Saturday Lunch Shenanigans

There's something quintessentially autumnal about the colour orange. Orange leaves on the ground, orange pumpkins at Halloween, oranges on sale in fruit shops as tart satsumas and juicy tangerines come into season.  Orange in the clothes shops, threaded through a woolly bobble hat or mittens set, along with other warming maroons and browns.  Orange on your legs perhaps, as you grasp at the last straws of summer by flocking to the nearest bottle of fake tan.  So it's fitting that my first blog post for a new term at uni in the middle of autumn, should be about a bowl of orange soup.  Or rather - a butternut squash, potato and red pepper melange of bright flavours and velvety textures that will warm your heart and fill your belly.

I have discovered, close to our new house, an absolute gem of an organic fruit and veg shop.  "Alligator", on Fulford Road York, is an Aladdin's cave for any ethical-minded foodie; all its produce from locally sourced potatoes, to chocolate, to rice, to yoghurt, to olive oil, to spinach, is organic. I made my first sojourn to this corner of cuisinal curiosity this saturday morning, after pausing in my morning of diligent study (!) with a hankering for the hot stuff. And by that I mean saturday soup.

Saturday soup is a recent phenomenon in our family at home, where everyone seems to meander back to the ranch round about lunchtime after various cafe shifts and weekend jobs, to reconvene over one kind of soup or another. Sometimes it happens in life that you hit upon a meal which coincides beautifully with the mood of the day, say, pasta and pesto for energy before training for example, and saturday soup is one of those. It perfectly suits the productive yet happy feeling of a saturday, and as a self-confessed creature of habit I have absorbed it fully into my food-at-uni-routine.

So to the soup.  After having selected a small but tasty looking squash, a couple of muddy potatoes and a loaf of sour-dough bread from aforementioned shop, I began the cooking process. Another reason to love soup: it's so so easy to make. Here is what to do:

Butternut squash, red pepper and potato soup

1x squash

A few potatoes

1 x red pepper

Salt, pepper, chilli powder, paprika

1 x onion

1 litre vegetable stock

Dice all vegetables into chunks.

Heat onion in some oil in large pan until soft. Add seasoning to this.  Chilli powder works well with the sweetness of the squash, so the soup has a bit of a kick.

Add all veg into pan and 'sweat' for a few mins while you make stock.

Make stock.

Add to pan and bring to boil, adjusting seasoning.

Lower heat and simmer til vegetables are soft, usually for about 15/20 mins.

Take off heat and blend using hand blender, or other.

Serve with slices of sour dough bread, wedges of cheddar cheese and some cherry tomatoes. Drizzle in balsamic vinegar, the sour dough bread is great at soaking this up.

Sit back and enjoy the different tastes and colours, and wonder whether autumn might not actually be your favourite season after all.

Next post: Falalfel Mania

Chicken Pie Crisis

Yesterday I made a chicken pie.  It was not my first attempt at this classic dish - last year in my fresher enthusiasm I cooked for the house and presented them with a perfect specimen of poultry pie-ness.  The only problem was that it just wasn't what you might call 'tasty', due mainly to having made the sauce for the pie filling out of stock and not chicken soup - a rookie error, says my mum.

So this time, another year of uni under my belt and tin of condensed chicken soup at the ready, I was fully prepared for success and glowing culinary achievement. After all, who could possibly fail at the same dish twice.

Unfortunately I fell prey to probably my worst habit in the kitchen, my rather, haphazard, way of cooking shall we say.  Simply speaking, I ignored the recipe. You would think, as I did, that this would not be so obvious. That a little experimentation, a little blurring of measurements, or a little inventive 'je ne sais quoi', would make no difference whatsover.  But it turns out that a tin full of cold water, plus a splash of boiling for luck, is far, far too much liquid, and results in what can only be described as 'chicken soup with pastry on top'. 

Absolute nightmare, only made worse when to my humiliation and my housemates general amusement I had to resort to drinking it on a spoon.  Something clearly went seriously wrong here and I am writing this blog so no other unfortunate soul makes the same mistake.

Chicken Pie - the right way to do it

Fry some garlic, onion and leeks, chopped small, in , in a deep pan
Add chunks of chicken fillet, and stir until turns white
Add chunks of carrot
Add a tin of condensed chicken soup
Season with a combination of wine, salt, pepper, tarragon (whoever has that in their kitchen should go and find a more professional cooking blog to read...)
Add HALF A TIN OF WATER (no more than that please, it WILL end in tears)
Simmer for 15-20 mins

NB if you use normal, and not condensed, chicken soup, it is quite likely you will need even less water.  In this scenario, please consult a proper recipe as I can take no responsibility for the ensuing watery mess.

Meanwhile roll out ready-made, puff pastry onto (clean) floured surface
Move pie filling from pan to suitable pie dish
Place pastry over the top, make to slits in the top and brush with milk (no point wasting an egg)
Cook in pre-heated oven, at a normal temperature, until the pastry looks golden and flaky

Best of luck with this fail-safe, fool-proof recipe, which I'm hoping I will actually stick to next time...

Next Post: The Best Hangover Biscuit