Tortilla Soup, Ole! Plus May Kosher Connection Recipe Linkup

This month's Kosher Connection theme is croutons.  Croutons are delicious, crunchy, fun to eat, generally not so good for you.  But I love them - who doesn't, really?  There is nothing yummier than homemade croutons: a diced loaf of crusty bread, tossed with butter or oil and amazing seasonings, toasted until perfectly crisp on the outside, with a little chew on the inside, so delicious and addictive, and then you put them in some incredibly flavorful soup or a beautiful salad, mmmmm...

Sorry, distracted.  Where was I again?  Oh, yeah, right.  I figure that as a baker, I contribute to not such healthy eating for some folks, so I have to be more careful when it comes to the courses preceding dessert.  That's why I went with a lighter style crouton - tortilla crisps.  No frying here, and the only added fat is cooking spray.  No seasoning is added, though still delicious.  And they top off a bold and hearty soup, which, oddly enough, is beloved by every single member of my family.  How often does that happen?!

Tortilla Soup

Tortilla Crisps
Ingredients:
3 flour tortillas
Cooking Spray

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray both sides of the tortillas with a light coating of cooking spray.  Cut tortillas into 1/2" by  1 1/2" strips.  Spread into a single layer on a cookie sheet. Bake for 5 - 10 minutes, tossing about 3 minutes through for even cooking.  Remove from oven when they are toasted and LIGHTLY colored.  Set aside to cool.

Soup
Ingredients:
2 medium onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
canola oil
1 red pepper, diced
1/2 yellow pepper, diced
1 green hot pepper, ribs and seeds removed, finely diced (be super careful about touching anything after dicing the hot peppers! Keep your hands away from your eyes, nose, mouth, children... And even if you wear gloves, remember that the cutting board may retain the spicy heat, so be careful when you wash it)
14 oz can diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon each salt, cumin, and chili powder (the seasoning amounts are very subjective - feel free to adjust to your preference!)
8 cups chicken stock (use water and chicken soup powder in a pinch) + 1 cup water
1 cup frozen corn
2 chicken breasts, diced
1 can black, kidney, or chili beans, drained and rinsed

Saute onions and garlic in a small amount of canola oil until onions and translucent and tender. Add in red, yellow, and hot peppers and saute for 2 more minutes, until beginning to soften. Add in the tomatoes (drained or not, depending if you prefer a redder or less red soup, really not that important unless you have a child who only likes yellow soup. I wish I had made that up, but yeah, got one or two of those.), and seasoning and stir. Then add in chicken stock and water and bring just to a boil and then lower. Allow to simmer for about 20-25 minutes. Add in frozen corn and diced chicken and simmer for about 10 minutes, then add in drained beans and simmer until everything is just heated through.  Adjust seasoning and serve, sprinkling each bowl with a handful of tortilla crisps.  Serve additional crisps on the side, because they're so good.

And when you've had your fill of this delicious soup, check out what all the other talented cooks have contributed to this month's linkup!

Orange Soup - Kosher Connection Recipe Linkup

Ahh, root vegetables.  This month's theme brings to mind autumn.  Caramelized roasted vegetables, hearty stews, warming soups.  It all sounds wonderful, like fall foliage, roaring fires, warm slippers, and fleece blankets.

Well, it would, if only we actually had a fall season here.  It's still very much summer outside, with today's forecast hitting around 90.  The A/C is on, flip-flops are the footwear of preference, and it's too warm to think about running the oven or standing over the stove for a long time.

And yet, my family is still a bunch of soup lovers.  We have chicken soup each and every Friday night of the year.  One daughter even enters the house on a regular basis with the delightful greeting, "Did you make soup?  Oh, no?  (insert sad and pensive face here)... Maybe I'll make some myself (put upon look)."  Oh, my poor sweetie, I was too busy eating bon-bons and polishing my toenails, while the elves were busy taking care of the housework and running my business.  But I digress...

So tonight we are having soup, and so can you, whether it's autumnal or or not (yet).  "Orange soup" is an Israeli classic, a pureed soup made of a variety of orange vegetables.  It can be sweet or savory, depending on the other components, from the added vegetables to the seasonings.  This version, which in its original form came from my friend Shoshana, is an easy and delicious addition to your table any time.  It stars carrots and sweet potatoes, along with pumpkin, zucchini, onions, and garlic.  It tastes great and it's not so heavy that you feel overheated just from eating it.  There is no sauteeing, no hard work aside from peeling and cutting.  And it cooks rather quickly (easy enough for a teenager to put together after school!).  Shoshana makes this in a meaty version, browning some stew meat before adding the other ingredients, and then removing the meat and some of the carrot slices before pureeing.  Because we love to have soup on hand all the time, I turned this into a pareve version, adding a bit of cumin for a smoky, beefy background flavor.  If you have beef flavored soup powder, it is a tasty enhancement, but we just don't find it too often on the grocery shelves in our part of the world.  For a special accent, you can add knaidlach, which makes this extra-enticing for my youngest child, who believes all things are better with matzah balls. Garlic croutons are great with this as well.  Feel free to play with the quantities and proportions of vegetables to suit your taste and your refrigerator!

