Artist's depiction

(The capsicum bushes were a big selling point. Drawn in gimp.)

M and I have been nestling into our new territory by cooking.  On our first weekend, M made a gloriously tasty batch of croissants. Ooooh, croissants: you taste even better when you are made in celebration of a new oven.   He has been keeping us well-supplied with hand-made pasta, pizza doughs and many many loaves of rye bread.  (I have been in charge of making ice cubes.)  Cooking is such a soothing process, for both of us, and exploring the potentials of a new kitchen and workspace has been a very important part of establishing ourselves in our new context. I find moving a really challenging process, and after all the dust has settled I feel kind of…filleted. So cooking gives me a way of finding my feet. And, in some weird way, it lets me re-establish my context: it’s as though there’s part of my brain that says “aha, this must be home, because she’s cooked muffins”.

One of the first things I made was some long-missed chai syrup.  I was out of some of the usual ingredients — cloves, ginger and cinnamon being the big absentees — so I altered it a little.  In addition to the standard black tea base, I used a generous measure of Earl Grey leaves; then added some mandarin zest and a squirt of mandarin juice.  These two modifications gave a fantastic citrus twist.  I used a lot of allspice, nutmeg, some bay leaves, and a little bit of garam masala to add the required spiciness, then simmered it all for a while until it was thick and syrupy.  While it cooled, I stirred in plenty of honey and vanilla extract and left it to cool.  It’s beautiful: I love that chai is one of those things that you can play around with according to whim and circumstance. There’s a lot of scope for experimentation.

The smell of spices while cooking both soothes and excites me.  It calms me and makes me feel creative and alert and I love it.  So it is unsurprising that the next thing I made was spicy roast vegetable and lentil soup.  Aw, baby, this was a good one, albeit tricky to photograph.

Spicy and steamy

Two small potatoes, some wedges of pumpkin, two carrots, a purple onion and a brown one, all rubbed with olive oil, salt and some chilli powder and roasted in the oven; right at the end, add a few cloves of garlic and roast only briefly.  Meanwhile, finely chop some celery, carrot and shallots and quickly fry in some butter and salt.  Have a litre or so of vegetable stock on standby, with some bay leaves in it. Roughly chop the roasted vegetables and toss them into the pot with the celery/carrot/shallots, then lightly fry the whole lot.  Add your spice mix: mine had (from memory) tumeric, cumin, coriander seed, garam masala, cardamom, nutmeg, cayenne pepper (and plenty of it), white pepper and mustard powder, and I needed a lot more than I originally thought I would. Throw it in and stir the vegetables around in it, until they get dry and spicy and very aromatic; the smell of the frying spices will fill your kitchen and sinuses.  Pour in your stock, make sure it covers the vegetables, and then throw in some generous handfuls of dried red, yellow and green lentils.  I soaked my lentils for a little while before chucking them in, but if you don’t, make sure you keep a close eye on how much water they suck outta the soup. They’re thirsty little blighters. Taste the soup regularly to make sure it’s flavoursome enough: you may need to top up the salt levels as you go, especially if the lentils go in dry. Let it simmer.  Eventually everything will have merged into a glorious, spicy, hot pulp of vegetables and you can mash it roughly or puree it with a blender.

This soup was fantastic.  I miss it still. And it was wonderful to have such a spicy, hot, flavoursome thing to serve with M’s homemade rye bread when our erstwhile housemates came over for dinner.

But you can get closer to awesomeness through making this fantastic roast vegetable soup.  It was cold, dashed cold, when I got up this morning.  1.8°C, the reliable Bureau of Meteorology website informs me. And that, my friends, is enough to encourage me to make soup.  Spicy, rich, lush, roast vegetable soup.  Now, I’ve got a bit of a boner for soup, as regular readers will be aware (Hi Mumini! Ignore that bit about the boner, that’s just what the kids say these days!), as well as a bit of a boner for chilly weather — add to that the freshly-baked Hot Cross Buns Anzac Day Buns I made for breakfast, and we’ve got a boner count of three and it’s not even ten o’clock.  Moving hastily on from boner counting, here’s a delicious spicy soup recipe you can make at home in the vain hope of being as awesome as I.  Makes about 4-6 cups of soup.

