftovers fan, but she convinced me, as we munched on day old risotto and pork tenderloin, that it is actually the perfect lunch. When leftovers aren't an option then it's soup for Kerry. She'll tell you that she happily ate the same lentil soup almost everyday for lunch when she was clerking in Brooklyn. It was warm and satisfying and when you include the pita that it came with, just enough to hold her until dinner, or at least until that afternoon snack.

Soup was the perfect comfort food for my mood yesterday. But I wasn't sure I'd be able to find all the ingredients at the train station grocery store, which is the only one open on Sundays. No trips to specialty stores or farmers markets, I'd be stuck with what they had, which always questionable on a Sunday because the market is packed to the gills with people, people who seem convinced that they'll never be able to buy food again. Thankfully the hoards of people left some butternut squash and apples for me and I set out to make this Autumn inspired vegetable soup.

The soup is almost entirely vegetable based. It's delicious on it's own, but for some reason I have a mental block where I can't eat soup without some type of bread, whether it's a slice, a roll or a crouton. When a soup is smooth I need some crunch. That's where the cheddar croutons come in, oh yeah, and the bacon bits! crunch crunch. The bacon and the cheddar pair well with each other, obviously, but they also pair really well with the butternut-apple flavor of the soup.

This recipe caught my eye when I saw that it started with bacon! It's from the Gourmet website.

butternut- apple soup - very slightly adapted from above recipe

- 8 slices of bacon, cut crosswise into 1/2" pieces

- 2 celery ribs, chopped

- 1 carrot, chopped

- 1 medium onion, chopped

- 1 leek, chopped

- 1/4 tsp cinnamon

- 3/4 lb boiling potatoes

- 3 medium Granny Smith apples, or other tart apples

- 1 1/2 lb butternut squash, peeled, seeded and 1/2" pieces (3 1/2 to 4 cups)

- 2 cups reduced-sodium chicken stock or broth (since it's hard to find in Switzerland and expensive when I do find it, I make my own roughly based on this recipe)

- 2 to 2 1/2 cups of water

- Garnish sour cream

cheddar croutons

- 1/2 loaf of wurzelbrot (twisted bread) or whatever leftover bread you have on hand, cut into 1"x1" pieces

- 1/4 tsp of ground cumin, more or less to taste

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 2 tablespoons olive oil

- 2/3 cup of grated cheddar cheese

Cook bacon in a heavy pot over medium heat, stirring occasionally so that it doesn't stick to the bottom, until crisp. Spread out on a paper towel to let the grease drain, leaving roughly 2 tablespoons of fat in the pot (add vegetable oil if your bacon doesn't yield enough fat).

Cook celery, carrot, onion and leek in fat in pot over low heat, keeping the pot covered and stirring occasionally. Cook for roughly 10-12 minutes until vegetables are soft and translucent but not brown. (If you aren't a bacon fan you can always use 2 tablespoons of olive oil instead)

While the vegetable are cooking peel and roughly chop 2 apples, the potatoes and the butternut squash. Stir into the onion mix, adding the stock, water, 1tsp of salt and 1/2 tsp of pepper. Turn up the heat and once the liquid begins to boil turn it back down to a simmer and let it simmer for 20minutes until the vegetable are tender.

While your soup is cooking make the croutons. Preheat the oven to 400ºF/200ºC and line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. In a bowl mix the bread with olive oil, salt, cumin and olive oil. Place the bread on a baking sheet in one even layer. Bake the bread for 5 minutes to toast it, keep an eye on it, you just want it to be lightly golden brown. Remove from oven, sprinkle the cheese over the pieces and then place back in the oven to melt the cheese. Don't worry about the cheese that lands on the aluminum foil and not on the bread, that will turn into nice little cheese crisps.

Using an immersion blender, puree the soup right in the pot. If using a blender, puree the soup in a few batches. Add additional water to achieve desired consistency. Serve hot with bacon, croutons, sour cream and some sliced apple.

The soup quickly became a vehicle through which to eat bacon and cheddar croutons. We kept refilling on the toppings without adding anymore soup. Cognizant of our expanding waistlines and of the preciousness of these fleeting summer days we went for a long walk up by the zoo. The haze obscured our view of the mountains, but it was still nice walk and a relaxing, albeit sweaty, end to a wonderful weekend.

I'm cozied up here with my second cup of coffee, but I'm thinking I should switch to ice coffee. In the time it has taken me to write this post the weather has shifted from cool and foggy to hot and hazy. And wow, I made this second batch of coffee really strong. Maybe it will propel me to actually get some things done today, or maybe it will just get me so riled up that I can't accomplish anything at all.

If you are looking for some events to put on your calendar this week be sure to visit Girlfriend Guide to Zürich, where this post is being featured as the recipe of the week. I know they have a Zürich Film Festival offer and some upcoming Girls Nights Out.

Okay off to try and check some things off the to-do list.