Simple Broccoli Soup
Oct0
A few days ago I received one of Gordon Ramsay’s cookbooks I had ordered. Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy is
As I’ve said before already: I don’t like celebrity cookbooks. Often you open them with high expectations and once you try out a few recipes you get disappointed not only by the result but by the time and money you invested.
I watch a lot of cooking shows with Gordon Ramsay and I’ve always been impressed by the simplicity of his dishes. This is actually the reason why I decided to buy his book and to give it a try, despite my prejudices. I randomly selected 3 recipes and will be trying them out over the next days, always posting about my experiences here.
When I went shopping today for ingredients, the list of items I needed to make those three dishes was 9 items long. Of course it always depends on how well your pantry is stocked but 9 items for 3 dishes is really nice, especially given the fact that I’m a student and that I must be careful with my budget.
The first dish I decided to try out was a Broccoli soup. Gordon Ramsay’s famous broccoli soup with 3 ingredients: Broccoli, Water and Salt! After preparing the dish I can say: it was quick, it was cheap and it tasted good. I wasn’t blown away but that’s mostly due to the additions beside the broccoli. Ramsay suggests in his book/dvd that for a “Posh occasion” you can add a strong goat cheese along with a few walnuts to the soup. Given the fact that I loath goat cheese I added some “Tomme Blanche” (which doesn’t have a strong taste) and a few walnuts. I loved the soup itself but the cheese bothered me more than anything and made the dish really heavy. The walnuts were ok but not a must either in my opinion. The soup itself though is a great way to eat broccoli which has a bombastic nutritional value.
Ingredients
- 1 broccoli head (nice green color, no brown spots)
- water
- salt
- olive oil to drizzle (optional)
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Preparation
- Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan.
- Take the broccoli in your hand, by the stem, and hold down the florets. Cut them off by cutting around the stem, turning it slowly as needed.
- Wash the florets and salt the water.
- Once the water is rapidly cooking, add the florets and cover with a lid.
- After 4-5 minutes, once you can cut through the broccoli with a knife, remove the pan from the heat and drain the broccoli through a sieve into a bowl. It is important to keep that water, do not throw it away.
- Put the broccoli in a blender and add some of the cooking water to it until the water is about at half height of the broccoli. Now blend thoroughly (starting slowly and interrupting a few times at first) until you have a soup with a very smooth texture. Remove the lid from the blender and add seasoning if needed.
- Fill a plate with the soup and drizzle a little olive oil on top.
- Croutons should go well with the soup, try it out!
- Serves 3-4
Enjoy 
Pumpkin-Carrot Soup with Ginger
Oct0
It’s autumn which means it’s pumpkin season! Normally every market should be filled with a great variety of pumpkin/squash/acorn. Yeah well that’s normally :p Unfortunately here in the south of France pumpkin is not really a staple food. When Halloween approaches the big supermarkets import a few pumpkins but whatever they don’t manage to sell is sometimes being offered for weeks after as prepacked pumpkin slices. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences so whenever I buy pimpkin I’m extremely careful. Luckily at the moment the markets here do have a few pumpkins lying around and they still appear to be fresh.
When I decided to make this soup I thought about adding a little fresh ginger to give it a spicy kick. Although I’m not a big fan of ginger the outcome was surprisingly good, however if you don’t like ginger don’t add any.
Ingredients
- 500g of pumpkin
- 2-3 carrots
- 1 onion
- 250 ml vegetable stock
- 1 tsp of grated ginger
- 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
- 2 slices of bread (white bread works nicely but you can use any sort of bread, I for one used black bread here)
- 2 tsp of paprika powder
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- crème fraîche (optional)
- finely chopped parsley (optional)
——————–
- Peel and clean the pumpkin. Cut into small pieces.
- Chop the onion finely.
- Heat the vegetable oil in a large saucepan.
- Peel, clean and cut the carrots into small pieces.
- Put the carrot into the saucepan with the hot oil and cook them at medium heat for about 5 minutes.
- Add the onions, the pumpkin and the ginger and cook everything for approximately 15 minutes on medium-low heat. (Or until the carrots and the pumpkin are nicely soft)
- Add the vegetable stock and bring to a boil.
- Put the soup aside.
- Cut the bread in cubes and drizzle them with olive oil. Powder them with a little paprika and put them in the oven at approximately 180 °C.
- Either use a food processor or an immersion blender to blend the soup until the texture is nicely smooth.
- Run the soup through a sieve and remove the croutons from the oven.
- Add salt and pepper to the soup if needed.
- Serve with a little crème fraîche and chopped parsley. (optional)
Serves 4.
"La jardinière" Soup with Zucchini Pancakes
Oct0
“Les soupes, c’est pour les vieux” (Soups are for old people)
“Errm… mais moi j’aime la soupe :p” (Uhm… but I like soup :p)
“Pas possible!” (Can’t be!)
I remember having a similar conversation with my husband’s adorable aunt. Well I’m not quite sure if young people really have come to hate soup nowadays, but I can’t imagine autumn without colorful vegetable soups. I must admit that the above soup looks more like a purée but that’s exactly the consistency I like 
Ingredients
- For the soup:
- If you live in France, you can buy a bunch of vegetables together (”Pot au feu” - vegetables). One of those boxes is what I used here (minus one onion). If you do not have anything similar where you live use 4 carrots, 1 onion, 2 turnips, 1 leek. You may, of course substitute the vegetables in any way you like (with what you got at home), you can even use 1-2 potatoes.
- water
- salt
- For the Zucchini Pancakes:
- 200g of flour
- 1 cup half milk half water
- 2 eggs
- 100g yoghurt
- 1 big Zucchini, finely shredded
- salt
- pepper
- optional: grated emmental cheese
- oil (olive oil for example)
____________
- Cut the vegetables roughly and put them in a pot. Add water to the pot to cover the vegetables. Cover with a lid and bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat to low and let simmer for about 45 minutes. If the water level gets low, don’t hesitate to add more.
- 15 minutes before your soup has finished simmering, start preparing the pancake batter. Pour the flour into a mixing bowl then slowly add the milk/water while mixing well. Adding the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients while mixing prevents lumps. Then add the eggs, the yoghurt and the spices. Mix everything well, then fold in in the shredded Zucchini (if you leave the skin on, it gives the pancakes a nice color).
- Put some oil in a frying pan and heat it up well at medium heat.
- With a laddle pour some of the batter into the pan until the whole surface of the pan is covered. Let it cook until the pancake is golden brown on the down-side then flip it. Sprinkle some shredded cheese on it and let the pancake cook until it reaches the same golden brown color from the other side. Once that is done you can fold the pancake in a half or you can fold it the way I did in the above picture (the cheese must be inside though).
- Once the soup is done, remove it from the stove and let it cool off a little while finishing the rest of your pancakes.
- Once that is done, pour the soup into a blender and blend it really well until there are no bits of vegetables left. You can then pass the soup through a sieve if you’d like a really smooth texture. It is not necessary though.
- Season the soup and add a little crème fraîche or some chopped parsley as garnish.
- Serves 4. Enjoy
