November 8, 2010 in
soups
My South African cuisine series continues today with a cauliflower-curry soup. I have never had cauliflower soup before attending this class. In fact, when I think about it, I haven’t had that much cauliflower in my life. Back at home, in Poland, the standard way of eating cauliflower, involved boiling it and drowning it in browned butter and bread crumbs (very delicious indeed). All other ways of cooking cauliflower were completely ignored and since one can only eat so much of boiled cauliflower with butter, in the past decade, I did not have cauliflower too often… which is a shame, because while doing some research on cauliflower, I have discovered that it is one of those magic foods, with extremely high nutritional content and all sorts of anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. In short, even if you are anti-cauliflower, it (together with its buddy, broccoli) should be a regular staple in your diet. Cauliflower shouldn’t be boiled for too long, in order not to lose its nutritional value… it is, of course, difficult to get away with not boiling it when you make a soup. So let’s just say that this soup will be featured for its taste, while I’ll look into preparing cauliflower in other ways.
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Back in May, I blogged about the South African cuisine cooking class, I went to with my husband. I teased you with some photos of genuinely mouth-watering food, promised to post the recipes and then… well, then nothing happened. First, I was fighting with the lazies, then I was fighting a black hole and finally I was fighting with the mess in my house, the mess in the middle of which I have lost the recipes for all the delicious dishes from the South African cuisine cooking class. I realized that I couldn’t post without recipes, ahem, especially since I’ve already done exactly that back in May. So this entire Sunday was sacrificed at the altar of cleanliness, I cleaned, I washed, I sorted through documents, all in vain. The recipes were not on the pile of bills and papers, which I’ve been saving “for later” since early March, they were also not stuck in one of my cooking books, and they were definitely not in one the drawers or under the bed. My overall conclusion was that I must have somehow lost them or thrown them out. Sometimes I suspect myself of throwing things out without meaning to or even registering it. Anyway, just as I started to despair, it occurred to me to check in one place where I would have put it had I been an extremely organized person… and sure enough, there they were, in my filing cabinet, lying comfortably in a folder labeled “Recipes”.
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I recently went on a business trip to Helsinki, Finland. It is the second time I went there this year and so far I haven’t managed to discover much about the culture, the cuisine or the people. But from what I have gathered, the overall concept of this country seems to be about surviving in this weird no man’s land between Russia and Scandinavia, while speaking a language nobody understands, freezing your derriere off and coping with all this by consuming copious amounts of alcohol and meatballs. I admit that I generally associated Finland with unrefined food, especially after reading the Wikipedia entry on Finnish cuisine, and how it continuously got slammed by various European heads of state. It came as some surprise, therefore, that it was in Helsinki, where I’ve had one of the best meals of this year.
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