and things went downhill from there

Today on "Cooking With Plonq":

In this special "using up stuff in the fridge" edition, I present sauerkraut soup. This was inspired by a cooking video we watched yesterday where the host made a cabbage-based soup, and he mentioned that there was a traditional Polish version made with sauerkraut.

We had a couple inches of kielbasa in the fridge left from a dish we made last week, and I had about ½ a jar of vintage sauerkraut that I keep forgetting about at the back of the fridge. I moved the jar to the front of the fridge before I went to bed last night as a reminder, and this morning I ran over a mental check-list of what might go well in a soup.

I started off by coarsely chopping a stalk of celery and a handful of baby carrots. I peeled and cut up the sausage into bite-sized pieces, then tossed the three ingredients into a pot with a bit of olive oil. I sautéed it until the sausage was starting to brown and then dumped in a couple tablespoons of dried red onion flakes.

I shook in about a half-teaspoon of caraway seeds and cooked it a bit longer to give them a hint of toastiness before adding about ½ tsp each of white pepper and sweet paprika and ¼ tsp of dill weed. I followed those with the half-jar of sauerkraut, liquid and all (this stuff did not have a lot of liquid, so I felt pretty safe adding it).

When that was all combined, I stirred in about a teaspoon of chicken bullion paste and then dumped in the remaining ~700ml of water left in the tea kettle after breakfast (I turned on the heat under it when I started on the soup). I followed that up with a bay leaf. Then, once the soup came up to a boil, I turned it down and let it simmer for another fifteen minutes.

I served it with a grind of fresh pepper on the top. It was really good. I know that atara won't eat this, but I'm keeping this one in mind for future reference. When I finished this, I filled a container for the fridge so that I can have it again for lunch tomorrow or Wednesday. While I had the fridge open, I spotted the sour cream, and it occurred to me that it would probably go well with this soup.

There was about half a bowl of soup left after I had packaged up my lunch, so I gave myself another serving and added a good dollop of sour cream. Good call. That pushed it to next-level good. Not as photogenic as the first bowl, but it made up for that in flavour. Two thumbs up.

If all goes according to plan, I will be walking up to the pharmacy later today to get a Shingrix shot. If they don't go according to plan then I will be sitting on my ass all day playing on the computer.

I personally know four people in the past few years who have contracted shingles - two of them quite recently - so I got my doctor to write me a prescription for it on my last visit. As much as I hate needles, I think I would dislike getting shingles even more.

And now, soup.

I made garlic soup for dinner last night. This used to be a fairly regular item in our meal rotation, but atara just stopped making it one day, and when I finally noticed and asked about it, she said that it was one step removed from drinking liquid bread. She had a point. The recipe calls for two cups of cubed French bread, and then for it to be served with bread.

We learned of this recipe when we went to a "no kids" resort just outside of town one November when they were offering decent off-season discounts. We were flipping through the channels when it was too cold to venture outside in the evening, and we happened upon Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network (back when he was still a thing), and this soup was one of the things he made in that show. We both thought it looked good, so atara tracked down the recipe and printed it off when we got home. This recipe is stained, and the ink is smudged in spots (it's old enough for us to have still been using atara's ancient inkjet when we printed it).

I had a quick look for this recipe on Sunday after I'd added this to our meal plan for the week, but the only hits coming back were for modified versions of this soup that contained onion, pepper flakes and the like. What we both liked about this recipe was its honest simplicity - it made no pretence over the fact that you were basically drinking liquid garlic. I did some more directed searches today, and I finally found the original recipe hiding on a food index site that seemed to be around to preserve orphaned recipes like this.

I considered printing that one off to replace this old copy, but having food and coffee stains on a recipe sheet just gives it an air of authenticity. The stains say, "this is a recipe that gets used." Also, this version has a number of hand-written notes on it. Two of the notes are my own additions.

The recipe starts with cooking a whole head of sliced garlic and two cups of cubed bread in olive oil. I crossed out the bread and added the note, "Add 1/4 cup of flour after the garlic is nearly done and create a roux."

Where it calls for 4 eggs, I changed that to 5 with the note, "Temper the 5^th egg and added it back as an additional thickener."

Using an extra egg as a thickener (to make up for not putting in half a loaf of bread) was atara's idea. I've tried doing that before. The trick is to temper the egg before it goes in, but I failed in each previous attempt, and I just ended up with runny soup swimming with bits of scrambled egg. This time the process went smashingly.

I am sure that there are some of you out there rolling your eyes at how it took me multiple tries to master such a basic cooking technique, but there is an undeniable sense of delight in having a technique work for the first time. I assumed - rightly, it seems - that I just hadn't tempered it for long enough on previous attempts.