Pumpkin and mushroom soup

Here in New Zealand, a cold wind has slammed the door shut on the mild false spring of recent weeks. As the storm built up, I made comfort food: my favourite pumpkin soup. This time I used half a grey skinned Crown pumpkin, bought already cut from the greengrocer. I often use butternut or buttercup pumpkins. In NZ the big orange pumpkins that Americans make into jack'o'lanterns are not so common, and I seem to remember them as not being so tasty as our little NZ varieties, but its been a long time since I was over there in pumpkin season!
Don't freak out at the whole head of garlic, once roasted it is mild, sweet and subtle; nothing like the intensity of sauteed garlic. For stock I usually use Rapunzel organic herbal stock cubes. They are delicious and don't have any of that chemical aftertaste of most stock cubes.

I'm pretty sure this is as original as one of my recipes can be. It has evolved over many years in response to my dislike for the taste of pumpkin, but respect for its affordable nutritional value.

Pumpkin and mushroom soup

half a medium size crown pumpkin, or whole butternut or buttercup
whole head of garlic
2 yellow onions, chopped pretty fine
bag of mushrooms, sliced pretty fine
1.5 litres of stock
1 teaspoon ground cumin
(other spices optional: coriander, garam masala, cinnamon or cloves,even some curry powder, can each add something lovely to this soup, )

Scoop out the pumpkin seeds and slice off the pointy end of the head of garlic so the ends of the cloves are exposed. Place pumpkin skin side down, and garlic root side down in a roasting dish and cook in a hot oven until they are soft and fragrant (about 45 minutes). Cool and then peel out of their skins (its so much easier than when they are raw). Puree in a foodprocessor til smooth.
Meanwhile, saute the onions in a soup pot with a little oil until they are soft but not brown. Add the mushrooms and saute until they are limp then add the hot stock and pureed pumpkin/garlic. Simmer until thick and silky.

Hippy Cooking

See how happy Gluten Roast can make you?

Here's a couple of odd recipes I've made this week. I improvised the rice crackers and they turned out to be very yummy. And the Non-cheesy Cheese Sauce I found in a garage sale find of a 1970s cookbook from The Farm, a hippy commune with a soya bean obsession.

Personally I try and avoid most soya bean products except miso. The research I've done into soya isn't entirely conclusive, but the indications seem to be that soya maybe implicated in some kinds of hormonal problems, such as nasty menopause and other women's health issues. I reckon better safe than sorry. Soyabeans are hidden in lots of different processed foods including lots of 'junk foods', but dodgiest form seems to be tofu and soymilk. The least troublesome is miso due to its fermentation process.

Anyway, the recipe that made me shell out 50c for The Farm cookbook doesn't have any soyabeans in it. It's similar to a recipe I used to make when Louise was little and had a dairy allergy, but I lost the recipe in my travels since then. Finding it last week was like being reunited with an old friend, just when I've had to give up my love affair with sugar.


Non-Cheese Cheese Sauce (from The Farm)

1 cup nutritional yeast flakes
1/3 cup rice flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp garlic granules
1/2 tsp dry mustard powder
2 cups water
1/4 cup margarine


Mix dry ingredients in a saucepan. Gradually add water, stirring with a whisk until a smooth paste. Place on heat and stir constasntly until it thickens and bubbles. Let it bubble for about 30 seconds then remove from heat. Whip in the margarine. Have with vegetables or pasta or spread on pizza.

Homemade Rice Cracker Recipe

1 cup rice flour
1/4 cup cold butter
3 Tbsp parmesan
1 Tbsp garlic granules
pinch salt
generous grind of pepper
1 tsp oregano
1/4 cup (rice) milk
1 Tbsp sesame seeds

Preheat oven to 200 degree. Put all the ingredients except the milk and sesame seeds into a bowl and rub or cut the butter in as though making pastry or scones. Mix in just enough rice milk (or other kind of milk) to make the dough stick into a ball but not be sticky. Roll or press out onto a greased baking sheet and sprinkle sesame seeds on top, press into the dough. Cut the dough into squares and slide apart on the sheet. Bake until golden brown and crisp.

While on the topic of anti-junk food food, check out this YouTube Chef with her Depression Era recipes. Mmm mmm.

Good Garlic

In my current research into happiness, I came across a reference to this study which found that adding garlic bread to a family meal decreased the number of negative interactions by 22.7% and increased the number of pleasant interactions by 7.4%. Apparently it's the garlic, not the bread that has the positive effect, and even the smell of cooked garlic is enough to improve family interactions!

