Red Alert: Sweet Potato-Red Bell Pepper-Paprika Soup

The best cooking experiences for me are like falling leaves in a dangerously warm yet stormy Fall: haphazard, from a recipe that coincidentally crosses my path. Here's a recipe on a notecard distributed at my food store for which I had all ingredients at home: Sweet Potato-Red Bell Pepper-Paprika Soup. This nicely thickish soup is the perfect red alert for the +6° Celcius weather that scientists ominously predict.

Sweet Potato-Red Bell Pepper-Paprika Soup

Serves 4

olive oil
1 clove of garlic, chopped
2 red onions, chopped (or 1 yellow one)
2 sweet potatoes, chopped
2 red bell peppers, (peeled and), diced.
1 clove of garlic
1 teaspoon paprika powder
freshly ground pepper
salt (optional) or some other herbs (thyme, rosemary)
800 ml broth

Braise onion and garlic in olive oil for 3 minutes, then add the sweet potato, (and dried herbs instead of salt) and stew for about 5 minutes. Add the red bell pepper and season with pepper, stew for 10 minutes more until tender over low heat.

Mix the vegetables, then add the broth, which has been heated before in another pan. Mix again to unctuousness.

Serve at once, sprinkle paprika in each plate for garnish.

Note: I have to go saltless these days, so I replace with herbs, fresh or dried. The original recipe adds the broth after the onion, and cooks the sweet potato and bell pepper in it, but I never follow that method. See my older recipes for soup to know where I get the mustard from.

Endive Crust: A Great Filling

The picture of a savory crust with Belgian endive and apple or pear paste in the free magazine Puur (Pure) of this month prompted me to repeat the gesture. I prepared this for lunch the night before. While I wasn't so keen on my own rather hard crust this time, nor on this fairly sober move with steamed endive, I was very pleased with my own filling: tart and sweet at the same time. Plainly steamed endive clamors for tart sweetness. Here's the recipe with my changes.
Endive Crust

puff pastry, ready-made (hey, we don't usually do ready made!)
5 Belgian endives, halved, and steamed
4 tablespoons apple or pear paste (pictured)
100 g blue cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon rosemary, chopped finely
pepper

My -saltless- crust:
250 g flour
100 g butter
10 cl water
1 teaspoon of paprika powder from Hungary
Form a ball, let it rest for an hour, then roll it out, prebake for 15' at 200 °C.

Preheat the oven at 180°C. Roll out the puff pastry in the baking tin, and poke holes with a fork.

Steam the endives, drain well before putting them on the crust.

Divide the crumbled blue cheese and apple or pear paste over the tart. Season with pepper and chopped rosemary.

Bake for about 30 minutes at 180 °C. Sprinkle with a few walnuts or serve with a salad with nuts.

Here's my own filling:
200 g goat cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon of pickled whole lemon from a fancy food store (which does give some salt to this dish), chopped
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1 big tablespoon of apple-pear paste
Combine everything, divide over the crust.

Great filling! Pickled lemon and apple-pear paste are a gesture I'd repeat.

Some Baking Laws Defied: Bread Pudding from East-Flanders

The Laws of Baking stand indomitable and tall: defying them sounds a little like questioning Newton on the apple. The quantities are precise; woe befalls the poor soul who deviates from them.

I decided to do precisely that: defy the laws on bread pudding, and I have to admit: when the pudding came out of the oven, it had the texture of crème anglaise. I was almost cursing my war on sugar, but behold: by morning, in the pale morning light, this is what had emerged.

Bread Pudding from East-Flanders

Based on a recipe on p. 158 of De keuken van ons moeder - The kitchen of our mom (Homarus)
Note: the recipe gives quantities for 5(!) bread puddings at once - some moms... Here are quantities for 1 pie.

1/5 pack of zwieback (beschuit)
5 slices of peperkoek (a specialty from the low countries baked with rye flour and spices)
50 g macarons (type of cookie) (I used 2 marzipan filled whole-wheat cookies and some speculoos)
4-5 Betterfood cookies (the type you give to toddlers in the afternoon)
800 cl milk (*)
40 g corn starch
60 g flour
120 g brown sugar (*)
1 egg
1 knifetip cinnamon
1 knifetip banda foelie
candied sugar syrup (*)

My changes (*):
Instead of milk, 800 cl oat milk "chai": oat milk flavored with cinnamon-clove-ginger-cardamom;
Instead of 120 g brown sugar, 4 tablespoons of apple syrup;
Instead of candied sugar syrup, apple-pear breakfast paste (sirop de Liège).

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Bring all bakery goods in milk to a boil over high heat. Stir well, the cookies will dissolve.

Add the rest of the ingredients: egg, sugar, spices, corn starch flour. Don't stop stirring, and mix really well. Cook for a few minutes longer. Remove from the heat, let cool au bain marie in cold water.

Before putting the mixture in the cake tin and in the oven, add the candied sugar syrup to the mixture.

Bake for 60 minutes at 200 °C.

Note: bread pudding is mostly made with stale bakery pastries or stale raisin bread.

Fall Ice Cream: Apple-Quince-Lemon verbena

It's become harder to blog on a regular basis. I write less frequently, with sudden bursts of posts. Somehow I continue my average diet of 10 posts a month. Here we go.

A major disadvantage about cooking at night in Fall-Winter is the lack of natural light. I'm counting: only 122 more days to go to Spring. If you consider ice cream in combination with artificial lux an anomaly, don't think just yet that your ice cream maker should go into hiding.

