Kitchen Chick

The Soup Challenge #1 - Red Lentil and Bulgur Soup with Chile-Mint Butter

My in-laws sent us an article with 15 Fall Vegetable Soups, all from past issues of Saveur magazine. I like soup. It's something I wish I cooked more often. These soups looked so delicious that I decided to do a soup a week. The first soup I had to make was their Red Lentil and Bulgur Soup with Chile-Mint Butter.

This soup is similar to the lentil soup that Asye serves up at her Turkish Cafe. Yeah. That soup. The soup that makes me swoon. (Do you have any idea how long it took me to figure out that the "other" ingredient was bulgar and not rice? No, you wouldn't, but it was an embarrassingly long time.) So of course when I saw this as one of the 15 featured soups it had to be the first one.

More importantly, I also had the ingredients on hand. Being impatient to get started, that meant I could cook it the very same night that I decided to embark on this challenge.

There are many lentil-bulgar soup recipes out there, all variations on a theme, and many of them quite good. But what takes this one to the next level is the chile-mint butter, made with Aleppo pepper. Three tasty ingredients in a delicious combination.  (It also helps to use good flavorful chicken broth.)

It's an easy soup, but it'll still take about an hour total to make. Maybe 5-10 minutes of prep time (depending on how fast you are with a knife), six minutes of attentive cooking, and another 45 minutes of simmering. The chile-mint butter can be during the last few minutes of cooking.

To the recipe... Saveur Magazine's Red Lentil and Bulgur Soup with Chile-Mint Butter

 

Tracklements presents Ann Arbor's Hottest New Food Talent - Oct 16, 6pm

You want to go. You need to go.

You want to eat pork buns and onigiri (rice balls) with Tracklements' Miso Mirin salmon and homemade pickles made by San Street's Ji Hye Kim and Kristen Hogue Jackson. (We've had those pork buns before, so trust us on this one.)

You want to see how Working Girl Eats is coming along on her Tex-Mex street food cart venture.

You need to try The Brinery's latest pickled goods. While sipping wine from Everyday Wines. Okay, maybe not wine and pickles at the same time. Though I guess it depends on the wine. And the pickles.

But you could alternate with something from Farrell Fruit.

And if that isn't enough, then you'll want to see what EAT catering is doing these days (you know, the people who used to do the food at Jefferson Market).

You want to go and tell us how it went, because we have a prior engagement that is going to keep us away from this fabulous event.

$5 gets you in the door to pot & box's beautiful space, which you want to see, if you haven't already — but only if you buy in advance. ($8 at the door — if there are any tickets left.) And then it's small plates of tasty tidbits available for $5.

And the proceeds all go to a good cause.

You know you want to.  Hell, we know we want to.  But we can't, so you're going to have all the fun.

What: Tracklements presents Ann Arbor's Hottest New Food Talent
When: Saturday, Oct 16, 6-8pm
Where: pot & box, 220 felch street #2, ann arbor
How to purchase tickets in advance: Contact Durham's Tracklements for more infomation at 734-930-6642

Carl's Outdoor Wood-fired Brick Oven - Picture Tour

Pizza cooked in Carl's outdoor brick oven.

Summer has faded to Fall and, though I haven't written much about them, I've had many amazing food experiences in the past few months. Not least among them was a summer get-together at a family friend's place where he made fantastic pizzas for us in his hand-built outdoor brick oven.

Hiding inside this square-ish exterior structure is a domed oven. The fire is built off to one side, and the pizzas bake on the heated floor. The baker uses the pizza peel (that flat shovel-like thing) to turn the pizza around to allow different sides of the crust to be exposed to the fire.

As you can see above, the oven was verging on too hot, which resulted in some blackening, but the pizzas were fantastic all the same. Carl set up a veritable buffet of ingredients, and we chose our own combinations and watched him put it together. These ovens hold their heat a really really long time. You can start your oven on one day and it'll still be hot enough to bake bread the next day. In fact, the temp will have finally cooled off enough for bread.  (Pastries definitely need a cooler temperature, as I demonstrate below.)

A pizza on the peel waiting to go into the oven...

 

Carl sliding the pizza into the oven...

 

Two pizzas baking...

Carl dressing up a fig and prosciutto pizza...

I couldn't resist all this baking going on and just had to put something into that oven, so Carl and his family graciously aided me in making one of my apple-bacon galettes.  Photos behind the cut...