Zingy Awesome Roast Vegetable Soup

Roast the vegetables:

• Two capsicums — I used 1 1/2 red, 1/2 green, because that’s what I had: halved and deseeded
• Half a purple onion: peeled, topped and tailed
• Five cloves of garlic, peeled
• Two small hot chillies, topped

If photographing oily vegetables is weird, hey, I don't want to be right.

Prepare all your vegetables as above, then brush generously with olive oil and toss some whole black peppercorns through. Arrange them on a baking tray: slide the garlic cloves and chillies underneath the capsicum halves, because this makes sure that (a) their baking aromas get captured by the capsicums; and (b) that they don’t dry out and become gross little char-nuggets. Make sure everything is looking oily and sexy and pop in the oven at 180°C for an hour or so, until the skins of the capsicums are black and bubbly-blistered.  Your house is probably smelling mighty fine about now. Can I come over? Huh. Okay, whatever.  While your vegetables are doing their roasting thang, get yourself some stock together as follows.

The pomodoro sauce M made last night involved crushing fresh tomatoes to get as much water out of them as possible, so we had a sizeable tub of tomato juices, which I promptly bagsed and used as the basis for my stock. You can use bottled tomato juice, or even just a can of crushed tomatoes in juices.  Whatever you’ve got handy, just make sure there’s some nice tomato backbone in there.

Stock:

• delicious tomatoey juices, fresh or bottled (about 1 1/2 cups, or one tin of crushed tomatoes)
• three or four generous teaspoonfuls of vegetable stock powder
• a few sprigs of thyme, stripped and finely chopped
• a very generous squirt of balsamic vinegar
• a very generous squirt of Tabasco sauce: work with your palette here — I wanted Zingy, so I was pretty splashy-splash-splash

Mix all of the above and taste: it should make you think of a Bloody Mary, but without the zing of vodka — like I said, it’s before ten o’clock, so you should have finished all the vodka by now.  Now add enough water to bring it up to 3 or 4 cups of stock: if you have the time to simmer your soup for hours, I recommend adding the extra water, but if you’re pressed for time, go for less.  Taste again and add some salt to make it good and flavoursome.

Bubbly, black and blistery

When your vegetables are done, let them cool awhile, just until they’re cool enough to handle.  Peel the skins from the capsicums and discard. Take your roasted purple onion, discard the over-cooked skin, and chop it just a little: keep it pretty chunky, but you want to break it up a bit so that you can spread the onion love around.

Beautiful. Now crush it!

Then slide everything — garlic, oil, peppercorns, everything from your tray — into a waiting pan with a little hot oil in it and get it sizzling. Once everything is good and frying and aromatic, pour your stock over it. Cover and leave for about ten minutes, then taste.  Adjust salt, chillies, spiciness to your liking: throw in some cayenne pepper and/or some paprika to taste. Now turn it down, walk away. Ideally, leave it on a low temperature for an hour at least — taste again, adjust if needed, then give it as much time as you can afford.  That’s why you make your soup right after you’ve finished the morning vodka: gives the soup plenty of time to infuse and become really rich and delicious.

And then, well, when you’re ready, you know what to do: pureé the lot. You have soup!  Zingy Awesome Roast Vegetable Soup à la bethini. Will it make you as awesome as me? No. But it will allow people to compare you to me more favourably.  You’re welcome.

I think of soup as full of lush, green, natural things, like peas and beans and herbs and lentils and spinach and leeks.  All nutritious and delicious and simmered together into a glorious smoosh of flavour. Also carrots, which are loosely classed as green in my head because they’re tasty and healthy as well.  When I’m under the weather, my thoughts turn to soup.  When it’s autumnal or rainy, my thoughts turn to soup. The fact that both have taken place lately makes soup-making a dead cert.

Today’s lush, green, natural soup is, well, not green. It’s pink. It’s full of beetroot! Huzzah.

