I’ve never had problems getting people to like these dishes.  They are all eminently lovable.  I’ve only had problems getting people to try them, to warm up to the idea that sweet and savory can not only be friends, but be greater than the sum of their parts.

Which is why I am coming to you now with this very simple, very satisfying, delicious winter soup.  There are lots of recipes for this basic soup floating around.   There are different ways to spice it, and different ways to finish it, but the basic soup itself is simple, cheap, and delicious and it takes advantage of winter produce. You can make it for a weeknight dinner, because it is quick and the prep work is pretty minimal.  It also keeps well and freezes beautifully.

Basic Cauliflower-Apple Soup

2 small or 1 large onion, minced

3-4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 small head cauliflower, diced fine

4-5 medium cooking apples (I like Winesaps or Northern Spy), peeled and diced fine

2 quarts stock (this works well with either chicken stock or an onion/celery/carrot veg stock)

olive oil

salt

Heat a large heavy-bottomed pot and add just enough olive oil to coat the bottom.  Add the onions and sweat them for several minutes until they begin to get translucent, then add the garlic and give it a minute or two to become fragrant.  Add the cauliflower, toss to coat, and then do the same with the apples.  Now add the stock — the stock should at least be equal in volume to the cauliflower and apples, if not slightly more.  You can add a little water if you need to.  Simmer until the veggies and apple are soft, about 15-20 minutes.

Using an immersion blender OR in small batches in a blender (you do not want boiling soup to spurt out the top of your blender, trust me on this), puree the soup.  You can puree it completely so it is silky smooth, or you can puree it partially so it is slightly chunky, up to you. Return it to the pot and simmer another 15 minutes or so.

While it is simmering, taste the soup and salt it, adding salt gradually and tasting after each addition.  How much salt you need will depend both on whether or not the stock you used was salted, and on how salty you like your soup.  Remember that you can always add more salt, but its a real bitch to remove it once it’s in there, so do be careful.

This makes a good basic soup that is nutritious, reassuring, and satisfyingly substantial.

There are Many Happy Variations you can also try:

Creamy Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Substitute a quart of milk or unsweetened faux-milk of your choice for a quart of the stock.  Be careful not to let it boil, especially if you use dairy milk.

Protein-Enhanced Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Puree 12 oz. soft silken tofu into the soup.

Coconut Cauliflower-Apple Soup: Substitute two cups unsweetened coconut milk for two cups of stock.  Phenomenal if you also do one of the spice variations along with the coconut milk.

Curried Cauliflower-Apple Soup:  Add your favorite curry powder to taste during the second simmering period.  This need not contain hot chili, although it certainly can.

Masala Cauliflower-Apple Soup:  Instead of curry powder as above, use your favorite ground garam masala blend.

(You can try many other spice mixtures in this soup, too, as it is a great canvas for that sort of thing.  Ras el hanout is great, so is Chinese five-spice mixture.)

Try strewing the soup with roasted crispy salted pumpkin seeds, as a garnish.  Or make some nice crunchy garlicky croutons with olive oil and garlic-rubbed stale bread and scatter those on top.  Or fry some cubed tempeh until it’s crispy and brown and use that.

And so on.

It’s good, I promise.

                          

The temptation is to just compost the lot of it.  There are some things even a guinea pig won’t eat.  But good fresh veg are expensive, and if you grow them yourself it seems even more insulting to just let the food go to waste.  It’s not spoilt, after all, it’s just… not very nice.

Enter the blender.  Why fight what is obviously the natural tendency of leftover salad to want to liquefy?  While the salad may no longer be very satisfying as salad, it can make a fantastic cold soup, a sort of gazpacho-y concoction that is, to tell the truth, not too dissimilar from eating a salad, except that now the liquid texture and the softness of the components have become an asset.