Here is ice cream with Fall fruit, from Peter Bauwens' book on ice cream, IJs en sorbets uit eigen tuin (isbn 9789044716399) - Ice and sorbets from your own garden. The apples and quince were self-picked.

Apple-Quince-Lemon verbena Ice Cream

2-3 apples
1 quince
agave or maple syrup
a handfull of fresh lemon verbena leaves

Peel and cut the apples and quince in wedges, and stew until tender over low heat, with no extra water, or else the tiniest amount, in an enamel-coated pot. The idea is to let the fruit stew in its own juice. Start with the quince, and after about 20' add the apple. Let cool.

Add 1-2 tablespoons agave or maple syrup to taste, and add the verbena leaves. Give this a brief mix, then transfer to the ice cream maker. Make sure you add some syrup, Bauwens says, because the ice cream tends to taste less sweet afterwards.

Serve at once or store away in the freezer.

Meanwhile I have ogled Dr. Ben Kim's method of banana ice cream: by freezing pieces of banana and by later putting these pieces through the champion juicer. Out creeps creamy delight. So don't store away the juicer either.

Rites of Fall

Retro 2: Rabbit with prunes and dark ale (Orval)

They say crises make people hark back to The Old & The Traditional. Hence perhaps my fascination with the Homarus cookbook, The kitchen of our mom - De keuken van ons moeder. My first rabbit dish from this book is a true retro move.

"Do cut it in pieces," I begged the Fowl & Game specialty store, when the lady behind the counter pulled a long, skinned and blood-stained rabbit from the fridge. I was too squeamish to take home the head.

Notes:
I used an abbey dark beer, Orval. An amateur of this beer told me that a less pronounced amber-colored or dark ale may better suit the strong-tasting rabbit.
And I did not follow the recipe of this mom, Nicole van Geel, faithfully: no vinegar, no sugar at all. So my sauce did not have the brown consistency of molasses. I give the recipe as is, with changes.
Rabbit with prunes and dark ale (Orval)

1 rabbit
2 big onions, sliced
2 dl vinegar
butter (2 tablespoons)
5 bay leaves
2 tablespoons mustard
2 zwieback (I used 1 slice of bread)
a swig of vinegar (I used lemon juice)
salt and pepper
250 g dried prunes
dark instant binding agent (I used flour)
200 g dark candied sugar (*)
My addition: 25 cl dark ale (Orval)
My addition: some slices of bacon, some mixed mushrooms

Cut the rabbit in pieces, put the pieces in a bowl, coat with the slices of onion, drench with the 2 dl of vinegar and let marinate overnight in the fridge (I skipped this part).

Remove the rabbit from the fridge, drain, pat dry. Melt some butter and brown the rabbit pieces on all sides.

My addition: after frying the rabbit, I briefly fried the bacon and the mushrooms, then transferred that with the rabbit to the cooking pot.

Add water (and ale) to the rabbit until nearly submersed. Add the bay leaf, the zwieback or bread coated with mustard. Bring to a soft boil, then cover, and let simmer for 1-1,5 hours.

Add the swig of vinegar when the meat is almost done, and season.

Bring some water to a boil. Turn off the heat, add the dried prunes to the water to soften them (I skipped that - I added the prunes towards the end of rabbit cooking time).

Remove the rabbit from the cooking pot. Bind the sauce with the binding agent and check the seasoning. Add the sugar, and mix well. Pour sauce and prunes over the rabbit, and serve.

(*) I did not add sugar, but reduced the existing sauce somewhat.

Retro 1: Kugelhopf

Heart of the Matter #31 for November has chosen Retro Dishes as the monthy theme. Do participate, as there is still plenty of time. The link says how and where to post a recipe.

Here's a dish from France's Alsace region: a type of raisin bread that looks like a cake and that's baked in a high cake tin with hole: Kugelhopf. A Jewish classic. If by name alone this isn't retro, I don't know. I also used a retro brown ceramic dish.

Chef Peter Goossens gave his version in last weekend's paper, and this prompted me to bake it twice this week. As it is low in butter, milk and sugar contents, I give it here, with 3 changes (*).
Kugelhopf, by Peter Goossens of Hof van Cleve fame

170 g flour
10 g yeast
70 cl full cream milk
30 g sugar
1 egg
2 g salt
30 g butter
8 g lemon juice
80 g raisins (marinated in 1 cl rum)
13 g orange candy (*)
shaved and whole almonds

Knead all ingredients (by hand) in a bowl except the fruit. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.

Mix in the fruit (by hand), and let the dough rest again for 15 minutes.

Make the dough form a ball, then press it flat. Make a hole in the middle (*).

Butter a cake tin, toss in shaved and full almonds, and place the dough on top. Let rise for about an hour in a warm place.

Preheat the oven at 200 °C (*), and bake for about 45-50 minutes.

Remove from the tin, let cool, and sprinkle with confectioner's sugar.

My changes:
1. Instead of candied orange peel I use 13 g coconut shavings or 13 g of ground almond.
2. After letting the dough rest for the second 15 minutes, I immediately transfer this very sticky dough to the cake tin. I cover with plastic foil for rising.
3. For my oven, 200 °C is too hot. My first Kugelhopf was too burnt on top. I prefer 180 ° C and 45 minutes.

Great treat on silent Armistice Day, November 11,when we remember the fallen of World War I.