Tuscan Bean Soup

I read a site devoted to foodies called "Chowhound" because it has one of the more active forums and communities among various food-related web sites. Unfortunately, as is the wont of foodies everywhere, they can be rather snobbish when it comes to food. I once bore witness to some of the more common variety of this in a discussion about garlic. One person turned his nose up at the very notion of using powdered garlic in recipes. Another, quite appropriately, said that he couldn't imagine using raw garlic in his egg or tuna salad.

The irony of a lot of food snobbery is that the attitudes were the opposite in the distant culinary past. The reason we have dried spices rather than use fresh ones was that they wouldn't travel well. People in England who were fortunate enough to have access to dried, ground cinnamon saw it as something worth more than an equivalent weight in silver. They had something rare and precious that would last. 

The only reason we can be snobs about fresh vs. dried spices is that we have the luxury of allowing spices to go to waste. When I buy a bunch of fresh cilantro for 99 cents at the market, I know I'm never going to use all of it before it goes bad, and I make some pretty cilantro-heavy recipes that use more than most. I have to freeze the remainder or toss it when the remains go off.

When I found this recipe for Tuscan bean soup, I had to choose between doing some specialty shopping for fresh parsley, pancetta, and dry beans, or use what I had on hand - dried parsley, regular thick-cut bacon, and canned beans. I opted for the latter, but I did my best to retain as much of the original recipe as possible. 

Usually, I don't list the recipes ingredients here because I don't want to rob the Times of their page views. In this case, I changed enough that I'm going to list out what I used, but I didn't change quantities or essential ingredients; I changed quantities (I cut the recipe in half) and form:

Ingredients:

• 2 slices thick-cut bacon
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 tablespoons dried parsley
• 1 small bay leaf
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 1 (15.8 oz.) can Great Northern White beans
• 3 Roma tomatoes, pureed
• salt and pepper, to taste

Since I was using canned beans, I had to cook the onions separately. My method was as follows:

Heat a large Dutch oven over medium heat. Cook bacon slices until crisp and brown. Remove from the pan, leaving bacon fat and drippings behind (this was my substitute for the olive oil in the Times recipe). 

Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the diced onions and cook for about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and saute until the strong smell diminishes (about five more minutes). Stir in the parsley and bay leaf; add black pepper and salt to taste. Cook until the onions are no longer releasing moisture through vapor and are thoroughly (about five more minutes). The mix should be very fragrant now.

Add the can of beans, liquid included, and then fill the can with water, add to soup pot, and stir everything together. Bring to a simmer, cover with a lid, and cook for about 10 minutes. Add the pureed tomatoes and simmer for another 15 minutes. 

Remove half of the soup and puree in a blender. Add the puree back into the soup and stir. Taste and add more salt if desired. Crumble the reserved bacon and either stir back into the soup (adds flavor) or serve as a garnish on top (retains texture). 

I actually used more garlic than I'm listing here, but I realized it was too much and have adjusted the recipe here. It isn't overbearing, but I had to really cook it down to diminish the amount of strong garlic flavor. I think that can be avoided by using less garlic.

I have another recipe for Tuscan white bean soup and this one caught my eye because it is so different. Mine uses thyme and lemon juice. This uses parsley and tomato. When I smelled the finished soup, the aroma reminded me of minestrone. The texture was a creamy,  yet still chunky, delight. There is no picture of this soup on the Times recipe page, but this is what mine looked like:

The flavor is more "beany" than some if you don't drain the beans. I prefer it undrained, but I guess drained beans would provide a less robust white bean experience. I liked that the flavors were somewhat delicate while still being very present. Usually, I use some sort of meat stock flavoring (like bouillon) in my soups to give it a strong, savory backbone. This was relying much more heavily on the vegetables and spices so the sense was less intense, but in no way flavorless or boring. The tomatoes also shone through a bit which lent a nice warmth to the soup.

This is an excellent soup to have as a complete meal and I'm sure I'll make it again some time.

Meera Sodha's Chicken Curry

A big part of the purpose of this blog is to motivate myself to try new things. I'll admit that I'm not new to curry in terms of consuming it nor making it. I've been trying to perfect truly good curry and sampling various recipes for the last year or so.

I spent years making curry-like concoctions that were fine, but nothing like the sublime experiences that I had when going to a good Indian restaurant. I've perfected a really fantastic almond curry (murgh badami) recipe that I discovered online. It has become my husband's favorite and it has a good deal of depth of flavor. It's a rare recipe that has no cumin and gets richness from the almonds.

While my husband can't get enough of the murgh badami, I don't want to exclusively focus on it. I've been trying for some time to get a tomato-based recipe that reminds me of the steaming bowls of curry offered at Indian establishments, and I've largely failed. It is for this reason that I decided to try The New York Time's oft-mentioned (on Facebook) recipe for Meera Sodha's chicken curry.

The picture on the Time's recipe is very vibrantly red. I think the picture is color adjusted digitally to look that way given that I followed the recipe fairly closely and mine was brownish orange. My tomatoes were plenty red, and I used good quality tomato paste which was thick and a rich red shade, but mine looked like this:

I think that the turmeric brought out a lot of the orange shades and the yogurt lightened the overall vibrancy. This isn't an important point, but I do wish that pictures weren't manipulated to make them look less realistic than the result. That being said, my curry is definitely less photogenic than the one on the Times.

The alternations I made were based on my experience with previous curries. Instead of adding the yogurt separately near the end, I marinated the chicken in the yogurt overnight with about a half teaspoon of  salt, a teaspoon of garlic powder, and about a half teaspoon of chili powder. I do this because my husband is the main consumer of my curries and he dislikes dry white meat. Marinating the chicken in yogurt for eight hours or more makes sure that it is flavorful and tender.

Beyond marinating in the yogurt with a few extra spices, the only changes I made were to use three small serrano peppers because that was what I had instead of jalepeno or cayenne. I also didn't want the curry to be too hot because my husband can't tolerate too much heat. To that end, I also skipped adding a pinch of cayenne at the end as well. The garam masala was plenty hot enough to make up for these changes.

I also had to cook the onion mixture longer than the recipe said, but it has always been my experience that the amount of time it takes to get onions to the proper "golden" state is longer than recipes assert. I think they don't want to scare people off by listing the real cooking times, which can be intimidating in their length.

The end result was an excellent curry that was richly savory and slightly thick with a hint of heat. The tomato flavor merges and is mellowed by the onion and all of the spices come together with equal power to form an excellent backbone. Usually, it takes an overnight sit in the refrigerator for the flavors to fully merge in curry (at least for me), but this one seemed to pull together very rapidly and tastes great right off the burner. This is one I'd definitely make again with the hopes of repeatinf the same result.