"There once was an ugly duckling..."

How ood is that?

About a year ago I wrote a blog on swede, saying it was not the world's most handsome vegetable. Recently tho, I've made a new veggie friend and I tell you, he makes the swede look like the Brad Pitt of the vegetable universe.

I'm talking about celeriac, which is a root vegetable with a bulbous hypocotyl. Oh yes. I'm not sure what that is, but it sure makes the celeriac look like one of those Ood creatures out of Doctor Who. It also makes it a pain to peel. But once you're past that... Well, you know the story of the ugly duckling? That's what happens to the celeriac. Metaphorically.

Take it slow in 2013

It's the start of a new year and we all know what that means. We're all making resolutions, vowing to be fitter, faster, better, more organised and a million and one other things. Here at Union of Genius we have something a little different to suggest.

Take it slow.

The soup of Ezo the Bride

Oh hi there.

Tomorrow marks the arrival of our third new soup of the week, and one that Elaine’s been dying to make for ages. It’s ‘The Soup of Ezo the Bride’ and it’s bloody delicious.

Brewlog

Hello soup fans.

This week's bloglette is about Brewlab, on South College Street. Run by chums Dave and Tom, the artisan coffee bar opened at the end of August and has been heaving with coffee-craving clientèle ever since.

By popular request

Here's another recipe for you, and it's one of my own. I am especially happy with this little beauty, as it is quite simply gorgeous.

That does sound completely immodest, but one of the things that tickles Amy, my co-soupmonger, is when I do the tastings each morning before the soups go out. A lot of the time, the tasting will result in a happy instinctive exclamation of "oh! That's gorgeous!", which is just my natural reaction to tasting something fabulous, and is most emphatically NOT an immodest appreciation of my cooking abilities.

So, by request, then, is this little gem:

Union of Genius Broccoli with bacon and chilli

2 large onions
2 large leeks
2 medium potatoes
2 heads of broccoli
4 cloves garlic
300ml whole milk
200g bacon lardons, cooked until crispy
0.5 - 1 tsp chilli flakes
ham stock
pepper, salt (if required)
1 tsp butter
1 dessertspoon vegetable oil

Rough-chop all the vegetables and saute in the butter and oil. Cook for 10 mins. Add the milk and top up to around 2L with boiling water and ham stock, or ham stock base (depends if you are using fresh or ready-made stock). Add the chilli flakes. Simmer for 30 mins, and blend. Add the bacon lardons and leave to sit for about 30 mins. Reheat and check seasoning; add pepper but only salt if required. The soup should be deeply savoury and creamy with a little chilli kick. The dominant flavour shoud be broccoli, with deep bacon background. The chilli should be a minor flavour note, not dominant at all.

I should say that of all the recipes on the blog, overall quantities of the soups are a little tricky. My own recipes make 10 litres at a time and I scale them down here, but - as with any recipe - the real pleasure is in the tinkering. Enjoy!

one of our soups has escaped!

This is amazing, and was one of the top notes of my week in Union.

It's been a quiet week - in an unusual display of record-beating, Edinburgh was one of the warmest spots in the country this week, as the sun came out, the skies turned deep blue and peely-wally Scots gazed up at the unaccustomed bright object in the sky and removed layers of clothing accordingly. Anyone who wasn't blinded by the sunlight certainly needed sunglasses to cope with the glare from our poor sun-deprived skins.

And, while we have plans galore to gradually introduce Edinburgh to summer soups and lots more, these plans involve a gradual transition, and didn't cater for a suddenly tropical week visited upon us in March. So, it's been quite quiet, which has let us soupmongers do a lot of catch-up cooking and some experimenting - and be absolutely floored by a tweet from @laterisermusic we received on Friday. This pic is a Lebanese lentil, lemon and spinach soup, made by @laterisermusic, who was inspired by our seasonal special. I was incredibly moved by this, and just couldn't get over it. How many cafes have I eaten in over the years, and been impressed enough by one of their dishes to recreate it? I've done this with restaurants, certainly, but never with a lunchtime cafe, and I was incredibly moved to see that our soup had been good enough to have been remembered, thought about, web-searched and recreated in another kitchen. So, here's our own recipe for anyone else who fancies bringing another tear to this soupmonger's eye:

Union of Genius Lebanese lentil, lemon and spinach soup:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, fine-chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
2 handfuls of rinsed brown lentils
3 peeled potatoes, fine-chopped
2 litres water
Vegan stock
2 large handfuls of fresh spinach, coarsely shredded OR 8 buttons of frozen spinach
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt (only if required)
Pepper
1 heaped tsp za'atar


Saute onion, garlic and potato in the olive oil. Add the water and when boiling, add the lentils. Simmer for 40 mins. Take off the heat, add the vegan stock and stir the soup thoroughly. This is to slightly break up the potatoes and make them thicken the broth a little. Add the spinach, lemon juice, pepper and za'atar. Leave to sit for about 2 hours for the flavours to mellow - as with any lentil soup, the flavours develop when left alone for a while. Before serving, reheat the soup and taste. Add more lemon, pepper, za'atar to taste, and add salt only if required. The soup should be chunky with potatoes, and the broth studded with lentils. The flavour should be well-rounded and citrussy from the lemon and za'atar, with nutty base notes from the lentils. 


The other high point of this week was our forthcoming collaboration with Brew Lab. More on that another time...

Soup with no gloop

The queen loved soup. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch and every dinner.
And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art. (The Tale of Despereaux p.110)

Let's be clear about something. Elaine loves soup. She loves to cook it, to eat it and to share it with friends. Most of all she loves to feed it to her husband. Since we got married, teeth have been strictly optional for me. Decent gums and a long-handled spoon and I'm good to go.

So when we moved back to Edinburgh 2008 we were both looking forwards to rediscovering the great cafés, watering holes and hang-outs we loved 20 years ago. Most of all, Elaine was looking forwards to soup. Sure enough Edinburgh has great food in abundance. Except for the soup. Go to most cafes and you'll get a soup. Sometimes it'll be great (and we've had some seriously good soups) but usually it'll be cheap, probably served in a styrofoam cup and there'll be a nagging suspicion that it consists of left-overs. As Ottolenghi wrote recently,

Many cooks, including some serious chefs, treat the soup pot as a kind of culinary compost heap into which they chuck whatever happens to be lying around in the hope that it will miraculously be transformed.

Above all else, the magic ingredient that seems to be in 90% of the soups we've met in Edinburgh is gloop.

A sort of squishy, slightly gritty thickening agent made to bulk it out. It makes the kind of tomato soup that, when you look at it, it looks back at you. In a fight, you don't really know which one of you would win.

So we decided that we would make soup. Soup with no gloop. We would treat it as a food to be savoured. After all, soup is not just for a day, it's for life. This means that there would be no artificial thickeners, preservatives, colours or enhancers. No mass-produced concentrates, no cutting the dodgy bits off an old onion and hoping no one notices. No longer would soup be the cheap option on the menu, it would be the star. Our soups will never be padded out with corn starch, flour or suspicious purées. They will be made with vegetables, stock, herbs and spices and cuts of meat. And, of course, love.

Cook smiled “See? She said. “There ain’t a body, be it mouse or man, that ain’t made better by a little soup”  (The Tale of Despereaux p.233)

The perfect package

Who would have thought that packaging could be so exciting? Not me but now we have bowls, labels and printed cups. 25 boxes worth, all from our friends at Vegware.

Part of the ethos of Union of Genius is something we call "full circle." We don't want our soup packaging ending up in landfill. For that reason our loyalty scheme is going to be based on bringing the packaging back but to complete the circle we need packaging that is produced sustainably and can be easily composted. That's where vegware comes in.

Even the labels can be composted.

So right now we have 11,000 printed cups and lids with bowls, cutlery, brown paper bags and napkins on the way. And nerves. Plenty of nerves...