With the fall glooms returning, time for soup! This recipe is adapted from one in “Passionate Vegetarian,” by Crescent Dragonwagon, a wonderful humongeous book (available in paperback!) just loaded with all kinds of yummy veggie recipes. The original recipe, adapted by Dragonwagon, is from Michael Romano of New York’s Union Square Café, and called for 3 jalapeno chiles, seeded if you prefer, and diced. Yeah, well, good luck with that. I will just say, season with “heat” to your own taste with jalapenos, or cayenne or red pepper powder or thai hot oil or whatever.
For its name alone, this soup just had to be tried.
Michael Roman’s Union Square Café Indian Borscht
4 med. beets, scrubbed, trimmed
3 tbs. vegetable oil
3 onions, sliced
3 tbs peeled and finely minced fresh ginger
2 tbs ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp cayenne or red pepper or Thai oil, etc. (or less, use the hot peppers to taste)
1 tsp paprika
1/4 cup white basmati rice
1-2 tsp salt or to taste
fresh ground black pepper to taste
2 QT vegetable stock (or can use chicken stock or both)
1-2 tbs honey
1 cup canned diced tomatoes in juice
3/4 tsp Garam Masala
Yogurt, sour cream, cilantro leaves, to garnish.
Roast beets in 350 oven about 60 min until tender, peel and cut up.
Heat oil in large soup pot and sauté unions until transparent. Add ginger and cook a few more minutes. Add the spices, stir a bit. Add everything else, (except the garm masala) bring to a boil for a bit, stirring, then turn down to mere simmer and let cook until the rice is done, stirring occasionally (about 25 minutes or more0
Cool mixture a bit, then blend with hand blender, add more stock or water to thin to preferred consistency. Add more honey if needed, and garm masala. Reheat if necessary.
Serve with dollop of yogurt and cilantro, if desired.
Hot, spicy Indian borscht? What’s not to love about THAT soupy weirdness?
Sunday, September 12, 2010
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3 comments:
Thanks for the recipe. I know how delicious this is!
Ti’s the Season......Thanks, Sounds delicious, and Indian spice blends are great in transfer across to other cultural kitchens as you noted this time in last winter's Souptimes. Keep them coming.
But......
The ingredients are overly complexed in this recipe. Not an entry or casual recipe to follow.
The first set of seasonings at a glance seems equivalent to making your own curry.
So instead of cumin and cardamon etc... An equivalent amount of your favorite curry would do(Madras for me).
As far as I'm concerned Garam Masalla is a ginger clove and cinnamon anis star seed variant of Curry. North Africa/Middle Eastern also uses many of these. Without checking in detail a standard Curry and a Chinese five spice powder (+Chili) (Or-and Jamaican Jerk) would substitute for much of this recipe’s individual spices. Then throw a pinch of every pepper you have around into it just to be sure you are hitting every taste bud from start to finish to afterburn. Fresh ginger preferred but powder does ok.
Not my source but this is what Wiki sez about "Curry Powder";
Most recipes and producers of curry powder usually include coriander, turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, and red pepper in their blends. Depending on the recipe, additional ingredients such as ginger, garlic, asafoetida, fennel seed, caraway, cinnamon, clove, mustard seed, green cardamom, black cardamom, mace, nutmeg, long pepper, and black pepper may also be added.
Word verification; redborma
In a sentence;
Chani did not know it, but it was my adding red borma to the old family recipe that captured her heart.
Alon, I suppose using the individual spices could allow you to play around with the taste. But you sure could use a basic curry powder or even a hot curry powder and still add different spices to taste.
there's something weirdly nice about this combo. I added a bit too much tomatoes (the whole can vs 1 cup) next time I'll cut back on the tomatoes to 1 cut and maybe add a few more beets. Am going to try this with a can of beets plus juice and etc. and see what that's like. The recipe also suggested using a cup or so of canned unsweetened coconut milk in place of the tomatoes (to supposedly soften/cool the hot peppers?) which might be interesting to try as well, tfough with no (red)tomatoes and white coconut milk, would the whole soup go lavender? Woooooo. I gotta try that!
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