Give a dog a bone AFTER soup

Sometimes I eat out of the garbage. Case in point: One year as we cleaned up Easter dinner, I asked my sister-in-law what she did with the ham bone. It was a good ham, we enjoyed it immensely. As I was eating it, I thought of the good soup I could make with the bone. Then she pointed to the garbage bin. Sure enough, there was the ham bone

Prairie Kitchens - Italian Turkey Soup

Sometimes, the oldest and best recipes have no measurements and few instructions. That's because they are so classic and so iconic the cook can make them by heart. Take, for instance, the recipe for Gilda DiSanto's turkey soup which she learned at her mother's side growing up in Italy.

Gilda, her husband Luigi and two-year-old Carmelina came to Canada in 1964, joining his brother who was already in Saskatoon. Before leaving their village, Fresagrandinaria, Gilda dehydrated her homemade pasta sauce and packed it along so they would not be without in their new home.

She recalls the train ride across Canada, eating the spaghetti and white bread they were served onboard. "It was so bad. I cried, Oh my God!" she laughs.

After fifty years in Saskatoon, she still makes her own pizza and spaghetti sauce, putting up 100 jars of home-grown tomatoes every fall. Those tomatoes are a special ingredients in her turkey soup.

She begins with a whole turkey, turning it into several meals. However, the hand-written recipe (as passed on to her daughter Carm Michalenko) substitutes turkey wings for the whole bird. I've taken the liberty of adding ingredient amounts to the basic recipe, so feel free to take the "bones" and make this delicious peasant soup your own.

Gilda's Turkey Soup
Broth:
2 lbs turkey wings
2-3 celery stalks
3-4 carrots
2-3 potatoes
2 cups canned tomatoes
1 tsp salt
1 onion, quartered

Meatballs:
2 lbs ground turkey or beef
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups finely grated parmesan cheese
1 tsp minced dried basil
1 tbsp minced fresh parsley
1 tsp salt and plenty of pepper
Orzo-shaped pasta, cooked
Leftover wing meat

For the broth, put turkey wings in a pot, cover generously with water and boil, skimming off the foam that rises to the surface. Peel vegetables, cut in half and add to the pot with tomatoes and salt. Cook until the meat falls from the bone. Strain and reserve broth. Separate bones and meat.

At this point, you can make a meal of the meat and vegetables removed from the broth.

Put the bones in fresh water with the onion and boil again until the broth is golden. Strain and mix the two broths together.

To make meatballs, combine ground meat, egg, parmesan cheese and herbs, seasoning salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly, until the meat is smooth and silky. Roll into meatballs about the size of a marble. Drop into boiling water and scoop out when cooked, about two minutes.

Reheat the turkey broth, tasting and adding more salt if needed. Add meatballs, cooked pasta and any leftover wing meat. Buon appetito!

(This article first appeared in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.)

Split Pea Soup

I'm cleaning out my pantry, which explains why I'm making a pot of split pea soup in July. Or maybe I'm just channeling next winter with a hearty soup and a travel guide to Greece. Whatever the motive, this soup is so easy to make, there's really no recipe:

Boil one smoked ham hock in water until the meat is just about falling from the bone. (I bought the ham hock at Prairie Meats in Saskatoon.) Cook two cups yellow split peas in water (green peas are good, too) with one chopped onion and a bay leaf until the peas are soft. (I did this in a crock pot.) In a soup pot, combine split peas and the meat from the ham hock. Also a few chopped carrots. Top up with water and cook until the carrots are done. Season to your taste with @ 2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Done! Like most soups, it's better the second day.

Prairie Kitchens - Kvass

On summer days, I recall my mom baking in the early morning and airing out the house before it got hot outside. In pioneer times, she might just as likely have moved the kitchen outside. Summer kitchens were a cool antidote to wood stoves and long hot days.

At the start of summer, the kitchen supplies were moved to a shed or lean-to where meals were cooked and eaten. Sometimes the summer kitchen had its own wood stove, but often the heavy cast iron stove was also moved out from the house.

In the cookbook Taste of Time (published by the Saskatoon Council on Aging) Eva Hazelwanter reminisces about the summer kitchen on her Doukhobor family farm near Petrofka Bridge.

She writes, "each summer pots and pans, etc. were moved a short way down the hill to the summer kitchen. It was a log structure with a corrugated tin roof that turned beautiful colours in the rain. Here we cooked and ate in the hot sun and escaped to the cool big house at night."

