You can always try ... Chicken Apple Soup

Goedendag! Hoe gaat het met jou? Ik wil je graag uitnodigen. Wat zegt u?
What? You didn't understand a thing? Well, it doesn't matter, my Dutch isn't that good either, anymore. In fact it never has been, although it should ... or maybe not.
Anyway, I want to invite you to have a soup together with me, a chicken apple soup. I improvised this recipe after a friend told me, he had tried something like this after having something like this in the Netherlands. Let's have a try then.

It might be Dutch, but then again, it might not be. I haven't taken the time to try. Nevertheless we leave it that way.

Ingredients:
150 g chicken breast, cut in bite-sized chunks
1 red onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp minced ginger 
1 red bell pepper, cut into stripes
1 red chili, finely chopped
750 ml water
6 tbs apple compote
100 g pasta or rice (I had rice pasta ... he he he)
Salt for seasoning
1 spring onion, chopped in rings


Method:
First fry the chicken breast pieces from all sides and put aside.
Get yourself a sufficiently sized pot and gently fry the onion in oil. After a few minutes add the garlic and the ginger and let it go for a few more minutes.
Then it's the time for the bell pepper and the chili to make it's appearance on the cooking scene. Put them in the pot and proceed with the cooking for a few more minutes ... eh ... that is until the bell pepper has softened a bit.
Pour in the water and bring to the boil. After that reduce the heat and add the chicken, the apple compote and the rice pasta. Let it all simmer for about 15 minutes. The chicken should be cooked through.
Finally add the rings of the spring onions and turn off the heat ... ready to serve.

You can always try. Normally, maybe, you wouldn't put such things together, but you never know, if you don't try. It might be the case you discover some nice flavours.
Een fijne dag nog! Tot straks!

La Soupe Aux Choux - Herby cabbage Soup

Space! The final frontier ... cut, cut ... stop this! We already had it.
What though about receiving visitors from outer space - having some aliens for dinner?
No, the aliens are not going to have you for dinner.
Well, let me get to it in a slightly different way. Just slightly. Do you connect some kinds of foods with movies? Or vice versa? What about cooking something you saw in a movie?
Let us come back to our aliens and move right away over to France. 
Sorry, if you got this wrong! It was not my intention, just put the words a bit of ... don't know. Anyway, you might know the famous French actor Louis de Funès. Right away, different movies come to my mind, that deal with food. One of it has the French title La Soupe Aux Choux.
That brings us straight away to France, as I said, and to the aliens, as I said as well. The main character receives a visitor from outer space, because of food, that is, a cabbage soup. Well, the movie contains also some ... well, eh ... just concentrate on the soup for now.

My intention is not to conjure up some extra terrestrial life. No! I simply like to reproduce such a soup and ... use up my leftover cabbage in the kitchen. 
By the way, this is not going to be fast food. We are taking some time to do this herby cabbage soup.

After slaughtering the cabbage we can get into things (Hey, who said, we could do this without hurting something ... ah, no worries. Things will be fine!). Good! I used cabbage already in my last post. I got a comment, that 'cabbage is hugely underrated as a vegetable'. We don't want this to be, do we? Besides that, if you take a closer look, you find more cabbage recipes out here on my blog. Hm, well, at least one more.
Let's work then: Herby cabbage soup. Plan about two hours, to be generous. Remember? No fast food! On top of it, it's all made from scratch.

Ingredients (as they go in):
A large knob of butter
One onion, chopped in rings (that's also a reason, why I cry so much lately)
One small white (to be specific) cabbage, roughly cut (use your imagination)
One large carrot, cut into cuby pieces
1,5 l water
Bouquet of herbs (rosemary, oregano, thyme, lavender)
600 g potatoes, cut roughly into cubelike shapes (don't be too fussy, unless ...)
4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped (yes, this is all going to be very rough)
Fleur de sel (or use other salt, if you must)
Pepper

Method (as time goes by):
Well, a lot of the above mentioned things (cutting) you can do as we go. At least this is the way I prefer to do it.
Therefore, whilst heating the butter in a large pot, you concentrate on the crying (onion) and then add them to the pot to let them start to soften a bit.
Now you devote your attention to the cabbage and then to the carrot. Obviously, the result of that leads to more vegetable in the pot.
It would be quite helpful to put the kettle on to get the water boiling. Why not take some more water. That way you can treat yourself to a nice cuppa of tea. We are in no hurry (you can do this at other times, if you insist). The water you are not using for your tea goes into the pot. The cabbage should be covered. If not, you used too much water for your tea.