Orange Soup

Ingredients:
2 onions
1 head garlic (If you are fresh garlic-phobic, you can add in a few frozen cubes instead)
4 carrots
2 zucchini
2 sweet potatoes
small chunk pumpkin (optional)
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon beef soup powder (optional)
several shakes cumin

Directions:
Peel and chop onions, carrots, zucchini, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin.  Peel cloves of garlic.  Place all ingredients into stockpot, and add water to cover.

That's it, all the hard work is done!

 

Bring to a boil, then simmer until vegetables are very tender.  Puree with an immersion blender. 

To add knaidlach:
NOTE - these are not the matzah balls we add to the Friday night chicken soup.  Those are delicate things of beauty, with a carefully combined batter that gets a rest in the refrigerator to let the matzah meal absorb the other ingredients.  It is then gently rolled into balls and dropped into a pot of boiling water flavored with salt and chicken boullion, and cooked until perfectly round, light, and fluffy.  These are not them.  These are rustic knaidlach, a little chewier and heartier, quickly mixed and dropped into the simmering soup by teeny tiny spoonful.
Mix together
1 egg
1/4 cup matzah meal
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Drop into simmering soup by teaspoonful, and cook about 10 minutes.  Enjoy!

Now that you can make your soup and eat it too, check out the other Root Vegetable recipes on the Kosher Connection this month.  And leave a comment to tell us what you thought!

Yay! It worked!

If at first... right?! Challah - it worked! I have to give many thanks to my children, who enoyed the challah I made two Shabboses ago to insist(politely and respectfully) that I try it again. So I did, this time using a cool Israeli product, Shimrit, which is granulated fresh yeast, and you can buy it in a dual pack with dough conditioner. I sort of had to guess at what I was doing, but it came out great! Here are the unbaked loaves,

and here they are after a vacation in the oven:I will openly admit that they are not the epitome of beauty - not what I would envision, but frankly, they were delicious and beautifully textured, and they just made us all very happy. I guess now I can say I do bake challah...

I also can say that I make soup - kubbeh soup, to be exact. After thinking about it for a while, and doing a bunch of research (there are lots of varieties of kubbeh, not to mention kubbeh soups), I decided to make a variation of red kubbeh soup. This recipe included beets, carrots, celery, onions, sweet potatoes, zucchini, lemon juice, and a tomato base,with, of course frozen kubbeh, which, lucky for me, were on sale in the supermarket. Having never tasted the real thing, the soup was probably a ridiculously American-Ashkenazi-fied version, but we all loved it. The picture is not pretty, and the bowl is messy, but we did not care.

Next post, I will fill you in on last week's baking exploits - lots of cookies were baked, lots of sugar consumed.

Dvora

Much to say

This week has been a little much - too much to do, way too little time, and way too little sleep, though not for lack of trying.

For starters, I am not just obsessed with baking. I am also on a quest to make as many orange soups as possible, making sure that none of them taste the same. (Not so much a quest as a coincidence, truthfully. I love soup, and I love to experiment, and a lot of my experiments turn out orange.) I have my usuals - Shoshana's soup, which has onion, garlic, zucchini, carrot, sweet potato, and sometimes beef. We top that off with knaidlach, and it is a very popular dish. There is also sweet potato based soup, but the kids ask for it not to be sweet, so that has shallots, onions, garlic, and thyme, and then some vegetable stock. We also make a sweet butternut squash soup with curry, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and a little brown sugar. I made two new orange soups recently, complete with a lame photo for each. The first was a red lentil soup. I sauteed onions and garlic with a whole bunch of spices - curry, cumin, coriander, turmeric - and then added red lentils and orange vegetables: I think the holy quartet of carrots, sweet potato, butternut squash, and pumpkin, but I can not be entirely certain because although I committed to writing down the recipes, I have no idea where I wrote it!!! It was a warming and hearty soup, and we all, even Dani and Lola, liked it. The second was a sweet potato coconut milk soup, with spicy flavors. This soup was accented with a little soy sauce and Tabasco sauce, with a little curry as well, and shallots with the onions for a different flavor. The coconut milk gave a great sweetness and smoothness that contrasted well with the spice. I really enjoyed this one - now I just have to find the stupid coconut milk in the supermarket again, which should be simple, but things always seems to move...