Today's equivalent might be the backyard barbeque. However, we might also imitate the Doukhobors and serve a refreshing cold cucumber soup called kvass. When the Doukhobors came from Russia in 1899, they were vegetarian so, no doubt, they had a broad repertoire of cold, vegetable dishes prepared with the bounty of their own prairie gardens. According to Eva, kvass was served for lunch with a plate of fried potatoes.

Kvass
2 tbsp grated onion
1/4 cup fresh dill
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups grated cucumber
2 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice
2 cup water

In a bowl, mash together onion, dill and salt until the salt is dissolved and the juices run. Add cucumber, vinegar or lemon juice and water. The soup can be eaten immediately or refrigerated for an hour to let the flavours chill and meld. Before serving, stir in enough ice cold water to make a thin soup.

Do you have an ethnic recipe transplanted to Saskatchewan? Tell me! Send me a comment and follow at Twitter.com/prairiefeast.

(This article first appeared in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.)

Prairie Kitchens - Ripe Bean Soup

In 1970, the Mennonite ladies of Aberdeen worried their old recipes were being lost to a younger generation. They wrote out their traditional dishes and published a cookbook called Mother's Pioneer Recipes, recalling a time when "mother made the best of what she had and what could be produced at home."

It was a century after the first Mennonites arrived in Canada in the 1870s. Though they spoke German, the Mennonites had been living in southern Russia, where they were successful farmers.In 1873, the Canadian government sent an agent to Russia to entice the Mennonites to western Canada. Today, that area is in the eastern pro-Russian part of Ukraine. Many answered the call.

They settled first in Manitoba and spread into Saskatchewan territory in the 1890s, first around Rosthern and then to Hague-Warman-Osler-Aberdeen and communities in between. Several years later, in 1924, Saskatchewan historian John Hawkes wrote that the Mennonite settlers were "among our most worthy, industrious and hard-working citizens."

Early cokbooks did not usually include recipes for traditional dishes that came with the various ethnic groups that settled Saskatchewan. For the most part, these recipes weren't written down but passed from generation to generation in the kitchen.We can thank the ladies of Aberdeen for writing down this soup recipe for posterity.

The word "ripe" seems to refer to dried beans, as opposed to fresh beans. The smoked pork hock was purchased at Prairie Meats.

Ripe Bean Soup
1 pork hock, smoked or salted
2 cups dried white beans
10 black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1 star anise
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp salt
Sour cream for serving (optional)

Put pork hock in a stock pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer 1 hour. Place peppercorns, bay leaf and star anise in a spice ball or sachet. Add the spices and beans to the pot, cover and simmer 2 hours, topping up with water if needed.

Remove pork hock. Add chopped onion and cook until the beans and onion are very soft, another hour. Meanwhile, remove meat from bone, chop and add to the pot. Remove spices. Season with salt as needed (this will depend on the saltiness of the meat). To serve, it is optional to stir a bit of sour cream into each bowl.

Do you have prairie recipe with a story? Send me a comment. Follow at twitter.com/prairiefeast.

(This article first appeared in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.)

Prairie Kitchens - Bullet Soup

In 1870, hundreds of French-speaking Métis packed their wagons and left Manitoba for open lands to the west. About 40 families established a village on the South Saskatchewan River north of present day Saskatoon. They called it Petite Ville.

In summertime, most everyone left the village to hunt buffalo on the southern plains, drying the meat and making pemmican as they went. In winter, they came back to Petite Ville. Excavations and history tell us something about what they ate including buffalo, snowshoe hare, muskrat, ducks and grouse, along with wild berries and plants.

Houses had open fireplaces and chimneys made of mud and straw. They cooked in copper pots and ate tinned and packaged foodstuffs such as tea and fruit preserves from the Hudson Bay Company. Shards of delicate English china in blue and white patterns indicate a genteel touch in a rustic prairie home. Meat was kept in ice pits outside the house (protected from animals) and other foods were stored in cellars under the floorboards.

I have not read evidence of gardens at Petite Ville, but it is recorded elsewhere that the Métis grew root vegetables such as potatoes and turnips, and I can imagine the elders tending gardens while the others were away at the hunt.

