Vegetarian Split Pea Soup / Vegetarische Erwtensoep / Vegetarische Snert (30 November 2013)
Today I found myself craving split pea soup, as I usually do around late November.
Last year, I posted a recipe for a meaty split pea soup, but, having decided to try and avoid eating meat, I needed to convert this to a vegetarian recipe.
This served another purpose: if I can somehow convert all my old family recipes to vegetarian recipes, I'll void all my excuses for not going vegetarian.
Also, the myths I posted last year are myths for a reason. Though the enamel soup pot thing is still true - I had my favourite fantastic one this year and I do taste a difference, if only psychologically.
Thus far, my vegetarian split pea soup seems to be turning out quite well - actually, I may like it better than my meaty soup - so here's the recipe. Also, a great thing about this is that it feeds loads of people or feeds a small amount of people for a long while, and shouldn't cost more than about 7 pounds in total, so it's also the ultimate budget food.
Ilse's Recipe for Vegetarian Split Pea Soup
Ingredients:
5l water
1kg dried split peas
2 leeks
1 big onion
half a box of white mushrooms*
3/4 of big celeriac (all of it if you're using a small one)
1 table spoon of mustard
half a stick of salted butter
six vegetarian stock cubes
salt and pepper
carrots
In a 5-litre soup pot, melt half the butter. Fry the sliced mushrooms; dice the onion and fry this too; slice the leeks and fry this (clean the leek beforehand!). Cube the celeriac (as finely as possible) and fry. Fry everything until nice and brown. Add the mustard and two stock cubes and the rest of the butter - leave until butter has melted. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Add half the split peas. Stir. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir. Add the rest of the split peas. Add 2l of water. Add the rest of the stock cubes. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir occassionally. Keep tasting and add salt to taste.
When almost done (that is, when the split peas have dissolved), add sliced carrots to taste (not too many, they sweeten the soup). Add salt and pepper to taste.
Ideally, make it cool down quickly and leave outside (if [near] freezing) or in the fridge overnight, then freeze or serve.
*I find it interesting that apparently I find it less insulting to my family recipe to use mushrooms to add a bit of an earthy, nutty flavour to the soup than I find it to use potatoes to thicken it. Perhaps because adding potatoes points to bad technique and using mushrooms enhances flavours. I don't know. Potatoes in split pea soup remain evil.
Chicken Satay / Kipsaté / Sate Ayam (30 October 2013)
I had chicken satay at a Thai restaurant the other day - I was quite happy to see that on the menu, it's perhaps my favourite chicken dish. But Thai chicken satay is not like the dish I've grown up on, which is the Indonesian version (well, one of the islands' version, but I'm too ignorant of Indonesia to know exactly which. Probably Java).
As luck would have it, I have a brilliant "Indisch" (Dutch-Indonesian fusion cuisine) cookery book, plus our family recipe for saté sauce. So I'll post it here for other people to make use of.
In the interest of vegetarianism (I'm currently contemplating actually making the move from a little meat to non-meat diet), I must post here that this dish also works well with tofu and chicken substitutes.
It can also be made with other meats, such as pork (babi), goat (kambing), shrimp (udang), and, for those so inclined (perhaps fewer Brits than Continental Europeans, who are far less difficult about horse meat), horse (kuda). Those are slightly different recipes though, and I restrict this recipe to chicken (ayam) / tofu / substitute only.
The Indische chicken sateh dish consists of two elements; the chicken and the sauce.
Chicken:
All you need to do for this is to cut chicken breast into cubes and stick it in a marinade to soak overnight.
Here's the marinade for 500 grams of chicken.
3 tablespoons of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce (if you can get it, ketjap manis. If not, dark soy sauce is a good enough substitute. The differences, though they are different, are fairly minor).
3 tablespoons of lemon juice.
2 tablespoons of peanut oil / vegetable oil (again, peanut oil is preferable, but vegetable oil works well enough).
1 teaspoon of pepper
salt to taste (remember soy sauce is already fairly salty)
So soak the chicken overnight in the fridge, then either shallow-fry the cubes or stick them on a skewer (wet the skewers if you're using wooden ones!), then on a grill.
