burnt toast

Ever felt like soup in spring? Yeah, maybe not. But maybe you totally do? Maybe you really love soup, especially now, around Easter, when you can’t bear to look another chocolate bunny in the eye. Then my dear friend, this tangy and aromatic tomato and lentil soup might just be the thing for you. It’s wonderful on its own, but I especially love it with some crusty bread  slathered with some cream cheese.

As with most recipes, this is more of a blueprint than anything else. As long as you have the rasam powder, you can add and subtract whatever your stomach desires. However, make sure you don’t leave out the toasted coconut – it really completes it.

Rasam powder

Make sure you either have a pestle and mortar or a solid spice grinder to make the rasam powder. The lentils brought my usual grinder to the brink of cracking, so if you’re unsure whether yours will make it, stick to pestle and mortar.¼ cup/ 50g split chickpeas

¼ cup / 50g yellow lentils (or whatever other lentil you have around)

1 cup / 60g coriander seeds

2 Tbsp / 20g cumin

2 tsp black pepper corns

1-2 tsp chilli flakes (go easy on those- remember, you can always spice things up later)

½ tsp asafoetida

2 Tbsp ground fenugreek

2 Tbsp ground turmeric

small handful dried curry leaves

Toast the pulses in a pan until golden and smelling nicely nutty. Cool for a moment then grind with a pestle and mortar or if you’re more one for speed and convenience, a strong blender.

Toast the coriander, cumin, pepper and chilli flakes until a shade darker. Let cool, then grind with the asafoetida, fenugreek, turmeric, and curry leaves.

Combine with the ground pulses and transfer into a lidded jar.

Will keep for a couple of months.

Tomato rasam

5 Tbs desiccated coconut

1-2 tbs ghee or butter

1 tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

3 garlic cloves, sliced

6-10 dried curry leaves (less if fresh, more if dried)

500g cherry tomatoes, chopped

100g lentils (whatever you’ve got on hand. Just remember they’ll vary in cooking time. I tend to use red lentils for a speedy soup, yellow if I have more time)

1.5 litres of stock

6 tsp rasam powder

half a bunch of coriander, chopped

1 tsp tamarind concentrate, or more to taste

1 tsp brown sugar, to taste

salt, more chilli

In a big pot, toast the coconut until golden. Transfer to a bowl and keep for later.

Melt butter and add mustard and cumin seeds. Let them bubble around until the seeds starts to pop. Add the garlic cloves and the curry leaves, and leave to fry a little longer until the garlic takes on a little bit of colour.

Add the tomatoes, cooking them until mushy.

Add the lentils and the stock, along with the tamarind and rasam powder and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and cook until the lentils are done. Again, this time can vary from 20 minutes to over an hour. If you’d prefer, you can pre-cook the lentils and add them as the same time as you would the dried ones.

When the lentils are cooked (preferably on the completely soft side, rather than al dente. Who even eats al dente lentils anyway), add the coriander, tamarind, sugar, salt and chilli to taste. Let all of it bubble for about 10 more minutes.

Serve!

Gazpacho has always reminded me of  that one summer in Spain – of cripplingly hot days, late meals on the terrace, and of thick, creamy gazpacho, made of mostly tomatoes, torn tufts of fluffy white baguette, and masses of olive oil. Every gazpacho that came after that was a disappointment. They were either too chunky, too watery, and always lacking enough salt. All everyone was doing was blending up salad and I wasn’t impressed.

Things needed to change guys. And finally, they did. This summer, in Ardèche, at the local supermarket.  France, with their carton-encased gazpacho from the chilled product isle, had all the answers to the questions I didn’t even know I had. It was delicious. And we had it nearly every night. Before you roll your eyes at me and tell me that you’re not a gazpacho sort of person anyway, focus those eyeballs of yours back on my face and listen. I’ve spent the past week trying to recreate that bottled soup at home and I know what its secrets are now. No, not bread. I don’t want blended bread in my gazpacho. I do want bread with it though, whole and crusty, to dip into the soup at the end. No, the silent winner of this recipe is the tinned tomato. The flavour is so much more well rounded than that of fresh (and at times acidic and watery) tomatoes. The second part to this recipe’s success is the comparatively small amount of cucumber. You only need a small hit, enough to add a hint of refreshing watery coolness, not a whole plate of it.  Finally, make sure you salt it well. This seems like an obvious instruction, but because the soup is cold, and because people tend to think of it as juice, they tend to under-salt it. So go on, give it a try. You might even love it a little bit.

Gazpacho

Unless you have a vitamix, you will have to do this my way with a hand held blender. Make sure you peel and de-seed the cucumber and the capsicum, because there’s nothing worse than having capsicum skin stuck in your teeth.

