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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One of the coolest wedding gifts we received was a cooking class for two with a German celebrity chef Mathias Ruta. I’m not sure how much of a celebrity this guy actually is, but for someone who is not mentioned by the German Wikipedia, the dude was a gargantuan ass. He made numerous Polish jokes throughout the class, which while not a crime in themselves (husband totally guilty of this, on occasion), turned out to be an ugly thing to do. You see, at that time, I didn’t speak or understand German, and, thus, I could not smack him back with some witty repartee. Fortunately, the cooking class had an all-you-can-drink wine station, which I duly abused, while murmuring what I thought meant “you’re mean” in German, but which later turned out to loosely translate into “you are evil”. So what made this class absolutely fantastic? Well, for one, Tim learned how to properly cut and clean a bell pepper – a skill which he proudly demonstrates to anyone willing to look (it is ironic, really, taking into consideration that he hates bell peppers even more than he hates pancakes). But most importantly, we learned two outstanding dishes, one of which was the honey-glazed roasted duck breast with lentils. Not only is this dish quite simple to make and impressive-looking, tastewise, it is absolutely exquisite, stunning really… and this actually comes from someone who doesn’t even like duck.
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So Dusseldorf continues to exhibit signs of weather schizophrenia. One day it’s cold and rainy and then it’s sunny and warm, only to get really cold in the evening and to rain on occasion. Every morning I wake up to grey skies but then around midday, the most beautiful, sharp, blinding sun comes out and shines till the late afternoon. I come out on the balcony, to bask in the sunshine and I realize that it’s really, really cold. This city and its weather are thoroughly confused. I’m not confused. I know what to cook when capricious weather strikes: soups, pots and pots of soups. Wintertime is like a culinary soup school for me, it allows me to broaden my soup repertoire. So I look in my numerous cookbooks, wrap myself tightly and go shopping for soup ingredients. Yesterday, I made a delicious red lentil soup with coriander. It instantly put me in a good mood, because it looked like a ray of sunshine in a bowl, and it tasted really good, too.
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