I love beetroots.  Shamelessly addicted to them, I’ll eat them straight from the can if you let me. We grew up eating the tinned, sliced stuff on sandwiches, from which it would effortlessly slither onto one’s shirt (or the tablecloth) and permanently stain.  It was also required for the Standard Australian Barbecue salad (iceberg lettuce, tinned beetroot, tomato, tasty cheese, tinned pineapple, tinned corn kernels if you were feeling a bit avant-garde).  In fact, as a kid, my favourite sandwich was beetroot and cheese.  I still get sentimental cravings for them, although now I prefer crusty sourdough bread to Tip Top, roast fresh beets drizzled with a bit of balsamic vinegar and olive oil over tinned slices, and feta over Kraft Singles.  But, as I said above, I’ll eat tinned beets straight from the can, especially the baby ones. Love ‘em.

Aren’t they beautiful? They’re so humble and rustic to look at, and then as soon as you slice them, they just glow with red-pink jewel tones. They’re so pretty.  Pushing all such reverence aside, I then chop the crap out of them and boil them for a few hours, with cabbage and potato and carrot and onion and herbs, until everything’s really soft; then purée and serve. Add salt if needed (and it probably will be).  Mmmmmm.  I’m going to have a big bowl for lunch. With toast. And a pickle. Jealous yet? You should be.

Still unwell, so I’m turning to the most nourishing thing I can think of.  If baking and the scent of spices calms me, making soup makes me feel like I’m healing myself. I think I must feel like I’m channeling my Inner Wholesome Pagan Wise Woman. Or Inner Peter Rabbit.  Wait, he didn’t cook.  Inner Beatrix Potter? That would make me bethini pottini.  What was I talking about again? Oh yes, soup.  There is nothing mystic about this soup, just the simple transformative process of cooking, which is magical enough in itself. I’m tired and sick and to my current state of mind, there is nothing so nourishing as this quiet and earthy magic.

While I find it tiring right now, I love that I can do something like take these herbs and vegetables and boil them and boil them and then, when I eat them, my body is going to break them all down into atoms and redistribute them around my atoms to nourish them accordingly. Isn’t that astonishing? This soup is taking carbon atoms (for example) that were constructed in tiny steps from the carbon of the soil, and transforming them into carbon atoms of bethini, temporarily.  I feel green, hippyish and nurturing of myself today.

When I first moved out of home and started going to the farmers’ markets for fresh produce (where I lived with my parents, this wasn’t an option), the difference was really eye-opening.  I immediately fell in love with the seasonal shifts, the people, and the non-uniformity of all the fruits and vegetables.  I admit that when I now go to the supermarket and see banks of identical, shiny capsicums, it makes me want to poke fun at them for their plastic appearance, but then I wonder what happens to all the non-matching capsicums and I get very angry at my vision of billions of capsicums being cruelly thrown away for their non-conformity.  Shopping in supermarkets takes me a long time.  Anyway, the flavour was the other big revelation. Vegetables and fruit from the farmers’ markets has opened my eyes to fresh corn on the cob, fresh raw green beans, and ye Gods, I didn’t realise how much I love eggplant. There was all the other miraculous stuff, too: fresh-pressed olive oil from independent, local producers; dozens of artisan sourdough and focaccia loaves baked that morning; marinaded olives; locally-roasted coffee…this stuff blew my mind, and meeting and talking to the people behind it all even more so.  Not because they were glowing goodness gods and goddesses — quite the opposite.  Most of them were there in their tracky-daks and looking like they’d been up since 4 am, which, well, they had been. They were real and friendly and they made me realise I could do all that stuff too.  Maybe not the olive oil pressing yet, but the bread baking and the cooking with the fresh produce: it was all there, waiting for me to take it up.  So I did and it’s a wonderful part of my life. It nourishes me. It makes me feel like I’m giving myself the greatest, kindest food I can get, and — oh, all right, since we’re on a bit of a hippy streak today — it makes me feel connected to the growing, to the people who produce this stuff, to the cycles of the seasons and to the way flavours, nutrients, people and the soil are all woven together. This kind of nourishing is communal, holistic and I suspect quite precious. I’m not saying we should hold hands and wear gumboots and go back to bartering chook eggs for rotary hoes or anything like that: but I do think that we are (as a first-world, Western culture) probably a little too divorced from the process of where our food comes from.

