I need to figure out a way to play with this soup so that both myself (the vegetarian who doesn't like bacon or chicken stock) and my girlfriend (the carnivore with a deadly allergy to egg whites) can try it.

My part's easy enough-- I can just prepare the bacon on the side and only slide it into hers (though I'll keep the shallots), and sub vegetable broth for chicken in my pot. But how could I thicken up her eggless portion, short of more gelatin? Would more cream do the trick? Too much cheese will also elicit an allergic reaction-- it's something she has a limited tolerance for, so I can't just go heavy on that.

Dammit, now you've also got me thinking about soy-bacon, something I swore I'd never touch with a fifteen-foot cavalry lance.

I thawed a quart of beef stock, and about half of the meat from the shank that went into the stock. Added a can of tomatoes.

Not-quite-diced an onion, and caramelized it in olive oil. Added the above, and two smallish turnips, quartered. Had mushrooms, was lazy, decided against. Simmered until the turnips were tender.

Lots of salt and pepper made a feast. Were I to do it again, I'd peel those turnips and add a couple of carrots.

I'm tempted to try the bacon and egg soup sans dairy.

My favourite soup is Guilia De Cesare's Butternut Squash, mostly because it's so easy.

Fry a couple of onions in a big pan in a little butter untill nicely golden. Add a couple of pints of stock (or water if no stock in freezer) chicken stock works well. Peel and cut up some Butternuts - two or three depending on size of pan and poach in stock untill dissolved. Add small tub of single cream (or large amount of double cream if on Plokta diet) bring back to almost boil and add a pinch of salt and lots of black pepper. Serve with an extra dash of cream.

Yummy.

Will store these receipts up for our cold weather.

A Question: Just what does doing eggs "over easy" entail? Poached on both sides? Fried on both sides? Or elsewise?

There is a series of questions we get in quizzes, which is to translate foreign names of fruit & vegetables. From memory, cilantro is coriander.

When you say 'shallots', are you talking spring onions - cylindrical green leaves like large chives with things-that-turn-into-onions-eventually under the ground, or french-type shallots, which look like a cross between garlic cloves and brown onions? We use both, which can be confusing. All part of the big onion/garlic family

BTW, the first-ever entry on my blog is a salad recipe I'd thrown together that day.

Eggs "over easy": correct, fried on both sides. As opposed to "sunny side up."

I'll leave the nuances of "shallot" to Teresa.

IIRC, EHANA. HTH, HAND.

I've just posted a couple of soup recipes to my LJ, http://www.livejournal.com/users/papersky/130860.html

Two ways to thicken a soup not involving gelatin are to make a roux - warm some butter or oil and stir in an equal amount of flour, cook gently and add in to the soup - or add the flour when you initially saute onions/bacon.

or - mix a little cornstarch in cold water ~teaspoon starch to 1/4 c water to thicken a
quart or so of soup) and stir this into gently boiling soup.

My family's favorite winter soup is my bean and sausage soup with smoked sausage or kielbasa.

Saute 1 large onion with a couple cloves of garlic and a couple bay leaves in olive oil. Add some roughly chopped red, yellow or green pepper (I use whatever I've got on hand). Add 1 lb of sliced sausage.

When the onions are transparent add 1 can each of white, (or navy or cannelini), kidney, black or pinto beans or soaked dried beans. And 1 large can of tomatoes, roughly chopped, 1 bottle of beer, and about a quart of water. Simmer for a couple hours and throw some chopped fresh parsley, salt and pepper in at the end. winter heaven!

(this works fine as a vegetarian version by just omitting the sausage.) I use carrots, celery or mushrooms if the mood strikes me.

;)

No, you're not; and I'd like to add that one of the best things about Making Light's readers/participants is that you can make observations like that here without people looking at you funny.

Now, lentil soup involves going to the latin grocery and getting pig knuckles....

Scanting the water is an important feature of this recipe. The trick is that the vegetables throw off liquid while they're cooking, especially the tomatillos and zucchini, and you wind up with a rich concentrated vegetable stock. It's really good. Strictly speaking, you don't need to thicken this soup at all -- if you do this right, the proportion of stock to soup is as interstitial cake to fruitcake -- but I like to add a little gelatin to give it a slightly more glutinous mouth feel. The gelatin doesn't mask the flavor of the vegetable stock the way flour would. If I couldn't use gelatin, I'd add one more red potato at the beginning, and I'd grate that additional potato instead of cubing it like all the rest.

BTW, a cook is sovereign in his or her own kitchen -- but I feel about tabasco sauce in my vegetable soup much as you do about J____ putting ketchup on your poached salmon.

