Guest recipe: Radish leaf soup

I'm impressed by the number of guest recipes I've been receiving! They all look super delicious and I plan to try all of them myself in the near future. The latest guest recipe comes from my friend, Ronan, who worked in my lab last year as a post-doc. He's an awesome guy who lives in France with his wife and adorable baby. He recommends this recipe as a delicious way of not wasting radish leaves. Frankly, I didn't even know that radish leaves are edible. I look forward to trying them!

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Hi Shaun! Congratulations for your blog. So, I promised a recipe... And here it is! You probably know that kind of stuff, but I discovered it yesterday. I grew radishes in my garden, and I had to remove half of them to allow the other ones to get bigger. So instead of wasting them, I made a soup (a “velouté” in French) with the leaves. Honestly I wasn't expecting much about it, but in the end it was really good. At least for french taste, I hope you'll have time to try it and like it ^^

Ingredients:

-200 grams of radish leaves

-2 medium-sized potatoes, cubed

-1 leek, white part only, chopped

-1L water + bouillon cube or vegetable broth

-1/4 cup dairy or cashew cream

-salt and pepper

-3 tbs olive oil or butter

 Wash the leaves and dry them

Cut 2 potatoes and a leek (only white part) in small pieces

Saute the leaves, potatoes and leek in olive oil/butter for around 3 minutes. Add pepper.

Add 1L of water with one bouillon cube (or vegetable broth)

Warm it up until boiling, then cover, lower the heat and let it boil gently for 20min.

Blend the soup until it becomes uniform.

Add a big spoon of cream!

Check the salt/pepper. My wife and I really enjoyed it, and if you never tried, I hope you will like it. Enjoy!!

 

Ronan didn't get a chance to take a picture of the final product, but he said that it looked like this. (Image from here)

Guest recipe: Pasta with basil cashew cream and roasted tomatoes

I asked my mum if she wanted to contribute to this blog and I was very happy to receive an email today with photos and a delicious-sounding recipe. In my opinion roasting is hands-down the most delicious way to prepare nearly any vegetable, so I'm very excited about the roasted tomatoes in this recipe.

Pretty much everything I know about cooking I owe to my mum. When my brother and I were teenagers she had us cook dinner for the family once a week. I wasn't always keen on this responsibility, but most of the time I liked having the chance to experiment in the kitchen. By the time my brother and I moved out, we were both much more prepared to feed ourselves without starting fires than the vast majority of our peers. My mum is very much experimental and spontaneous in her approach to cooking, and as a consequence so am I. No planning ahead grocery lists or carefully following recipes for us! You can be guaranteed that the measurements in this recipe were approximated post-hoc, rather than carefully measured while cooking.

Without further ado, here is the recipe. I hope to try it out in the near future, because it sounds really good!

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I bought a large tub of cherry tomatoes on sale thinking that I would make a summer inspired tomato basil salad to celebrate the May long weekend.  Unfortunately Ottawa is still cold and damp. We were craving some warm comfort food after an afternoon of garden clean up.  Pasta fit the bill.  Roasted tomatoes fit the bill. Thus was born this recipe for pasta with basil cashew cream and roasted tomatoes.

I'm sure the recipe would work perfectly well with larger tomatoes. You could cut them in half, drizzle with olive oil and roast for 40-60 minutes.  Coarsely chop the larger roasted tomatoes before placing on top of the pasta.

Before roasting

After roasting - yummmmm...

Here's hoping for warmer weather to get into summer salads!

Recipe:

4-5 cups cherry tomatoes

1 onion

4 large cloves garlic

2 tbsp olive oil

1 c cashews

2 1/2 c water

1 bunch basil (about 30 large leaves)

3 tbsp nutritional yeast

2 cups chopped mushrooms

1 tbsp olive oil

4 cups penne or fusilli pasta

Salt and pepper to taste

Soak the cashews in 2 cups water for 1-4 hours.

