“Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP!”
Are scientists generally good cooks? asks Sarbjit.
Not this one, I can tell you that ! But I’m learning…
As I wrote before , my resolution for 2009 was to learn to cook five awesome dishes. Three people kindly left recipes in the comments of that post, and a few weeks ago I decided to give Åsa’s soup a try. It seemed more simple than Henry’s recipe, and Steffi suggested something with ginger, which is the one food item I sometimes find really gross (especially when it’s chopped in pieces) so I went with the safest recipe.
Potatoes, onions, and leek were on my shopping list, but when I wandered through the store there was no leek to be seen. They recently rearranged the vegetables, and the organic ones are now separate from the rest, so I looked at both sections. No leek. I looked again, and again, until I found a sign that said “leek” next to an empty compartment. Huh. Disappointment. I lacked the culinary creativity to come up with a whole new dish right then and there in the supermarket. Couldn’t I make it without the leek? Could I maybe substitute something else? Onions are kind of like leek, and chives taste very similar, so I decided to jump off the deep end and experiment.
I should remind you that, despite being a lousy cook, I’m an above average baker. I have made pumpkin pie twice, both times using this recipe but never doing what it said and rambunctiously adding apple or too many spices or whole wheat flour.
Replacing leek with onion and chives in a non-dessert food, however, was a whole new kind of scary. That’s like using the wrong TRIS buffer, and that can be absolutely devastating to your experiments! But the soup turned out fine! It was a bit mashed-potato-textured, so I knew to add more water next time, but it tasted just fine.
Did it taste the right kind of fine, though? I had to find out. There’s the scientist attitude! So today I made the soup again, with leek this time, and with more water. It tasted… pretty much the same! If there was any difference, it was the amount of onion. I only had a small onion this time, and it didn’t even make me cry when I cut it, so it wasn’t as strong as the one I had before. The chives as leek replacement, though, were uncanny.
Conclusion: I experimented in the kitchen and it worked!
Discussion and Suggestions For Future Work: I have one dish down, four to go! This dish was vegetarian if you add the sour cream and vegan if you leave it out so I’ll see what the tally is at the end of the year to see where it counts. For now, I’m just very proud that I cooked something with total disregard for protocol and still made it taste good.
Thanks, Åsa!
That sounds so delish and very scientifically innovated- I love it! But don’t tell the Welsh, they may be reticent to wear an onion and chive on St David’s day….
But there’s no doubt in my mind that if you did the analysis the right kind of onion and chive would contain chemicals common to leek.
Your desserts sound interesting.
What, you don’t put leek in your desserts?
Sounds like you’re experimenting with creativity! Recipes (and recipe books) are a great place to get an idea for a dish, but it’s way more fun to take the basic idea and add your own twist. This might be forced upon you by the availability of ingredients, as you’ve discovered, but there’s always a tasty way to get around these issues.
So, continue to enjoy expanding your culinary repertoire, just don’t get too scientific about it.
But a caramelised leek and chocolate fondue sounds pretty interesting.
I’m mostly trying to get myself in a state of mind where I can think of Things To Have For Dinner. Right now, I get hungry, I have no food, I go to the store, and by that time I’m so hungry that I have no time to cook and end up with something ready-made or something that can be microwaved or eaten raw/cold. Ask me to think of something to cook and I’m almost clueless. I can make pasta/rice and all that, but it doesn’t occur to me to think of combinations of vegetables and what sauce to put on what food.
It has to be scientific, ’cause this is my science blog =P I tend to try and find the science angle in everything, so even in this. And cooking is quite obviously chemistry.
You know, Eva, I had never considered it. But I’ll have to organize a party, just to make Mike try his new idea…
caramelised leek and chocolate fondue
Don’t forget the pilchard and lemon curd sandwiches.
This is interesting. Maybe leeks are just overgrown chives. Now there’s an idea for St David’s Day – usually I wear a daffodil – but a little posy of chive flowers would make an interesting (if slightly smelly) talking point. And thanks for the recipe Asa – I could have done with this last week. I tried making lamb, leek and potato soup and it came out like wallpaper paste. We still ate it though.
hard to get good groceries here in Memphis :( I haven’t had an onion make me cry for years. Maybe I’ve become well kitchen ’ard.
This is often how I cook. I have a standard repetoire of a couple of dozen dishes and when I get bored I’ll search for a recipe on line, then go to shops and buy what I remember and do the rest from scratch. It usually comes out OK…
This is My Kitchen Project For ‘09, regarding beloved gf, who says she doesn’t like to cook, but has fun in the kitchen when pressured into it. The only problem is that she sucks at timing things so we eat at 10PM, one side dish will invariably be cold, and the whole is usually…interesting… like hot dogs with baked apples, boiled rice and sauteed celery. Not necessarily bad…just…weird…
One of the finest soups I ever had was leek and potato soup, made with my own potatoes, and my own leeks. Fresh, homegrown leeks are a universe away from shop-bought ones.
Me and Mrs Gee, on those days that we’re both at home at lunchtime, now make a warming miso soup with noodles in it, which keeps us happy right through the afternoon; Mrs Gee makes a fabulous fish pie (I’ve jusst had some). I don’t think you’d like my cookery, though, as I tend to put chopped root ginger in everything.
More seriously – I reckon lab life is the quick way to poor health, if one eats odd things at odd times and relies on microwave meals and fast food. One way to get round this is to buy a slow-cooker. Put everything in before you leave for work … it’ll be great when you get home. Mrs Gee came up with some great Moroccan-style recipes involving lamb (excellent when cooked slowly), pearl barley and so on.
I’ve got a great slow-cooker, called a croc pot over here. Except it’s big enough to feed six/cook a large housecat. So it just doesn’t get used as much as I’d like ($$$).
But, to get it all ready and switch on before work and have it ready 8,9 hrs later…perfick!
Ian – your method sounds similar to mine. I sometimes get an idea, or a crazed yearning to mix two ingredients together (e.g. celery and rhubarb), and then look through a few recipe books and/or online. Mainly I’m looking for endorsement that it’s not too crazy an idea and the mixture won’t kill anyone. If trying a particular dish then I like to look at different recipes and then make up my own.
The only downside of this is that things do often go a bit wrong. It didn’t matter so much when I was single, but now I get dark looks over the dinner table if something goes badly wrong (“I thought yorkshire puddings with lentil flour in would be tasty…not just solid biscuits”).
That taste chives, leeks and onions have in common is probably be cystein sulfoxide, since they all belong to the genus Allium.. I wonder whether they can all replace each other in cooking?
Franks rhubarb and celery experiment sounds more daring though. Did you really do this, Frank? In what kind of dish?
Steffi – I haven’t done it yet. I was planning it as an accompaniment to roast lamb or pork (I think pork is better) but got delayed on Saturday evening and couldn’t find rhubarb quickly when I wanted it. I think I’ll need to do use young celery so it’s less stringy. Or I might use fennel root.
For the record, I have now also tried Henry’s macaroni recipe (from the comments in the same post ). There’s a story there: I couldn’t make it sooner because I could never remember all the ingredients, and always forgot to bring a list to the store. Then I found out that Whole Foods has wifi and I used my iPod touch to surf to the original post and look at the ingredients in the store. I substituted Korean chili sauce with Thai chili sauce. I know, they’re two totally different countries, but I couldn’t find anything Korean in the entire store.
The macaroni was indeed yummy!