When Louise was about 7, we were living on an organic garlic farm in upstate New York. That's where I learned to roast whole bulbs of garlic. We would slice off the stem end, and place the root end down in a generously oiled roasting dish, rubbing oil over the whole bulb. When roasted until soft and beige (not brown and hard), everyone would get their own head of garlic. We would squeeze each clove out of its skin, the flesh as soft as warm butter. This is delicious spread on bread or mixed in with other roast vegetables as a condiment. Roasted garlic is creamy and mild, without any of the sharpness of raw or lightly cooked cloves.


When I don't know what exactly I'm making for dinner, its usually a safe bet to start by sauteing some chopped onion and garlic, then adding whatever I can find in the fridge. Some of my favourite ways to get the aroma and taste of garlic going include:

• Sliced garlic and chunks of zucchini sauteed in butter or olive oil until the garlic and the corners of the zuccini just start to caramalise and turn brown. Sometimes I'll add tomatoes and fresh basil.
  
• Chopped garlic and sliced mushrooms sauteed slowly in butter or olive oil until the mushrooms are very very soft and the garlic has kind of melted into the mushroom juice. This is good with lots of finely chopped parsley and a squeeze of lemon or a dollop of wholegrain mustard.
  
• Chopped garlic and onion sauteed til soft (starting with the onions and adding the garlic towards the end so it doesn't burn and become bitter). Then when the onion/garlic is cooled down I mix in lean minced organic beef, a free range egg, soft bread crumbs and whatever vegetables, herbs and spices I feel like (today it's lots of cumin and and a little cinnamon). I enjoy squooshing the mixture in my hands like playdough, and then shaping into little balls which I bake on a rack in the oven until brown. The cooked meatballs sit in a box in the fridge and get added to spaghetti sauce, cooked vegetables, sandwiches, even salad as I feel like it. When Louise left home and I was only cooking for myself, I stopped cooking very often. This is one of the things I try and make once a week so that I have some proper food to graze on even when I'm not making a whole meal.
  

Jess comes home from work

When we were young children we took it for granted and didn't much notice it. Finally after three years at university, I came home during the summer that I became engaged to read Proust and only then did it strike me how very much in love our parents were. And by then I knew it wasn't the usual way married couples behaved.



One afternoon I was hanging out in the kitchen. Mom had started dinner. I noticed her cheeks were pink, her eyes were sparkling and she had a little smile. She was close to the door when Dad came home from work. He took her in his arms, leaned her backwards, and gave her a long, passionate kiss. Coming out of it, they both were smiling. He took his uniform jacket off, put a large bath towel around his waist and they went into the kitchen togetherto finish dinner in perfect harmony. I realised that was the way he had always come home before we lived in Japan which was a year when everything was different.



Their teamwork was so smooth that there was little room for us. As children we were given tasks like putting the applesauce through the food mill. We set the table and unset it and did the dishes but did little cooking. The cooking they did together was a public demonstration of their love for each other. As well, Dad's need to feed people with delicious food was his most open expression of love for others.



I should now describe the applesauce. Wash unpeeled apples, roughly cut up boil up skin, seeds, cores and all together. Put through a foodmill which lets the applesauce pass through and sieves out the skins, cores, and seeds. Cooked this way the spplesauce is a warm, pinky brown. While it is still warm, flavour the applesauce with sugar, butter,cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg. Strangely this wasn't dessert. It was put on the table with cottage cheese, pickles and olives, bread and butter as a side dish in an ordinary meal in addition to the main components of meat, a green and a yellow vegetable and a starch. Then there was a dessert: cake or pie or pudding. Remember the punch made with Coolaid and fruitjuice. My favourite was grape Coolaid and pineapple juice. Does anyone still make punch the way we used to? I serve the applesauce for dessert with a lttle cream or ice cream.



Now I will tell you why the Kellerman kids happlily ate their spinach when other kids hated it. They never served canned spinach, only fresh or frozen. Boil a couple of eggs. fry up some diced bacon, briefly cook the spinach, drain the liquid, stir through the crspy bacon and a little of the bacon fat, salt and pepper, slice the eggs and arange on the top of the spinach. Very beautiful and tasty too. Not so often we had creamed spinach and it was just as good.

Now I challenge Edwina to post the browned butter carrots and Judy to post the perfect gravey.

Betty and Jessie, Jeannie and Will what were the everyday foods that you liked best? Do you still make them? Did you teach your children?