Bullet Soup is a Metis tradition. The name comes from the French word boulettes, meaning meatballs. This modernized version of Bullet Soup comes from Colleen Hamilton of CHEP Good Food Inc., who grew up in one of the original French Métis communities of Manitoba.

Bullet Soup
1/4 lb lean ground beef
1/4 lb lean ground pork
2 tbsp grated onion
1-2 clove garlic, finely chopped
Salt and pepper
Dried rosemary and parsley
Flour for dredging
1 diced onion
2 cups diced potatoes
1 cup chopped carrot
1 diced turnip
1 diced sweet potato
1/4 package whole wheat pasta

Mix beef, pork, grated onion, salt, pepper and herbs. Form into balls about the size of a jawbreaker. Dredge in flour. Cover with water and boil until cooked.

Cool pot, refrigerate and when cold, skim the fat. (Optional. Not necessary if using lean meat.)

Reheat broth, adding more water to make a full pot. Add diced onion, potato, carrot, turnip and sweet potato. Simmer until tender.

Season broth with salt and pepper to your taste. Before serving, add the pasta and cook until done. Serve with bannock (recipe).

(This article first appeared in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.)

Soups of Summer

It's a warm and breezy summer day, bees buzzing in the garden and zucchini growing before my very eyes. I'm inspired to go into the kitchen and make… soup.

Who says soup is cold weather food? There's no better time to make soup than when the ingredients are at their prime.

One of my favourite summer soups is minestrone. The Italian recipe Bible The Silver Spoon lists ten versions of minestrone, including Minestrone alla Russa made with beets. (Read more in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix)

My version includes vegetables now in season in and around Saskatoon, either from my own garden or from the farmers' market. Have fun making it your own!

Minestrone alla Saskatchewan in July

2 tbsp olive oil

1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3-4 small zucchini
Bunch of baby carrots
Handful of green beans
Handful of edible pod peas
Bunch of baby spinach and chard
1/4 cup herbs: parsley, rosemary, oregano, thyme, basil
6 Roma-style tomatoes
2 cups cooked white beans
Salt and pepper
6 cups chicken broth (or water)
2 cups short pasta, cooked

Heat oil in a soup pot. Sauté onions and garlic until soft. Meanwhile, cut zucchini and carrots into rounds or half rounds, depending on their size. Chop green beans, peas, spinach and chard into bite-sized chunks. Add these vegetables to the pot.

 

Finely chop a mix of herbs, tasting it to ensure a pleasing balance. (Don't let the parsley overwhelm!) Stir the herbs into pot. Chop the tomatoes and add them with the beans. Season with 1 tsp salt and many grinds of pepper.

 

Cook until the vegetables and herbs are warm and fragrant. Add the broth and simmer for 20 minutes. Taste and add more seasoning as needed.

 

To serve, place cooked noodles (I used little bowties) in each soup bowl and pour on the hot soup. It's quite Italian to sprinkle on a bit of Parmesan cheese.

Ginormous Beet Soup

My garden produced an average beet crop. That is, average-sized beets. And then I pulled out this monster. Either it was raised on steroids or it got an extra shot of compost -- perhaps, to a beet, that's one in the same.

The average-sized beets found their way into beet and walnut salad. This gal, well, she deserves a place of honour in the soup pot!

Soup Challenge 2010

Whew... just finished Soup #52... thus completing a year's worth of Saskatchewan-based soups. Over the month of December I cooked up:

Week 49 - Lentil and Sausage
Week 50 - Pork Shish Kabob (made with leftover shish kabob)
Week 51 - Chicken Noodle (which became...)
Week 51 1/2 - Chicken Carrot and Chickpea
Week 52 - Christmas Ham Spilt Pea Soup (made with leftover ham)

So, I must decide my new food resolution for 2011...

Soup Week 47 - Faba Bean

Larry Marshall, an organic farmer from Shellbrook, gave me a yogurt container filled with his dried faba beans. Like so many crops we grow in Saskatchewan, faba beans originate in the Middle East. (Rumour has it, faba beans were found in the ruins of Jericho, circa 6200 BCE.)

Also known as broad beans, they are gaining popularity among Saskatchewan farmers who practice crop rotation (planting different crops on the land each year, usually in a four-year cycle) thanks in part to new varieties developed at the University of Saskatchewan specifically for our growing conditions.

I wish I could tell you where to buy Saskatchewan-grown faba beans, but as far as I know, they are not available in stores.  

