The Soup
Me and my sweet sister have a few competitions going between us. To mention one, when donating blood we always compete in who has the highest score of red blood cells. But the most important competition we have going, is the one concerning The Soup. This is the most brilliant dish you will ever eat, and I mean it. I know I myself shrugged when my sister told me about this weird Nicaraguan soup a couple of years back. Neither was I too impressed when I tried it the first time, the second time I liked it, and the third time I was hooked. Hooked for life, I tell you. I eat this Soup 3-4 times every week, and I just can't seem to get bored of it. I have convinced several of my friends about the greatness of The Soup, and my sister has forced it on several of her friends. And this outlines our most important competition; who can recruit most new Soup-eaters. I think she is in the lead, but the competition is close! I am gaining on her every month. My excuse to her current lead is that she started recruiting before me. And if I ever lead I fear she will claim that since she recruited me, she is entitled to all my recruiting-points. But that's just cheating!
You need to try this soup, at least three times, then you'll be hooked! It might taste a bit different initially (I know I thought so), but it'll be worth it. You will find a new world, heaven in a bowl. At the end of this post there will be special instructions for how to boil the beans in advance (easy), but for now, lets assume that you have already made your nice chili/garlic beans, and are ready to cook your Soup. There are three things you need to do: 1. Fry/boil the rice, 2. defrost/heat your beans, and 3. prepare the soup bowl. Soon you will learn to do all three things simultaneously, but as a beginner I recommend you start off like this:
For 1 person:
1.5 dL (~1/2 cup) plain white rice (e.g. jasmine rice)
1/2 red onion
1/2 lemon
40 g feta cheese (preferably made from goat milk)
1.5 dL frozen (or newly boiled) kidney/black beans
If your beans are frozen, start defrosting them in the microwave-oven (1 portion takes about 3 minutes to defrost). Prepare the bowl by chopping red onion and feta cheese finely. Put it in the bowl, and squeeze lemon juice over. Put a dash of olive oil in a frying pan, and add the rice. Put on maximum heat, and mix around so the rice is more or less covered in oil. Fry and stir until the rice gets brownish (as long as you dare, avoid burning it obviously), then quickly add about 5 dL (~2 cups) of cold tap water (careful, the steam is hot! obviously), and put the pan back on medium heat. Let the rice boil until ready (try by carefully tasting, it should be a bit crispy on the outside but not hard all the way through). Add more water if it is not ready, and increase the heat if the rice is ready but there still is water in the pan (so it quickly evaporates). While the rice is boiling away, put the defrosted beans in about 1/2 cup of water on medium heat until they start boiling. Put the fried/boiled rice in the prepared soup bowl, and pour over the beans and as much liquid as you like. Mix around with your spoon, and eat!
Bean batch preparation
500 g dry beans (kidney or black)
1 stock cube
3 L (2 pint) water
fresh spicy pepper fruits (red chili, piri piri, jalapeño, habanero, scotch bonnet etc.)
1/2 - 1 whole (not cloves) fresh garlic
Boil the stock cube, chopped garlic, and chopped fresh spicy pepper fruits in all of the water. Thereafter let simmer for about 15 minutes. Add the beans, and let simmer until done (about 1.5-2 hours, when they are soft, and the peel curls when you blow carefully on it). Let the beans cool, and freeze in 1-2 portion-bags (1 portion is about 1.5 dL or 1/2 cup). Use as much chili as you can take, and for every new batch making, be sure to increase the spicyness! If you're not used to spicy food, start with putting about 4 red chili fruits in your first batch. The beans can of course be used in other dishes, like lasagne, pasta sauces, salads, enchiladas, on toast etc.
It is a very healthy and cheap Soup (roughly about 1 euro/dollar, or 50 p, mainly dependent on the quality of your feta cheese) that makes your mouth water. Really, it makes your mouth water! I know mine always does when I have put the ingredients in the bowl, mix it around, just about to start eat. If you are not up to being so healthy, serve your Soup with some nice bread (will give you my foccacia recepie next week), and/or drink a nice beer with it. I promise you that you will never regret learning how to cook this Soup. Please make sure to let me know if you have problems, will be glad to help you. And also, make sure to let me know as soon as you are hooked to it, I need the recruitment-points! Someday I will kick my sweet sister's competitive ass, but in the meantime me and her (along with our recruits) will together convert the world to excellent Soup eating!
posted by Sister Sweden @ 13:02
4 Comments
4 Comments:
As a convert, I can testify to this soup as being one of the indeed easiest to cook, nicest to your wallet and most satisfying to eat dishes in the world. Well, at least if you let me solipsistically define the world as my experience of things. The feeling of satisfaction is for me the best thing about the dish, though it is possible that this feeling might be a conditioned reflex since I at first only ate this soup when visiting the blogowner with whom I always feel very comfortable. The intense taste makes you feel alive, and the sourness of the lemon balances the spicyness of the chili in a most delighful way.
I do have some comments on the soup building instructions (otherwise known as the recipe). The amount of water you need for the rice depends heavily on the type of rice you use and depends moderately on the heat of your frying pan. I use basmati rice with about 2.5 - 3 dl of water to 1.5 dl rice to get that nice crunchy feeling to the rice, since our soup is a soup the rice easily getts soggy when sitting in the eating bowl if you used too much water when boiling it. Boiling the rice that is, not the bowl.
You should also experiment with the way you mix the layers in the bowl when eating four your personal OSE - Optimum Soup Experience.
When you know how to prepare the soup one step at a time you can work on optimising the preparation time consumption, that is minimise the time from thought to soup. My usual routine is to first put a saucepan and a frying pan on the stove and turn the stove on. Then I put water in the saucepan and get all the ingredients and utensils I need, (if you have to go to the store to get ingredients, it is strongly recommended that you turn the stove off before leaving your house) first putting the beans in the sauce pan, then the olive oil and rice in the frying pan. The rice needs constant supervision and stirring until ready to boil. When the water for the rice is in the frying pan, it is time to prepare the cold ingredients, which usualy takes about as much time as it takes for the rice to get to the ideal crispy-but-not-hard state and the beans to be boiled for a few minutes.
Thanks for the very long and nice comment, Peter. You are a truely dedicated Soup-eater, and you are of course right that optimising the recepie is the next step to go! Be inspired people!
Evil laughter, my ass. I, and only I, get points for the Soup-eaters I'm able to trap! And to get technical and honest, you also learned the art of Soup cooking one day right? Your evil laughing competitive ass is sitting firmly under this teacher's wings, and this someone that taught you, is in my opinion in such case entitled to all your points (and mine)! But this is of secondary importance, since 'people in general eating soup' is more important than the competition itself. 'The bean Soup forum'-idea sounds very interesting!
Thank you Sister Sweden for your quick rice and bean soup. I was just looking for a recipe to help use up some left over feta from a tomato salad and now i've got a easy great tasting soup recipe! Thx squirrely
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