It was a cold night during the extended holiday season. We had been indulging in everything one indulges in during that caloric time.
And so we wanted to eat something flavorful but healthful. Something that did not require a trip to the grocery store. So we shopped in the pantry and the refrigerator, though actually it was the freezer, and made a hearty, delicious seafood soup.
And then, like a lunkhead, I failed to write down the recipe. I didn't even think about it. It's not like I write about food for a living, or anything.
Still, a recent cold snap had me thinking once again of cooking up several batches of that most wintery of dishes, soup. Naturally, I started out by attempting to re-create that magnificent seafood dish.
A great seafood soup begins with a good seafood broth. You can buy it, but it's so easy to make one yourself. All you need is chicken broth, which I always keep on hand, and shrimp with shells on it. Just remove the shrimp shells, drop them in the broth and cook. After a few minutes, you have a superb, fresh-tasting (because it's freshly made) seafood broth.
Along with the usual soup suspects _ onions, garlic, carrots, celery and a single bay leaf _ I added a can of fire-roasted tomatoes for a mahogany-like depth. Only at the last minute or two did I add the shellfish: the peeled shrimp, which I had chopped, some langostinos, which I had also chopped, and a handful of clams.
It helped that we happened to have the langostinos in the freezer when I first made the soup. The second time I made it, for this story, I used frozen bay scallops. Either way, it was terrific.
Admittedly, the shellfish soup recipe is a little complicated, so for my next soup I made what has to be the world's easiest soup. Honestly, I do not understand how something that takes so little effort can taste so good.
All you do is plop some broccoli into boiling water, and then blend it with some of the water you boiled it in. Season it with a little salt and pepper, and you have a brightly flavored, remarkably satisfying soup.
The recipe comes from Gordon Ramsay, the invective-prone chef from England, which may explain the superior results. Ramsay also suggests topping each bowl with a couple of slices of goat cheese and a few walnuts, but he emphasizes that these are not necessary.
If you like goat cheese, use the goat cheese. It makes the soup even better.
In a similar vein, I made a carrot and red pepper soup, which comes from Chez Panisse, one of the most famous and influential restaurants in the country. This is actually two soups, a carrot soup and a red pepper soup, but neither is significantly harder than the broccoli soup.
The carrot soup is just carrots and onion simmered in water and then pureed with a splash of lemon juice for contrapuntal tang. The red pepper soup is just red bell peppers simmered in water (no onion) and then pureed (no lemon juice).
They are both simple, pure flavors. The magic comes in the presentation. You pour a bowl of the bright orange-yellow carrot soup and then carefully ladle a little of the red pepper soup in the middle. It looks simply glorious, and it tastes even better.
For a heftier, meal-like dish, I chose to make a chicken tortilla soup. This is a traditional dish, popular south of the border and north of it.
With this soup, you make your own chicken broth by simmering some chicken. Mark Bittman, the not-always-reliable cookbook author, makes an extraordinary suggestion that turns out to be entirely reliable: add a couple of beef bones to the broth for extra depth.
The beef is nontraditional and completely optional, but I highly recommend it if you can find the bones. If not, you can use a cut of beef with a lot of bone on it, such as short ribs or flanken _ which is short ribs sliced across the bone.
Another secret to this dish is the puree that you add back into the stock as a thickening agent. You put some of the stock into a blender and add a couple of tortillas that you have fried, a chipotle pepper or two, a little onion and some cilantro. This puree gives the soup some real heft, both in texture and especially in flavor.
The most fun part of any chicken tortilla soup, of course, are the garnishes. Once the soup is served, you can top it with a wedge of lime, shredded cheese, cilantro and, best of all, thin strips of fried tortilla.
For my final dish, I made what is perhaps the most famous soup of all, French onion soup. I made mine the traditional Parisian way, from my favorite cookbook, "Tasting Paris."
To be honest, I don't know what makes this version any more Parisian than any other. It is a relatively simple affair that begins with slow-caramelized onions, adds a lot of beef stock and a little white wine (maybe it's the wine that is so Parisian?) and ends with a dash of red wine vinegar to temper the sweetness of the onions.
Of course, French onion soup wouldn't be French onion soup without a couple of pieces of stale baguette floating on top, absolutely covered with an easily melted cheese such as Gruyere, all cooked under a hot broiler.
Assuming, of course, that the broiler in your brand-new oven works. Don't ask.