Sauce:
Okay, so this is the family recipe for the simple version. The difficult version involves crushing peanuts to a powder and all that sort of nonsense. So this works well enough.
Get a small jar (300 grams) of smooth peanut butter. Not chunky. Smooth. It needs to be relatively oily too, so if you've got a 'dry' peanut butter, you need to add some peanut / vegetable oil to the recipe. You'll want to use half this jar.
Chop chillies, or use chilli paste - preferably sambal ulek/oelek, but that's so hard to get. Chillies and chilli paste work well too. Mix this with a pinch of ground ginger and a pinch of ground coriander.
Fry a diced and cubed onion with two chopped cloves of garlic (or more, if you like garlic). Add the spice mix. Then add the peanut butter and add milk and water, until everything has dissolved and the sauce has a sauce-like consistency. Add a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and a 1 cm^3 cube of creamed coconut. Tweak the amounts of milk, peanut butter, chillies and spices until it is just the way you like it.
Serve over the chicken cubes, or with chips, or over nasi goreng or other rice dishes, or whatever you like because you'll want to stick this peanut sauce on just about everything.
And that's it. Bon appétit.
Flammkuchen (22 September 2013)
Sorry that it's been so long. Anyway.
My 100th post is coming up, so it's time for an overhaul - that's why from now on you'll find my blog under a different url, committingcriminology.blogspot.com - this is also because it's no longer Leicester Uni Adventures as I'm no longer a student at Leicester. Expect further changes in the next couple of weeks.
I now live in Leeds, or in Headingley to be exact, in a house with five other students - third years, fascinating from an anthropological point of view - and have not been up to much lately other than attend Leeds Uni's Crime Fiction conference, and taking the train to Manchester to see Kristy, who's moved to Oxford this week (somehow Manchester ended up the easiest place for us to meet, long story). I like Headingley, it's a nice place, half a mile from shops (ten minute walk, which is great because I've had something like Fresher's Flu the last few days and I'm quite capable of starving myself if I don't feel like going to the shops - half a mile is just the right distance for me to not have an excuse to go out) and with a great public transport connection to Leeds city centre (and the Uni, of course). My housemates seem friendly enough, so that's cool too.
It's been a bit sunny too, yesterday and today, and Kristy gave me a lovely photo book of our trip this summer, so all in all I was reminded of Heidelberg - and with memories of Heidelberg come memories of Flammkuchen. It's not a difficult thing to make, so I decided to give it a shot today. The traditional version first, I'll make the veggie one next weekend (I do think I prefer the veggie version, to be honest - the traditional one is a little heavy. You'll see why). As coincidence has it, today the Dutch newspaper I regularly read online has a fairly big thing on the German elections. I suppose it's a bit of a German day today then.
You'll need the following equipment:
A measuring cup
Baking paper
Baking tray
Optional:
Mixing bowl
Mixer
Rolling pin
Ingredients:
Dough:
200 grams (7 ounces) plain four
110 millilitres water (tap water is fine)
1 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon olive oil
Traditional toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche (Sainsbury's has some decent ones, also 50% less fat ones but I was being unhealthy with it anyway so went for the full-fat one)
100 grams diced bacon (I diced two rashers of thick-cut smoked back bacon, but it depends on your own tastes. I suppose smoked bacon is better than unsmoked in this case though, despite being bacon even smoked has enough difficulty to hold its own in this dish)
Half a diced onion (or however much you want - I like onion, but don't need it to overwhelm me. Also these are big, big onions I'm using. Just make sure it properly covers your dough)
Vegetarian toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche
Cherry tomatoes
Rocket
Pesto
Onion optional (I don't recommend it, this combination has more delicate flavours than the above sturdy one, but to each his or her own)
Pine nuts (they make everything better)
Preheat the oven to 230 - 250 Celsius (depending on how long you want it to take and whether you mind checking up every minute if you do it really hot)
So, you start by making a dough - in a mixing bowl with a mixer, or on the counter top with your hands if you like it messy. Hands and surface must be clean. You simply slowly (a bit at a time) add water to the flour, which makes for a dense and sticky ball of dough. Add the salt and oil, which makes it extremely sticky and a bit stringy too. Don't get dough on your shirt, and if you do, keep your shirt on until you're done because you don't want to make more than one dirty. If you're making a messy dough (like I did), you'd be better off wearing an apron.
