{ ffwd } bowls of soup

It’s been a while since I’ve participated in FFwD. Life and new projects have been keeping me busy these past couple of months. I feel slightly guilty about this. I’ve been wanting to post something for quite some time now but lately the scheduled recipes require that I trek to specialty stores downtown. I know that it’s a little extra effort I’ve signed up for when I joined this group but frankly these past few weeks have been so crazy that I just want to cook something simple, with ingredients that are readily available from my local grocery store around the corner. But me wanting something simpler doesn’t mean that I’ve put away my AMFT. In fact lots of Dorie recipes are quite simple and I’ve made lots of them recently. In an attempt to get my groove back into blogging, I’d like to share some of those photos with you. And although I’m not posting the correct recipe for this week’s FFwD, I’ll at least honour the theme: soup! Glorious bowls of soup.

So first up, corn soup. Since I live in the tropics, my local grocery store stocks up on corn all year round. And they taste really sweet too. I think they come from Indonesia, Malaysia and/or Thailand. Corn is basically a staple in this house. So I decided to make Dorie’s corn soup a few weeks ago. I remember that it was quite easy to make, although taking the kernels off the cob will always be a messy affair, it was fun to make. It was also very creamy and quite thick as well – which we like, although I remember that it was milk that I put into the soup and not heavy cream.

Second, creamy cauliflower soup – sans cream. This soup was dreamy. I loved the velvety texture and even more of the fact that it had zero cream in it. I liked this soup so much that I wanted to serve this when we had guests over last week. Sadly it didn’t make the cut because the grocery store ran out of good-looking cauliflower and we were left with the sad looking ones. So we decided to make something else that night. But this soup has definitely become a favourite that I’ll be making again and again. I think I might even roast the cauliflower next time..

Stone soup: a.k.a clean your fridge soup. It might seem like a boring vegetable soup, but I assure you that it’s chockfull of flavours. The herbs were crucial in defining this soup, without them it’s just a plain old boring soup. I also love that this soup can be really flexible. You can use any unloved leftover vegetables you have lying around in the fridge. I decided to leave the veggies in chunks this time and we quite liked sipping on the clear broth.

Next, potato and leek soup. How did this one rate? Well… it was not very memorable. Very thin, too thin.. and did I mention watery as in, it didn’t have much flavour in it. It wasn’t a disaster either but definitely have to do some tweaking to make this soup work.

And last but not least, warm weather vegetable pot-au-feu. Yes, perfect for the warm weather, thus for us. We liked this soup. It had a very unique flavour, almost Asian-like with the lemongrass. The shiitake mushrooms were a nice addition to the soup and top it with a poached soft-boiled egg, it was perfect!

Check out:

• Dorie Greenspan’s book: “Around My French Table”
• French Fridays with Dorie
• Amazon page for Dorie’s book