<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Monday, October 11, 2004

Soup Season 

As we wait for word on financing (and Manager seeks new stockholders and other avenues of financing), we settle into the Soup Season.

One of the nice things about soup is the ability to make the "pre-soup" things ahead of time. The same "pre-soup" recipes can be used for multiple soups. A mirepoix, for example, is just a sauteed blend of several standard vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, garlic.

In India, many of the soups have a "pre-soup" of sauteed herbs and spices - black mustard seed, coriander, cardamom, peppers, cinnamon.

We've created a Daily Soup that starts off with the same base, but depending on what we add to that base, we can change the nationality of the soup. So far, we have variants for Irish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Greek, and Egyptian.

This Daily Soup is vegetarian in creation, but it wouldn't take much to make it a meat soup, just a small addition of mutton, pork, chicken, or beef.

Being in a landlocked state, we haven't explored the options of seafood soups, mainly because we really can't get truly fresh seafood, only frozen stuff. Our clam chowder, for example, suffers severely with canned clams. Most of the time, we simply leave the clams out and have just a potato chowder.

And yes, yes, the Manly Man Stew will make an appearance on our Soup Menu. It won third place in the Manly Stew Competition, up against professional chefs.

It's easy to cook for most men. If you put meat, potatoes, lima beans, and tomatoes in it, most men will love it. Toss in a bit of bird and some corn, and they'll follow you home.

Our Manly Man Stew has mesquite smoked chuck, beer butt chicken, potato balls, lima beans, extra tiny diced tomatoes, corn, caramelized onions, and olive oil in it. The flavor is soul satisfying, and the soup is filling, especially when paired with Mexicali Corn Bread.

Women want it pretty as well as tasty. Even though we facetiously named the stew the Manly Man Stew, it has a clear ruddy broth that showcases the yellow corn, green limas, and white potatoes, and the dark meat deepens the color, making it autumnal colored.

We chose to keep the broth clear rather than gravy-like because we wanted those colors to shine through. A gravy would have made the soup duller in appearance, although no less delicious.

A spicy Mexicali Cornbread goes well with this stew, but so does a sourdough rosemary carrot bread, or a light and fluffy feather roll.

A medium roast Peruvian coffee complements it well, or a light apricot blend iced tea.


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?