Bacon, Lentil and Apple soup - Serves 3-4, but freezes well.

150g smoked streaky bacon (I find the thin-sliced stuff crisps up best)
150 g red lentils
1 cooking apple, skinned, cored and roughly chopped
~3 carrots, roughly chopped
1 medium onion, chopped (you guessed it... roughly)
25g butter
bay leaf
salt and pepper
1L veggie stock (from a stock cube is fine)

1: Cut the bacon into strips about an inch long, and fry in the bottom of a largeish saucepan until crispy. Remove and put onto a plate, leaving the fat in the pan. Any crispy bits stuck to the bottom of the pan are good - they add to the flavour.

2: Add the onion and the butter, and cook over a low heat for 5 mins with the lid on, until they soften.

3: Add the apple, carrots, stock, and lentils. Drop in the bay leaf. Bring to the boil then turn down the heat and let it simmer with the lid half on for ~30 mins, or until everything is tender.

4: If you really want to, you can blenderise the soup now - remove the bay leaf first! I prefer the chunkier texture, just mashing it with a potato masher. Season with ground pepper and if you must, salt. Pour into bowls whilst piping hot, garnish with the crispy bacon bits (you didn't eat them all aready, did you?), and serve with crusty homemmade brown bread and butter.

potatos
leeks
chicken stock
heavy cream

Peel and cube the potatos--use whatever kind you like. Yukon Golds are nice, so are the Red Bliss. Chop up the leeks (greens too!) and rinse all the sand out of the bits. Put them in a pot with almost enough stock to cover them and start simmering. When the veggies are cooked, mash them up or use one of the little hand-sized blenders to puree the soup in the pot. Add the heavy cream, and salt and pepper to taste.

There aren't any quatities because my mother didn't use any set quantites either. The amounts of potato and leek should be roughly equal, I guess. Freezes well too.

It tastes far better than you'd think something so simple would--the heavy cream gives a mouth feel like velvet. I suspect the chicken stock could be substituted with a veggie stock successfully, but I have very little experience with them.

But this is our primary trivial family soup (every family needs one of these; almost no work and joy, a big vat of soup that everyone likes); sweet potato and tomato. You microwave some sweet potatoes, which keep for ages especially if you're using them for something as forgiving as this. (I peel and chop them, but if you prefer to cook them in skins & scoop them out that works too), and while they're cooking you chop and fry some onions until just before they start browning and then add a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes. You then fry for a few minutes more. Once the sweet potatoes are done you tip them (no skins) into the mix along with a stock made with boiling water and a beef OXO and some Marigold vegetable stock powder and bring to the boil. You then get your soup whizzer, which plugs into the other socket right by the cooker one, and pulverise your soup till it's smoothish. And then season it, and serve it with a pile of chopped parsley and dabs of yogurt. And good bread.

The real version of this included some amounts, I'm almost sure, and real beef stock and fresh tomatoes not tinned. It boils the sweet potatoes rather than microwaving them, and it mashes the entire soup through a sieve at the end to get a much smoother texture. But even the book I got it from admitted to the everyday version, in a way that made it clear the author cooked it for her family all the time and couldn't bear not to put it into a book that was, for the most part, about much posher soup.

While on the subject of food. If a US recipe calls for three tablespoons of chili powder in a baked pasta dish to feed six, and there's no other reason to suppose they're chili fiends, what spice does she actually mean? Could this be proprietary chili seasoning (which would make sense as the guts of the dish was pasta, tomato and mince), or is it more likely to be paprika? It's a sad tale; Steven cooked it, and put 1/2 teaspoon of chili powder (we use a good UK Asian brand of cayenne pepper) in it, reckoning that surely cutting down the recipe by 95% would be fine?

The result was just hotter than mild for him, and as hot as I wanted to eat a dish that I wasn't accompanying with yoghurt, and far, far too hot for the kids. My general rule of thumb is to put no more than a pinch into low-fat food, rising to 1/4 tsp in, say, a fatty curry, for the four of us.

Christopher Davis: Potstickers are generally known in Boston as "Peking ravioli" for whatever reason. Gyoza is probably a more useful term for these.

