As Strong As Soup

The recipe for this autumnal soup is based on something that I ate in a restaurant around 20 years ago, but it reminded me of a time long ago and of the music of Leonard Cohen. Early in the 1970s, there lived in South London a man who saw it as his mission in life to cook food for the waifs, strays, bad poets, questionable musicians and general hangers-on of the area. I'll call him Henry because, after all this time, I have to slightly misquote Dylan and admit that the only thing I can remember for sure about Henry is that his name wasn't Henry. The meals he made were often soups and always vegetarian. I'm fairly sure that they were made from the dodgy-looking veg they couldn't sell to normal people in Balham market. The meals were invariably accompanied by the sound of one of the first two Leonard Cohen albums. I assume he had some other records, but I don't remember him ever playing them. Although I've eaten a vast number of vegetarian dishes since then, inclu...

This oddly-nostalgic recipe might seem a bit strange these days but I was reminded of this savoury soup when I dredged the recipe for  Chicken Liver Pâté with Rum and Mango  out of my memory a while ago. Around the late eighties or early nineties, there was a brief trend among some British recipe writers to celebrate cooking with bananas. I remember a number of recipes for banana chutney (often very tasty), banana jam (interesting but usually ludicrously sweet) and soups such as this one. I've made this from memory, so it may not be entirely true to the period. I don't think of this as a hearty, lunchtime soup to satisfy your appetite after a hard morning's work. Rather, I think it's a soup to serve in small bowls as a starter. But what do I know? It's certainly a different way of enjoying bananas that's hopefully not too different for your guests. I seem to remember one restaurant serving a soup something like this with one or two freshly cooked prawns. I'...

The other day I was listening to a fine rendition of Erik Satie’s ‘Je te veux’ on the radio and, for some reason, I remembered that he claimed to eat only white food. This choice may have stemmed from an artistic desire for purity, although, let’s face it, Satie was as mad as a box of frogs a trifle eccentric. I started to imagine what I’d serve up if Satie came round for dinner. I wouldn't put it past him to turn up out of the blue with a bouquet of umbrellas in hand expecting to be fed. I'm not sure that being dead for nearly 90 years would stop him. The starter could be a white soup, I suppose, and maybe chicken in a white sauce for the main course. But this is definitely the dessert. My version of coconut rice pudding isn't dairy-free, because I like the silkiness that the dairy elements bring to the dish. The fromage frais not only gives some extra creaminess, but also adds a little sharpness, which I think lifts the flavour of the pudding. There are other elde...

I've pinched the idea of this tart case from a Donna Hay recipe. Essentially she uses a simple coconut macaroon recipe to make tart cases by shaping them in muffin tins. It might not be as adaptable as a conventional pastry tart case but with the right filling it makes a great alternative. For the filling, I've added rosewater to rice, which is a combination that seems to turn up everywhere from Greece to India and most places between. Finally, all that sweetness needs some dark chocolate on the top to balance it – or maybe I was just thinking about Bounty bars. This should make 8 – 10 tarts, depending on exactly how big your muffin tin might be. For the tart cases:         170 g desiccated coconut         120 g caster sugar         2 egg whites For the rice filling:         100 g short grain rice        ...

For this month’s Belleau Kitchen Random Recipe challenge I arbitrarily selected the book “Simple Good Food” by the formidable Jean-Georges Vongerichten, co-authored by the redoubtable Mark Bittman. This is an excellent book which I’ve used on many occasions – in fact, it tends to fall open at the Pork Baeckoffe page. This time, though, I opened it in the dessert section and came up with Coconut Sorbet. I've looked at this recipe in the past and somehow it just seemed too simple to work. Oh me of little faith – I now know that it's excellent. Really simple to make but delicious to eat. It's called a sorbet and technically I suppose it is but the result is a lot creamier than any normal sorbet and pure in both colour and taste. The sorbet worked really well alongside mango and berries dressed with a little lime juice but it was also lovely on its own. I've halved the quantity given in the book because that's all my little ice cream maker can handle but it still p...