You can find a recipe for vegetable and lentil soup anywhere, if you don’t feel like making one up as you go, but this is the one I made today: I might as well share it with you since we’re here anyway and I’m here to tell you that it’s tasty and warming and lovely. Moving slowly, I finely cubed the stems off some cauliflower and broccoli (save the florets), carrots, onions and garlic, and sautéed the lot in some butter (not margarine).  Added some freshly-ground salt and let it sweat for a while, sizzling with the lid on.  When it is getting soft, add your bouquet garni — mine was a stick of rosemary, some sticks of thyme and a twig of sage, all tied together with some kitchen string.  I also threw in some dried bay leaves; then I topped the lot up with vegetable stock and let it start simmering.  Add some finely-chopped potato, broccoli and cauliflower tops, a handful of peas and a few very generous twists of salt from the grinder.  Get it all simmering away and add about half a cup of dried brown or green lentils and let it simmer for as long as you can.  The lentils will swell up and hog all the water, so make sure you check it and top it up with water if necessary.  The longer you simmer, the more rich and evenly-distributed the flavours will be. Taste it periodically to see if you need to add some more salt.  If you have leftovers (and, frankly, you will), you might need to top it up with more water when you reheat, because those greedy little lentils will continue to suck up all the water they can get and the soup will thicken.

You don’t need me to tell you how to serve it, but I do recommend any of the following: with crusty bread, with grilled roast vegetable toasties, with wedges of warm sourdough or poured over some of M’s leftover handmade pasta.

(mmmmm, can’t you hear the sizzling?…I rubbed them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper, and then left them at 150°C for about an hour). Then I chopped up some carrot, garlic, chillies, ginger and onion, and sweated those in some butter for a while; then threw in the above, peeled and chopped, with some tinned tomatoes, basil, bay leaves, a dried, smoked, chipotle chilli and a bit of salt.  Oh, my, yes.

This is the pre-serve, simmering-actively shot.  After simmering all afternoon, from about 12:30 until 4:30, I fished out the dried chilli and bay leaves, and puréed the rest. Spicy, robust, smoky and deeply flavoured: magnificent.  I served it with some grilled cheese-on-toasts, which were generously spread with my Dadini’s Hot Stuff tomato relish.  A perfect match, I might add, especially when built upon a slice of M’s fine home-made bread.

I’m in love with the slow-moving cooking.  It’s rich, deeply-flavoured, savoury and you get to spend the whole day inhaling the heavenly vapours of your labours.  (Plus, being daft and easily-distracted, I can wander off, do other stuff, and then come back to the delightful surprise of a whole pot of soup waiting for me! Whee! As well as easily-distracted, I am also forgetful.)  This is my favourite kind of Sunday: slow, savoury, resonant with the smells of all the things I don’t have time to cook on weekdays. (Well, I do, but I don’t like making everyone wait until eight o’clock for dinner.)

Carrot and coriander!  It is pretty good, although I threw in a splash too much orange juice when I added the stock, which made it a little too sweet.  To remedy this, I put in a generous splash of apple cider vinegar, which has helped diminish the sweetness nicely.

Want to be bold and saucy with your soup-making? Try this.

Ingredients

A fist-filling bunch of coriander, roots and all, well-washed
About 900g fresh carrots
Half a brown onion
Two cloves of garlic
A dash of ground coriander
An inch-and-a-half-long piece of fresh ginger
About a litre to a litre-and-a-half of stock
A splash of orange juice and maybe apple cider vinegar (optional)

Method

Finely chop the coriander roots and the coriander leaves, separately. Peel and finely chop the onion, garlic and carrots. Peel and shred the ginger. In a thick-bottomed pot, melt about 25g of butter until it is nice and hot. Throw in the carrots, onions, garlic, ginger, ground coriander and coriander roots, and fry.  Turn the heat down and put a lid on the pot, and let them cook for about twenty minutes, stirring regularly, until they are getting tender and aromatic.

Top up the pot with stock and finely chopped coriander leaves. Let it simmer for about fifteen minutes, and then taste.  Add orange juice and salt and pepper to taste: if you accidentally add too much orange juice, add some apple cider vinegar (a little at a time, tasting in between) until the flavours begin to balance out.

Simmer for 30 minutes or so until everything is nice and tender, then pureé and serve.  You can top it with a little more chopped coriander leaf, or a swirl of yoghurt/creme fraiche/sour cream, but it’s tasty on its own, too.