Soup Week 46 - Beans and Wieners

Suddenly it's cold, and hubby's working outdoors in the snow. Here's the view from my new kitchen window. Obviously, this man needs soup.

Soup Week 45 - Fish soup

Leftover Lake Diefenbaker trout, carrots, tomatoes and potatoes - and a fish stock made the day before with the fish head. Never discard a fish head...

Soup Week 44 - Memories of Meadow Lake

I picked up this bag of Yukon Gold potatoes in Meadow Lake while at a book event for Prairie Feast. Then John got overly ambitions and cooked up a mess of mashed potatoes. 

I will confide, I'm not a big fan of mashed potatoes, so I turned them into soup. Add onions, bacon and chanterelle mushrooms and, well, those mashed potatoes were mighty good. I hardly noticed them!

My Saskatchewan soup project is in the home stretch -- just a handful of weeks to go in my New Year's resolution to cook 52 soups, one for each week in 2010.

Soup Week 43 - Lentil Carrot Bacon

Grandma Lou's lentils in another pot of soup. I must admit that I accidentally burnt the soup (of course, who would burn soup on purpose?). To overcome the burnt taste, we added bacon, carmelized onions and honey. Not bad!

Soup Week 42 - Grandma Lou's Lentils

Grandma Lou is a good cook, and she has the lentils to prove it.

Grandma Lou (aka Louise McDougall) farms with her family near Moose Jaw. They have packaged their lentils, chickpeas and flax under the label of Grandma Lou's, complete with recipes.

I made Grandma Lou's lentil soup, but since I can't stand to follow recipes, I substituted chanterelle mushrooms for the potatoes and instead of celery, I used carrots (orange and yellow), then spiced it with a bit of cumin. Voila - délicieux!

Check out Grandma Lou's website for purchasing information.

Soup Week 41 - Chicken Coconut

While moving into my new house, I discovered a can of coconut milk which I believe has been in my pantry for a very long time. So, rather than move it, I made it the basis for a lovely soup with the leftovers of my Thanksgiving chicken.

1 can coconut milk (2 cups)

3 cups chicken broth (homemade)

1 handful of leftover chicken

1 tbsp finely chopped ginger

2 chopped banana peppers (from my garden)

2 cups chopped chanterelle mushrooms (local, of course)

1/4 cup fish sauce

1 small leek, finely sliced (farmer's market)

1/2 lemon

salt and pepper to taste

Put everything in the pot. Bring to a boil, then simmer until it's cooked and yummy (I simmered it with the lid on about one hour). Remove lemon before serving.

Soup Week 40 - Potato Leek Corn Chowder

...with crumbled bacon. Rats, forgot to take a picture again.

Soup Week 39 - Pototo Leek

Bought leeks and potatoes at the farmers' market this weekend...

Soup Week 38 -- Corn and Bean Soup

Last week's soup was delicious but I felt something was missing -- so I added a can of mixed beans. (No not locally grown, except perhaps for the chickpeas.) Voila, a whole new soup. That's the beauty of soup. It's always a work in progress...

Soup Week 37 - Corn and zucchini soup

I love soup. I love making soup. I love making soup without a recipe, just composing it as I go along with ingredients I have on hand. So, if anyone should ask for the recipe to this delicious fall soup, well, there isn't one! But I can tell you how I made it:

1) Cut the kernals off three or four raw cobs of corn. Place the de-kerneled cobs in a soup pot along with a big carrot, a celery stalk and a spring of fresh thyme. Cover with 6-8 cups of water and boil. Turn down and simmer about an hour. Strain the stock (placing and vegetables in the compost -- gotta keep the worms fed, too). Clean out the soup pot.

2) Melt a nob of butter in the soup pot. Add a chopped onion and one chopped clove of garlic. Cook until soft. Add one red pepper, chopped in a small dice. Cook until soft. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and chopped fresh thyme leaves. Add corn kernels. Pour on the corn cob stock and bring to a bubble. Turn town and simmer until the corn is cooked.

3) Add two chopped zucchini -- one yellow and one green. I used young zucchini about 2 cm across. Since it was young, I didn't peel it. If you're using bigger older zucchini, you might want to peel it and scoop out the pithy centre before adding it to the soup. At the same time, add a tbsp (more or less) of fresh chopped basil.

Simmer until the zucchini is tender. It won't take long. Taste the soup and add salt and pepper if it needs more. Yumm.