Halfway down the Danube

Instead of pies...

... a quick and dirty but very yummy soup. My soups are always experimental, sweep-the-kitchen-floor style soups. Often, they come out just fine.

Today I tried to recreate a soup from Snack Attack - a zucchini soup. I read the ingredients in the menu and thought it should be pretty straight forward. I forgot I lacked one important ingredient which was sour cream. Well. If you do sweep-the-kitchen-style-cooking, then you have to deal with shortcomings.

First, I chopped up two big onions in generous pieces and cooked them in oil until they were nicely transparent. In went two chopped up zucchinis -- without the skins, they looked nasty, but there isn't a good reason why nice zucchinis shouldn't keep their skins. A leftover stalk of broccoli was added for good measure. I stewed this a little but didn't let it get brown. As soon as this threatened to happen, I added vegetable broth to cover the veggies and let it simmer for about ten minutes. As soon as the veggies are soft, I went through the mixture with my blender and made it nice and smooth.

Now for the fun part: the spices. A little salt, a generous helping of curry. You could use a ready mixture but I made my own of dashes of: coriander, red chili, fenugreek, cinnamon, asafoetida, cumin, caraway seed, ginger, and mace. Teensy amounts of each ingredient (less cinnamon, more cumin -- to taste) made up a reddish and very rich tasting mixture. (For nursing mothers: Fenugreek is the thing to make you produce amounts of milk you never knew you could produce. Really.)

Ahem. Let's get back to the soup.

Lacking the sour cream that the originial recipe called for, I subsituted with coconut milk, and let me tell you, that was quite the stroke of genius. The soup tasted rich and curry-y and just yummy.

I finished it almost all, just kept a tiny bit for Doug to try later today. Heh. Not my fault. I thought he was coming home for lunch but he wasn't. So.

Posted by claudia at July 1, 2004 03:18 PM