I do not speak or read Chinese (any version), so I've had to take someone else's word that the Chinese name (sometimes ~rendered as "guo ti'eh") actually \means/ "pot stickers" -- which would make sense as they're flat-bottomed and normally served scorched on one side. (They're more appetizing than that sounds.) It's a widely-used term -- the only meal I've eaten in San Francisco's Chinatown was at a place called the Pot Sticker. "gyoza" I've only seen used for the Japanese version, with a much thinner skin around a smaller bit of filling. Both are a ~circle of dough pulled up on both sides, crimped in a single seam, and bent into shallow crescents, around a bit of ground meat. (I'm sure somebody has made them vegetarian; I've just never seen them.) So they're in the same family as ravioli, but more like tortellini. (Sometimes the geeky details just spill out when I'm not sleepy and should be.)

Teresa: have you tried freezing the bacon-and-egg soup? (Has Patrick ever given you the chance?) It sounds good to me, but I've been told I'd have to finish it (twist my arm a little harder) and I'd hate to spend the time on a cut-down batch -- I was brought up to cook but have gotten very lazy.

"Picadillo soup"? But, but... no vinegar? No raisins?

should also mention how much I enjoy the site - been lurking for a long time and rarely post.

And many American recipes say "chili powder" when they mean pre-blended spices suitable for flavoring chili, containing chili pepper (generally one of the mild ones) with a fair amount of cumin and other spices. It doesn't refer to a particular proprietary blend, but to the type of blend (like "italian seasoning" is going to be some mix of basil, oregano, parsley, and marjoram, and maybe thyme or savory.)

I've made the same mistake even more dramatically than you did, despite the fact that I'm native to US kitchens and should know better. (I'm a total spice wimp, and thus unfamiliar with cayenne details.) After the chili debacle of last winter, it was all explained to me in some detail, and I was given my very own container of Penzeys mildest chili powder. I have such good friends. Such forgiving friends.

Sweet potatoes vary quite a lot in the UK; we get US ones which are good, and Middle Eastern ones which tend not to be as good. Tinned chopped tomatoes vary even more; the best ones come in thickish juice, and the worst are very watery. If using the latter sort you need more tomatoes and less water to produce a soup of zenlike balance. Of course, different people's zenlike balance varies; there's an anti-Delia trend in UK celebrity chefs at the moment that argues 'cook the thing and see if it tastes good. If it tastes good, then don't worry about whether or not you've followed the recipe or how it's 'supposed' to turn out.'

Interesting web fact of the day '30% of the UK population don't know what they'll be eating for dinner tonight'. Really? So few? In my experience, 75% of the population of my household don't know what's for dinner -- and the other 25% is normally none too sure. I guess the real statistic is '30% of those charged with cooking dinner tonight haven't decided what they're going to eat yet'.

If you can't find queso blanco at a grocery store (remember, I now live in a country that doesn't even have a single Taco Bell), it's easy to make at home:

1 Gallon Whole Milk
1/4 Cup White Vinegar
.

Heat 1 gallon of milk to about 180 F (82 C) over a double boiler. While mixing with a whisk, slowly add 1/4 cup white vinegar. You will notice the milk begins to curdle. Turn off the heat but leave the pot in the double boiler, and keep stirring for 10-15 minutes.

Line a colander with a fine cheesecloth. Pour the curdled milk through the colander. If you want, you can add a pinch of salt at this time and stir it through. Then allow the curds to cool for about 20 minutes. Tie the four corners of the cheese cloth together and hang it to drain for about 3 hours (until it stops dripping -- easiest way is to take a long twist-tie, tie it around the top of the gathered cloth and then around a wooden spoon, and hang the spoon across the top of a tall pot).

When you unwrap the cheese, you should have a solid but squishy block of cheese, which will cut cleanly but easily. It's pretty tasteless on its own, but good for cooking with.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy!

(Actually, the soup would require some significant tweaking for me as it includes sufficient veggies I don't care for -- notably squash in various varieties (except zucchini, which I do like), but also yam -- and too many carrots for me (I like them raw lots, cooked in small quantities only), but overall it sounds pretty good, and tabasco would make it wrong. But it was still my first reaction.)

The bacon and egg soup sounds awfully good, except reading the two recipes, I'm curious: why nuts in soup? I don't think I've ever had such a creation.

And, if anyone's curious -- and you probably aren't -- I haven't yet tried my vegetarian gumbo experimentation, but the more I read recipes the more inspired I get.

Now I just need some energy to go with my inspiration.

My family makes lentil soup and various other recipes that usually call for pig knuckles, but substitutes a smoked turkey leg. You should be able to find these in the meat section of the grocery store, we pick them up at the big chain one with no need for a specialty shopping trip. Gives the soup that nice full flavor, avoids pig knuckles, and provides a lot more meat to boot.

Back to the sock drawer with you!

Cripes. Whadda maroon.