Preheat oven to 375*F.  Place tomatoes on large baking sheet with a rim and toss with 1 tbsp olive oil. Toss the garlic cloves and quartered onion with 1 tbsp olive oil and place on a baking sheet. (You can use the same baking sheet, but will want to pick out the garlic and onion to use in cashew cream, so do not mix with the tomatoes.). Bake in oven for 30-40 min.

Drain the soaked cashews and place in food processor with 1/2 cup water, nutritional yeast, roasted onion, roasted garlic, juices that gathered on the roasting pan and fresh basil leaves.  Process until it is very smooth.  The mixture should have the consistency of table cream - add more water if too thick.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente.  While the pasta cooks, fry the chopped mushrooms in 1 tbsp olive oil over high heat.  Fry until the mushrooms have released their fluids and then dried - they will develop almost a caramelized look.  Once the mushrooms have finished  cooking then lower heat and toss with the roasted tomatoes.

Drain the pasta then return to the pasta pot and combine with the basil cashew cream.  Stir well to distribute the cream through out the pasta.  Place a serving of pasta on a plate and top with the mushroom-tomato mixture.

Enjoy!

Creamy mushroom-Guinness ragout

This is the kind of recipe where when I taste it I think to myself in my humble way, "Gee, Shaun. You might just be a genius." The flavour is rich and complex and it's a stick-to-your-bones sort of meal. I highly recommend you try it. It's the best thing I've made in a while!

I served mine over some pan-fried store-bought polenta. If you're more ambitious than I am you could make your own polenta . It could also be good over pasta, or with bread or potatoes on the side.

Depending if you're vegetarian or how strict a vegetarian you are, you might not want to use Guinness. Or maybe you might just prefer another type of beer. I'm sure another type of dark beer would work just as well as Guinness in this recipe. I personally don't even like Guinness that much, but I had some left over from making Chocolate Covered Katie's Double Chocolate Guinness Brownies. The brownies, incidentally, are delicious and I highly recommend them. They're very moist and rich. I think this ragout would be good, but would also have quite a different flavour, if you used red or white wine in place of the beer.

Chop that garlic!

The onions sauteing with the dried herbs.

The mushroom-onion-beer mixture is simmering happily.

It tastes as deliciously creamy as it looks!

Recipe: Creamy mushroom-Guinness ragout
Serves 3-4 people

Ingredients:
-2 cups chopped white mushrooms
-1 chopped large yellow onion
-1 cup of firm tofu, cut into 1 cm cubes
-1/2 cup raw cashews soaked overnight in 1/2 cup water
-3 minced garlic cloves
-1 tbs soy sauce
-3 tbs olive oil
-1 cup Guinness beer (or other dark beer)
-1 tbs cornstarch
-1 tsp dried sage
-1 tsp dried rosemary
-salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat 2 tbs olive oil in a large pan. Once it is hot add the onion. Add the sage and rosemary. Saute the onion until it is translucent  (5-10 minutes).

2. Add the garlic, mushrooms, and soy sauce to the pan. Allow the mushrooms to cook until they are soft and tender (5-10 min).

3. Add the Guinness beer and 1 cup of water.

4. Allow the Guinness and mushroom mixture to reduce while heating the remaining 1 tbs of olive oil in another pan. Fry the tofu cubes in the oil until they are lightly browned (10 min).

5. Add the browned tofu into the Guinness and mushroom mixture and stir together.

6. Blend together the soaked cashews with their soaking water, using a high-speed blender or immersion blender, until the mixture is smooth and creamy. This is the "cashew cream". Mix the cream into the ragout.

7. Remove about 1/2 cup of the liquid of the ragout and place in a bowl. Add the cornstarch to the liquid and mix thoroughly. Add the cornstarch mixture back into the ragout and stir thoroughly and immediately. This will thicken the liquid of the ragout.

8. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper. Enjoy!

I literally licked my plate clean because I'm a disgusting human being.