Stretch the dough on the paper on the baking tray - with your fingers if you don't have a rolling pin (or perhaps with your fingers even if you do, because this is really sticky dough and will most likely stick to the pin rather than your paper). Get it nice and thin without any holes.
Spread the crème fraiche on the dough. You'll get a fairly thick layer, but that's how it's supposed to be. Sprinkle on the onions and bacon, or your other toppings (you can stick your bacon and onions in a frying pan first for a bit if you so prefer). It's supposed to look a bit like this:
Stick the tray in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes (do check often because it's fairly easy to cook this thing to a crisp, which is such a waste of a good dish). Once it's done it looks like this:
Eat. Recommended for drinks is a lager (personal recommendation is a nice, clear Heidelberger 1603 but if I did that here I'd probably end up the same as whenever I get my mum to bring me a bottle of a nice French wine I used to drink during holidays in France - it never tastes as good as it did there) or a dry white wine that holds its own. If going for non-alcoholic (I may be living in the UK now but even for me 2 in the afternoon of a regular Sunday is a bit early), keep it simple with a (sparkling) mineral water.
Enjoy it. I know I am :)
ILSE'S RECIPE FOR AUTHENTIC DUTCH SPLIT PEA SOUP (18 January 2013)
Things you need:
Cooking equipment
A big soup pot
A sharp knife
A cutting board
Ingredients
Water
Split peas (100 grams per half-liter)
Diced bacon
Plain pork ribs
Marrow bone
Stock cubes (1 per liter)
Leek
Onion (1 per 5l)
Carrot
Celeriac (half for 5l, whole for 10l)
Rookworst
Salt and pepper
What to do:
First, soak the split peas overnight, then strain and toss in soup pot with the water, diced bacon, the ribs, the marrow bone and the stock cubes.
While that's boiling (make sure it's boiling!), cut the leek, dice the onion and carrot and celeriac. Make sure to 1) keep stirring the stock (otherwise you'll end up with a big black layer on the bottom of your pot, which will not only make your soup taste funky but is hell to clean) and 2) keep scooping off any froth.
Boil the split pea stock until most peas have burst. Note: this may take up to three hours. Scoop out the ribs and marrow bone. Carve any remaining meat and marrow from the bones, toss out the bones and put the meat back into the stock. Now also add your vegetables. Boil until all vegetables (including the celeriac!) are soft; this may take another one-and-a-half hours.
Add salt and pepper to taste. If you really can't wait, have a bowl of split pea soup now. Leave the rest in the pot and put somewhere cold overnight. This may be your balcony or garden (bonus points when it's freezing and snowing!), or your fridge. Note: if you put it in your fridge, make sure your soup and pot have cooled enough to make sure you won't spoil whatever else is in your fridge through residual heat.
The following morning, your soup has officially turned to 'snert'. Heat up, scoop into bowls, cut up rookworst and add, eat with rye bread and bacon (or pancakes, perhaps?) and enjoy!
Snert keeps remarkably well when frozen.
I gave no indications of how much veg has to go in: that's up to yourself.
This is a family recipe, and as you can see there are no secret ingredients (not even 'love'); all a good snert or split pea soup requires is attention and devotion. It's a process that can easily take up your entire afternoon and night, and you can't just go out and do something else; you have to stay with it.
The ultimate test of snert is being able to stand up your spoon in the bowl. Note that this recipe requires no potatoes; potatoes are evil and if your snert needs them, that's more an indication of your inability to cook a good and thick snert than of the fact that somehow snert needs potatoes. If you've made a good batch, your spoon will stand up even without added potatoes.
And that's it; that's all there is to cooking a traditional Dutch split pea soup or 'snert'.
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