And just a suggestion for those still weary of this whole gazpacho business – don’t overdo it when serving it. A small bowl or even glass of it will do. Think of gazpacho as more of an amuse bouche than a full-on course, as something to dip your bread into and whet your appetite before you head on to your main dish.

You can either serve it immediately, at room temperature, or one or two days after making it. Just remember to take it out of the fridge at least half an hour before you intend to serve it.

Enough as an entrée for 4 people

A 400g can of whole plum tomatoes

One red capsicum

One shallot

1/3 of a cucumber

100ml water (or more)

4 – 5 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 tsp red wine vinegar

1 – 1 ½ salt, to taste

To serve

More olive oil, cracked black pepper, chilli flakes, maybe some green leafy herb, cherry tomatoes, and crusty bread

If you’re using a hand-held blender, do this in batches, one or two vegetables at a time. This ensures that you don’t have a chunky texture of different-textured veggies.

Get out your blender and two jugs. Start off with the plum tomatoes. Empty them into one of the jugs and give them a good blend. Add a few splashes of the water if you need to loosen it a bit. Once smooth, pour into the second jug. Quarter and de-seed the capsicum. With a vegetable peeler, peel away the skin. Yes, this may seem a little fiddly, but you’ll get the hang of it. Squish the capsicum towards the peeler and you’ll get all the more tricky bits, too. Add the capsicum to the jug and while you’re at it, finely chop the shallot and add it as well. The two are sort of similar in toughness, so they blend quite well together. Blend until smooth, adding a little of the water again to loosen it and make it easier to blend. Once completely smooth, add to the tomatoes. Finally, peel and core the cucumber, chop and chuck in the blender. Add a little more of the water and, surprise, also blend until smooth. Add the cucumber to the other blended veggies and add the olive oil, vinegar and salt (start with half a teaspoon, then add to taste), and give it all another blend. Add more water if you’d like it a little more liquidy.

Now pour into glasses or little bowls and decorate with a dribble of olive oil, some pepper, maybe some herbs and some deliciously crusty bread.

Also, surprisingly delicious mixed with tequila for a bloody Maria.

I love this recipe. I know you probably make your own version of this and probably more frequently than me. But if you have the time to give this one a try, then do, because to me, it’s the best I’ve ever had. Here, instead of chucking everything into a baking dish and waiting forever till it’s done, you pre-boil the potatoes in the cream mixture, which not only makes it nice and creamy, but also cuts down the baking time considerably. If you’re not sure whether you should go for a medium / deep dish or a large / shallow one, go for the latter. Maximise that surface area to get the most of that caramelised cheesy goodness you get in the end.

Potato Gratin

Adapted from here.

Serves 4-6 people

500ml milk

250ml cream

2 garlic cloves, crushed

3 tsp vegetable stock powder

a few gratings of nutmeg

1 kg waxy potatoes, peeled and finely sliced

salt and pepper

80-150g gruyere (or more), grated

chopped parsley (if you can bother)

Combine the milk, cream, garlic, stock powder, and nutmeg in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the potatoes and bring to a simmer, cooking them until they just start to soften. Remove from the heat. See if it needs any more salt, and add a few grindings of pepper.

In the meantime, preheat the oven to 200°C. Transfer the potato and cream mixture into a baking dish. Sprinkle over the 80 grams of grated cheese. Now, side note here – If you LOVE cheese, feel free to stir extra into the sauce before transferring it into the dish, and then layering more of it between the layers of potato. I swear I love cheese too, but here I don’t think it’s necessary. But you do you, k? Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until golden and bubbly.

I like myself a good G&T as much as the next aficionado, but I do get bored with it pretty quickly. I need some pizazz. The current favourite around here is the cucumber and black pepper combination, which is wonderful in its own right. And after two of those, crunching on a diluted strand of gourd, I have often wondered what other fridge ingredients could be added to amp up the next phase of the evening… and this is what I found. A lovely friendship of flavours, somewhere between a martini and a gin and tonic, with enough goodies thrown in to keep you satisfied till the end.

The Barcelonian (G&T)

Inspired by this recipe

Ice (at least 5 cubes)

30ml gin

a squeeze of lemon juice

a lemon twist

one big green olive (preferably Sicilian)

one caper berry

a sprig of rosemary, smacked with the back of a spoon to release some of the delicious oils

60-80ml tonic water

a pinch of Maldon sea salt

Get yourself a glass and add the ingredients one by one until you’ve topped everything up with tonic water. Finish everything of with the salt. Donesies.