Recipe (Vegan) Welcome Home Soup

SatNavSaysStraightOn

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This is another from my Sweet Bones cookbook for the recipe from a cook book with little to no use... It's only had little to no use because it's new. Technically I think the challenge is to use cookbooks that you've not cooked from before, but I honestly only have 1 that I purchased (3 came with equipment purchased and contain both meat/fish and dairy products, none if which we eat), so it's books we've used but recipes we've not yet made.

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Ingredients
2 tbsp macadamia oil
1 onion, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp hot curry powder
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 bunch kale, destalked, roughly torn and washed.
2 carrots, sliced
2 field mushrooms, chunkily chopped
3 medium potatoes, diced (1cm)
2.5 L boiling water
2 tsp vegetable stock
1 tin coconut cream
200g baby plum tomatoes/cherry tomatoes
Seasoning.

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(Celery and bananas not included! )

Method
  1. Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the onions and cook until starting to brown.
  2. Add the garlic and curry powder
  3. Add the washed kale and the soy sauce. Don't shake the water off the kale, use it to stop the pan from sticking. Add a little more if needed and cook for a minute or two.
  4. Add the carrots, potatoes and mushrooms, cook for another few minutes, stirring as needed.
  5. Add the water and stock powder and cook for 5 minutes.
  6. Add the coconut cream and tomatoes, stir well and cook for 10-15 minutes. Check the potatoes are cooked at 10 minutes and if they are not cook for the remaining 5 minutes. If cooked, serve.

Observations, a lot of the recipes in the book use macadamia oil, but it's not cheap. $6 for 250ml is a lot for oil in my book. But I guess I pay similar for decent local olive oil. So first time around I'll use macadamia oil, next time around it will be with whatever is available on my oil shelf.
Several other thoughts have come to mind making the recipe. Carrots like potatoes and bunches of kale, all vary in size. My carrots being the 'odd bunch' are quite small. Actually they are very small, often only half a carrot. They are the rejects that a lot of supermarkets now sell. So I'm doubling them. My mushrooms are white field mushrooms, so I'm only using 2. My tin of coconut cream is 100% coconut kernel extract.

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Similarly the same coconut milk by the company is 96% or 97% coconut kernel extract with the remainder being water. There is nothing else in my coconut milk, so I don't bother buying the coconut milk, only the cream. And I'll only add 1 tin (I've only got 1 tin), so I'll top up the water levels by 1 tin. What else? The cherry tomatoes didn't look very ripe in the supermarket yesterday so I got some baby plum solanato ones instead. Roughly half of these are bigger than cherry tomatoes size (they're more like baby plum tomatoes) so I've cut them in half).

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The recipe says to add 2 vegetable stock cubes. I don't have stock cubes and I don't know what volume of water they usually get dissolved in (½ or ¼L per cube? ) so I've added just 2 tsp of my usual which equates to 500ml total. That means the rest of the 2L of boiling water is plain water... I also don't have the garnishes including the sriracha sauce. The closest I have to a hot red pepper sauce is tabasco. We'll see...
 
Bananas? That seems very strange to me.... at what stage are they supposed to be added? (I know you can't eat them).

Celery - makes sense. Why did you leave it out?

Its a pretty yellow colour - is that from the curry powder?
:laugh: No, it was a reference to the photo! There celery and bananas in the photo in the background!:giggle:
 
I'll try for a better photo of the recipe tonight. One that perhaps doesn't feature an egg in the middle of it.
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We're not certain about the recipe. Don't get us wrong, it's not bad but it doesn't remind us of a tex-mex dish but more of a Thai dish we know as lhaksa (or some variation of that spelling wise). Perhaps it's the curry powder we use, or perhaps it is the coconut cream/milk that came through a touch too much for us not to think Thai. We're using Clive of India (brand name) Hot Curry Powder which we're very fond of. But 1tbsp wasn't anywhere near enough and after eating it like that once, we both wanted more added which we will do tomorrow.

Would adding sriracha sauce to it help? We're not certain. I think switching out the coconut cream/milk would probably help. Or just halving it (remember we only used 1 tin, the original recipe called for 1 tin of coconut cream and 1 tin of coconut milk but failed to say what size tin. Both coconut milk and coconut cream come in a variety of different sizes and if you go with a standard 400ml tin, 1 of each is just excessive). I reckon it would probably work equally as well with a cashew nut cream to give it a slight creaminess.

Would we cook it again. Certainly but with some changes. More garlic for 1, more curry powder, switch coconut milk and coconut cream for cashew nut cream/milk. You could easily mix and match with the veg. Even serve it over noodles if you stayed using coconut milk/cream. But for me as a soup for a vegan meal, it lacks protein (hence why we added an egg or two with us being vegan plus eggs). How to add extra protein, kidney beans would help with that tex-mex theme and some protein.

Edmame beans would add loads of protein and work well with noodles and even tofu chunks which would probably give a well balanced meal. That gives me an idea for tomorrow nights portion. I've also got a spare fresh red chilli...
 
Your analysis sounds spot on - I thought most of what you said from reading the ingredients. In particular, what leapt out at me from reading the list, was that given the sheer quantity of vegetables and volume of soup being made, the quantity of spice and garlic added seemed minimal.

I personally don't like recipes that say add curry powder (unless they are specifying a brand) because as we all know, curry powder can not only vary in strength but can vary wildly in the ingredients used.

On the plus side, the look of the soup is good and the vegetables are nice and chunky and colourful.
 
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