Soup's Ahoy!

I am on a roll with soup making, I don't mind telling you.

A couple of years ago, I worked as a cook at a conference center in Scotland, a place called Iona. It was a gorgeous setting and an amazing place, but what I really loved was the work. Along with a team of 4-5 volunteers, I churned out breakfast, lunch and dinner for up to 80 people a day. The team taught me so much about having fun with cooking and what a collaborative art it can be. But I also found my own style in the midst of the group and I love how it has stayed with me. I have a cooking sense now that I never did before, and sometimes recipes just appear in my head and I work them with a kind of natural ease that I find very delightful. Nothing complicated, mind you, but the results are sometimes just wonderful.

Take my soups lately. Very simple fresh spinach soup:
a couple of onions, some cloves of garlic, all chopped and sweating nicely in a good covering of olive oil
a bit of veggie broth mix
great handfuls of fresh spinach
enough water to cover
salt and pepper
a dab of butter to deepen the flavor
when the spinach is cooked down, blend with a stab mixer and serve with grated haloumi cheese and cracked pepper

It's so green and good you feel as strong as Popeye after a couple of bowlfuls.

Next time - the stilton and celery soup I brazenly copied - and improved - from my favorite buddhist restaurant here in London.

In honor of all things green, this pic from Cambridge last weekend.

Captain, O Captain (and Commander)

August is a month full of remembering and celebrating my foodie father, who was born in August and died in August, just shy of his 70th birthday.

One of his favorite birthdays was with his best friend (a man who also loves food and just happens to have been born on the same day in the same year as dad - they always thought that was fun) when they celebrated at the chef's table at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. The four of them, mom and dad and their friends, had a wonderful time but for dad it was a real dream come true. Check out the current menu at CP.

Even More Manly

Way back when, I wrote about Manish Water, soup from Jamaica designed to make a man outta ya.

For some reason, I seem to be on a strange roll here, leaning towards the masculine. Here is the manish breakfast, London cafe style. It was me, several men of the construction world, and a business man or two going back to their blue collar roots. The place was steamy on a cold, rainy summer's day. I read a whodunnit that would have made my dad proud - the whole breakfast was in honor of him, a working man if there ever was one, though by late in life he had reached his aspiration: to feel wealthy enough to not wear socks with his deck shoes. Hey, everybody has their thing, right? Anyway, this breakfast and this post are dedicated to Carl George Norman, Jr. a fabulous cook who nevertheless enjoyed a greasy spoon or two in his all-too-short life. August 26, 1935 - August 5, 2005. I raise a fork to ya, dad.