In other news, I BAKED CHALLAH! This may not seem like much, but... I am a self-confessed perfectionist. People call me not infrequently and ask me about challah baking, since I am a baker. I am always abashed to answer that I do not deal well with yeast dough. The challahs I have made, though not for the last 3 years, never look perfect, and that is hard on me. But since I do not enjoy going to the bakery, and since their challah has been a little funky lately, I decided to take the leap. I got a recipe from my friend Lori, who makes challah EVERY WEEK (though it is with a bread machine, so I am not sure if it really counts...) and adapted it slightly for the mixer, as well as for a slightly larger quantity. It was delicious, if very sweet, but there are no pictures, and not because I forgot - it's because I REFUSE! They just don't look as nice as I would want them to, and I am totally vain that way. Maybe I will have better success next week - b'li neder I will try it again!

I also made a fun treat for the kids, but mostly because I had some vanilla cupcakes in the freezer that were mistakenly defrosted, not by me. We had Boston Cream cupcakes, and they were yum!! I used the cone method to fill the cupcakes with vanilla pastry cream (which became the crater method for us, as we like pastry cream) and topped them with chocolate glaze. It was a real treat for those of us who really miss Dunkin Donuts' Bostom Cream Cupcakes. The pictures are again, lame , and the cut of the cupcake was messy, but you will get the idea.

But darn if that cupcake didn't make me want a cup of French Vanilla coffee! BTW, see what I mean about the crater?! This was fun to make, and fun to eat. And it reminded me how easy it is to fill cupcakes. Guess that will be the next obsession!

Nothing new and interesting on the cookie front. I thought I would have some time to experiment, but it just did not happen, so the same old, same old, tried and true will have to do. That's all for now. If I can think of more, I will be back. Things should be interesting around here - Adar is arriving, and learning will come to a screeching halt, so there should be fun and nonsense to report.
Shavua tov and Chodesh tov!
Dvora

No soup for you!

It's been another weird, wacky week. I have been working on a dessert project for the bar mitzvah of the son of a friend, and though I can not show you until the party, it should be very cute. Unfortunately, I am not making the progress I need to. I am committing to getting this under control by the end of Motzaei Shabbat - and you can all hold me to it. I very sadly lost out on a job for this Shabbat, for a kiddush in Yerushalayim, because the shul in which it is being help requires hashgacha. For all of you chutznikim who think that sounds really basic and, well, sound, it needs to be mentioned that a great many shuls here allow members to bring in homemade goods. Similarly, no Green's mini-cupcakes for birthday parties here; you can bake you own and bring them to school! So I was a little distressed by the turn of events, but it has renewed my interest in getting a hechsher (which we had investigated before but deemed difficult and unnecessary). Do you think it would have helped if I told them my husband used to be a professional mashgiach?

On the plus side, I did get an order from someone else in the capital for a party. We are feeding people far and wide! Unfortunately, the platters have already been picked up and I - all together now - forgot to take a picture! I must remember to photograph the regular Shabbat platters... In case, the flavors are chocolate dipped chocolate chip, cranberry pecan bars, lemon glazed ginger crisps, linzer cookies, thin mint sandwiches, and tuxedo brownies. I also tried a new recipe, courtesy of Yocheved, for a chocolate caramel cookie bar, a lot like a Twix. It still needs some tweaking, so it is not going in the platters, but so yummy (though David did find it a little overly sweet, but that is just silly).

And this week's soup adventure - I made a faux Temani soup. That is the soup is faux, not the Temani. I took leftover chicken soup (from the soup I made Sunday; since we were away for Shabbat, we were still eager for chicken soup on Sunday. I was kind of hoping it would not taste as good without the "spice of Shabbat," but it was awesome. But I digress.) I took the leftover strained broth, added some water and a bit of fleishig chicken soup powder - note that the powder is indeed an ingredient in the original recipe given to me by a friend whose husband is Temani. Then I added in hawayij for soup, which is a Yemenite spice blend, and some cut up potato, carrot, celery, and onion. Zucchini would have been a good addition, but somehow we were completely out. After letting it simmer a while, I returned the leftover soup chicken, shredded up. I served it over a pile of rice, and it was so good and rich. As David said, "All we need now is the kubeh." Which we could buy frozen in the supermarket, because we live in God's country, and that's how we roll. Anyway, there is no soup for you, not because you are being punished or denied. There's just none left.

Next up, Shana's birthday cake and Shabbat sleepover. My oldest is turning 16. How did that happen?! When did that happen?!