The bouquet of herbs, to which I also like to refer to as a bouquet garni, goes into the pot as well just before you put the lid on and bring all to the boil.
After that is done, we have plenty of time for tea and for the potatoes and garlic. Should it be in boiling mode, we reduce the temperature and let it simmer for an hour.
Depending on your skills, though, you could also manage to do some other things during that time ... you think of something for yourself.
I'm not going to tell you, what I did.
No!
Forget it!
Back in the kitchen, right in front of our soup, yes, after one hour has passed, we throw in the potatoes and garlic. Season the soup with fleur de sel and pepper. I like to use fleur de sel (hand-harvested sea salt), because traditional fleur de sel is collected off the coast of Brittany - just to give a bit more of a French touch to it.
Having come that far, we are nearly through. Just another half an hour to simmer and then we are ready. What to do again?
Maybe set the table? I'm planning on having a candlelight dinner. Oh, well, yes ... I put a candle on the table and light it.

If it is according to your desire, you might open the meal with a small glass of pastis - as also seen in La Soupe Aux Choux. As you see on the picture as well, you have a nice baguette ready to go with the herby cabbage soup, too.
Before I forget, the bowl for the soup is also from France. What you can't see here is, that it has a picture in it with a famous place in Normandy, which has also something to do with a place in Cornwall. I just mention it, so you get a rough (yes, again) idea.
Should you have anything of the baguette left, you could finish your meal with some cheese. Yep! I did it!
Let us now come to the side effects of the soup. If you remember the movie La Soupe Aux Choux, you know what I mean. Up to this point, where I am writing this done, nothing happened ... and no, I didn't get any visitors from outer space. I might get a few visitors, though, reading this post or even trying this recipe.
Is everything said now? No, not yet, not yet!
Since we used our lovely bouquet garni, I decided to enter this post into Lavender and Lovage's Herbs on Saturday challenge, even though, it's Wednesday.

Finally, after everything has been said, I'm not keeping my mouth shut, although that will be the case very soon.
Think again! What comes to your mind, when pondering food and movies? What movies pop up in your head and/or what foods? Let me know!

More from The Two Greedy Italians: Salad, Vegs, Soup

Ah, this week I feel a bit Italian. Whatever that means!

Anyway, I'm not going to say "I should have been born Italian." as someone else used to say, but it's really nice to have a lot of Italian food. Already before I wrote you a bit of my experiences with the book Two Greedy Italians eat Italy. I'm not quite through with the book, but I am making progress. 

While browsing through the book I selected three dishes to try. The first one was Insalata della Valtellina or in other words: bresaola salad. I like bresaola. If you don't know it, it's air-dried beef. This meat is very lean and tender. The origin of bresaloa is the northern region of Italy, called Lombardy.

That is how the salad looked like. Among the bresaola there are featured some black olives, hard-boiled eggs, some bread, sliced radishes and of course a few salad leaves.
I had something similar before.
This particular one here was lovely as well. I liked the different flavours and textures - meaty, crunchy, soft and ... well, it was worth making it.
Next on the list was Bagna Cauda. It's a warm dip containing ... hm ... yes, garlic was in it, quite a lot. It was warmed cooked with milk and then followed quite some oily and fatty things: anchovies, butter, olive oil and double cream.

I had it with some sliced up vegs and bread soldiers. I wanted to try bagna cauda already way before. So now, finally I made it and ... well it didn't really work as a dip. Something must have gone wrong. It was kind of thin. The bread worked well, because it has soaking power. Everything else was just minimally coated. Nevertheless, the taste was alright, but I would have liked it a bit more ... eh ... dip-like. Maybe I add some more double cream next time, or less milk.
Finally, I made a soup again. Yes, it might not be the weather for soup. Winter might not be the time to go outside with shorts, but I did it anyway. So goes the soup. Well, I'm only lucky I didn't do it three days before, when it was really hot, so hot we really had difficulties to sleep at night. Lucy was panting half the night, or something like that. Still, we both survived and now I am even able to eat a soup.

This soup is called Eisacktaler Weinsuppe or beef and wine soup. Actually, it's the very first recipe in the book (obviously it starts with soups). The preparation is clearly the opposite from what I had to do last time I made a soup. It really takes next to no time to put it together.
You just boil white wine and beef stock for one minute. Yes, just one minute. Then you add double cream and Parmesan and heat it through ... here you go. Right, you may need a bit longer when you want to have this fried bread in it, however, still it's no big deal.
From this explanation you can gather, that much depends on the wine and the stock as to the taste, because for sure this soup has a very strong wine taste.
That's for now!
For sure I try some more nice Italian recipes of those. What is your favourite Italian dish?
Let us know?

Now I'm really finished with this post. I take some more time to fight with myself, whether I'll do a spontaneous vacation within a few days ... can't decide yet ...