Last night I made salata horiatiki for a get-together, and having overestimated the number of mouths it might be likely to feed, I came home with a fair quantity of leftovers.  Salata horiatiki, for those now scratching their heads and wondering what fresh hell I’m up to with this fancy-pants foreign salad business, is just a rustic Greek village-style salad, usually composed of onion, tomato, cucumber, sweet peppers, and oregano, with a wine vinegar and olive oil dressing.  Usually it also has feta, sometimes ripe olives, sometimes little pickled hot peppers, peperoncini.  It’s an easy-peasy salad.  Chop everything up, toss it together, sprinkle your oregano over the top — I used the blossoms from my Greek oregano in the Forest of Unruly Herbs in the kitchen garden — a little salt, a little black pepper, and dress it with 1 part wine vinegar to 2 parts olive oil.   Quick and easy and delicious and, as you might expect from peasant food, uses up what’s fresh and abundant this time of year.  Perfect.

Not so perfect the next day, though.  But this need not worry you, as I discovered just this morning.  Put your leftover salad in the blender and press “transmogrify.”  (Or “puree,” if your blender somehow lacks a  “transmogrify” button.)  If it seems too thick, you can add a little water, or throw in another tomato or cucumber, as you like.  It makes a lovely soup, which you may, if you like, drink out of a tall glass as I just did, for your breakfast.

A nice thing to add are a few oil-packed anchovy fillets.  Let your conscience be your guide.  After you give them a whiz, though, you won’t notice anything like a HELLO I’M AN ANCHOVY flavor, but more a mysterious, profound savoriness that, as the good Rev. Sydney Smith wrote “half suspected, animate(s) the whole.”  (Even if he did say it about the onion.  The anchovy sauce, by contrast, he described as magic, and he was correct.  Who doesn’t need more magic in their life?)

Speaking of Rev. Smith, you do know the poem I refer to, don’t you?   Well, you do now.  It’s called “A Recipe For A Salad.”  It does make a very fine salad, too. should you choose to follow his instructions some time.  The recipe is actually for a salad dressing, so choose your greens and so on as you will, then proceed with the Rev. Smith.

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes,
passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.

Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.

O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
‘T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.” –   Rev. Sydney Smith (1771–1845)

                          

We ate a shrimp-broth based egg flower soup, black bean sauce tofu with bok choy, and smacked garlic cucumbers.  No rice, we usually don’t unless company’s in the offing, the better to spare my temperamental metabolic system.  Thumb-thick, winey-ripe blackberries for dessert.  Salutary indeed.

And so, back to work.

                          

The shrimp at the Asian supermarket this morning were nice, and the price was good, so I bought some.  I had been hoping for mussels, but the mussels were not happy.  So shrimp it was, a foundation for what ended up being a shrimp-centric meal.  I shelled the shrimp and stir-fried them, in a riff on a Barbara Tropp recipe, with handfuls of minced ginger and loads of chopped scallion, a little double black soy, and not much else.

For veg, there were a mix of green pea and snow pea sprouts chased through the wok with a fair whack of grated ginger and some minced dried shrimp.  The brownish-red bits are shrimp.  I added a little black vinegar as well.

And there was soup.  It’s one of our favorite Chinese soups, and one that reminds my Belovedary of childhood.  It’s intensely savory and good, though not much to look at.  It can be made with almost any kind of stock, providing that the stock has been made with Chinese seasonings and not, say, thyme and parsley and carrots and bay leaves.

This one was made with a shrimp stock I’d made some while ago.  I pulled it from the freezer earlier today after coming home with the shrimp. To the stock, I added pickled mustard greens and stir-fried ground pork seasoned with garlic and wine, and let it simmer while I fussed with the rest.

Now, because when I have both paid for shrimp and done the work of shelling them I don’t want to waste any of the money or effort or goodness, I have the shrimp shells in a pot on the stove, simmering into another batch of shrimp stock.  Shell stocks are quick, and need to simmer for only about a half an hour, so it’s no big deal to do one after supper.  Particularly if you are, as I am, doing it in small quantity.  I’ll end up with about a quart of stock… exactly the amount I used to make the soup.