Dvora

All puffed up

I am feeling good about myself today, culinarily speaking. The day started with Ariella grouchily refusing to get out of bed. Then I told her that I would be walking her to school instead of Dani, since he had mishmarot (crossing guard duty) today. She leaped out of bed, cheered, and ran to wash up. Okay, that was not about food, but it was yummy.

Next, I made a very tasty tomato soup with very ripe fresh tomatoes. I got the thumbs up twice from David, which is high praise in my book. I was a little curious about how it was going to come out, since I had no recipe, just an idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted it to come out. Fortunately, it really is delicious, and the perfect accompaniment to grilled cheese sandwiches. I had to explain to David the idea of dipping the sandwich into the soup, for the traditional combination. Somehow, he had missed out on that in his childhood. While we did not have homemade tomato soup, at least not to my recollection (feel free to correct me if I am wrong), we enjoyed canned tomato soup on a regular basis. It was really good, or at least it is in my memory. I feel like it is an iconic American comfort food, and even living abroad, I want that flavor memory for myself and my kids. I suppose by kids I mean the older two, as the younger ones won't touch tomato soup. Tomatoes are, if you were unaware, "gwoss." If you are interested, I am including the "recipe" - more like the method, since measuring did not happen.

Dvora's Can-less Tomato Soup

I began by seeding and chopping about a dozen fresh tomatoes. These were regular, possibly Beefsteak, tomatoes. (While I am well aware of the merits of Plum/Roma tomatoes, we just don't see them in the supermarket I frequent here. Back to our regularly scheduled program.) I chopped up two medium/large onions, about four cloves of garlic, and one carrot - chopped very finely. (Since the soup will eventually be pureed, the carrot was just for a little extra sweetness, and a way to sneak in a little more vegetables.) I sauteed the onions in a large pot, using a mixture of olive and canola oils. I added a little salt, and let them sweat a little more. Then I added the carrots and a little sugar and let things soften. I stirred in the chopped garlic, letting it cook just until it was fragrant. A couple of spoonfuls of flour were then added, cooking it, stirring, for a minute or two. (I needed to add a bit more oil to moisten the flour at this point.) I added in a couple of cups of warm water and mixed very well, scraping off the bottom. I poured in the tomatoes, along with whatever liquid had collected in the bowl, about 200 grams of tomato paste, and water to cover plus about an inch . To season, I added salt and pepper, sugar, and frozen chopped basil - two cubes. I could not possibly even approximate quantities of the other seasonings, so you will have to go for "to taste" and forgive me (especially you, Lori!). Start slow, as you can always add more seasoning but taking out is next to impossible. And that was today's wisdom. Let the whole mess simmer for about 45 minutes, until it is all tender. Use a handblender to puree the whole thing, or you can use a food mill and skip the next step. I did not really like the texture at this point - remember, I left the peel on the tomatoes, and did a cursory job of seeding, so there were a lot of "bits" in the soup. So I pulled out a handy dandy sieve and strained the whole darned thing into a large bowl, making sure to use a spatula to push everything through that could go through, and scraping off what was stuck on the outside. Then return the strained soup to the pot, or don't. Up to you. Adjust seasonings to make your taste buds very, very happy.

To serve, you could make yourself a delicious grilled cheese sandwich and dunk away, or sprinkle soup mandlen on top, maybe oyster crackers, anything else you can think of. You can also add a little milk to add some creaminess, cut the acid, and make the soup taste more like how my mom prepared the canned condensed stuff. If you want to fancy things up, you could add a swirl of heavy cream or perhaps a little chiffonade of fresh basil. Above all, ENJOY!

Last braggy item: Got a call last night to order cookies. The customer, also a friend, was telling me how her family enjoys when they order cookies. It's not dessert, she told me, it's an EVENT. One child brings in the platter, another unwraps, another reads the scroll listing the flavors and their descriptions to the family. (Funniest part: No one is allowed to eat any cookies until the table is clear, because apparently, "Dvora said no eating until everything is cleared off." That's her story and she's sticking to it. What power I wield... ) I loved how she described it, and it was exactly how I want everyone who eats Dvora's Cookies Creations to feel - like something special is happening, like it's a real treat, and someone really thoughtful brought/bought this wonderful gift!

So I have now violated my cardinal rule of behavior - don't brag; it's repulsive. Forgive me, I can pretend I am talking to myself when I write. So pretend this was just a ruse to include a recipe and photo that are not cookie related. While I am asking for forgiveness, I apologize for the quality of my photography. It's bad, I know, but learning how to take better photos of food is next year's project.

Contritely,

Dvora