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...

Game Soup

Back in the dawn of time, before soup was invented, Mr Genius (aka Bruce) was a student at Edinburgh University. Before he learned how to dice vegetables, he used to be found rolling dice and saving the world from dragons as a member of the Grand Edinburgh Adventuring Society - the university's role-playing club.

Back in 1987, 25 years ago, inspired by StudentAid we set up a role playing game convention with any proceeds going to charity. We did far better than we expected and next year we did it all over again, with the money going to Barnado's.

Much to my amazement, 25 years later I'm back in Edinburgh, now working at university while dicing vegetables in my spare time. The convention, now called Conpulsion has gone from strength to strength. Under the leadership of the tireless Phil Harris, this Easter it opens for the 25th time. This makes it one of the longest-lasting of such conventions in the UK and in the last two-score years and five it has raised tens of thousands of pounds for a wide range of local charities.

We're delighted to be doing our bit to help out this year. We'll be opening for lunch on Easter Saturday to provide soup for all who come in through the door. For every soup we sell we'll contribute 50p towards this year's charity Pass IT On. The charity accepts donated computers and adapts them for use by people with disabilities in the Edinburgh area (EH postcode).

If you're a convention attendee, show us your ticket and you'll also get 50p off any soup on the menu. We'll still be donating 50p as well. There'll be a mix of vegetarian, vegan as well as omnivorous options and all gluten-free. We're basically a take-away with a small number of seats but all the packaging is compostable so bring it back afterwards and we'll recycle it for you. We do have a small number of seats and free wi-fi. Check us out on Facebook if you want to get an idea of the soups we normally do.

We'll be open from 11-3pm on the Saturday. Of course, you don't have to be at Conpulsion to drop in for soup or any of our normal range of Artisan Roast coffees, gluten-free cakes and all manner of healthy and delightful snacks. We'll also be more than happy to explain all about this gaming lark.

If you're reading this and wondering what all this role-playing stuff is about, there's no better way to find out then to go along to Conpulsion this Easter weekend. There's a massive range of boardgames suitable for anyone to try, all sorts of special events (aspiring novelists and artists and creative types of all sorts should check out the Creator Zone on the Sunday)  and even a Steampunk disco on Saturday night that's open to anyone with a cog or two. You don't want to know how disappointed we are not to be able to make it there this year.

So, do check out Conpulsion if you don't know of it already. And if you're going to Conpulsion, drop by for lunch on the Saturday between 11-3pm and fill your dice bag with soup. Let's face it, one healthy meal for the weekend won't hurt you.

Cream of Wild Mushroom Soup recipe

Cream of Wild Mushroom soup (serves 4 to 6)

Ingredients

• 25g butter
• 20ml sunflower or olive oil
• 300g onions (2 medium) - roughly chopped
• 400g potatoes - roughly chopped
• 2 cloves garlic
• 250g portobella mushrooms - roughly chopped
• 20g dried porcini
• 600ml vegetable or mushroom stock
• 500ml whole milk
• 50ml double cream
• 1 tsp za'atar
• salt and pepper to taste

Writing on the board

A rum soup

So what do rum and soup have in common?

Before Christmas, Ms Genius and myself were at Provenance Wines for a spirit tasting night. Sort of like a seance but with significantly more spirits in attendance. While were still sober, our guide reached the rums and we ventured into some Chairman's Reserve Spiced Rum.

Throughout the discussion our guide had been mentioning "botanics" which, in my slightly fuddled state I had been understanding as botany bay. ("Botany Bay? Botany Bay! Oh no!") Once I realised my error I began to understand what he meant. The botanics refers to the mix of herbs, berries, spices etc that a spirit is distilled through. For example, gin must be formed of a majority of juniper berries. Least ways that's my understanding.

For soups this is what is called the mirepoix. In traditional French cuisine, mirepoix is a combination of "aromatics" (celery, onion and carrot) that forms the base of the dish. Varying the mirepoix changes the composition of the stock. At Union of Genius, most of our soups are made with a mirepoix with the thickening coming naturally from the vegetables (usually potato) as opposed to using a roux or (I shudder even to type the word in our blog) cornflour.

What this tends to mean is that our soups are heavily packed with vegetables. For example, to make ten litres of cream of wild mushroom soup we use 1.5kg of onions, 1.8kg of potatoes and 1.2kg of mushrooms along with garlic, porcini, herbs and spices. This means that a standard sized portion has about 150g of vegetables. To give you another example, caldo verde has 1.8kg of onion, 2.7kg of potatoes and 250g of kale so is even higher in vegetable content. (Kale works out at roughly 1 small handful per serving.) By weight, our soups often contain more vegetable than water.

But back to the rum. It's the balancing of the base that sets the foundation for the flavour and, of course, like rum, some soups work better when aged. Not all; a soup like Tomato Rasam is best when newly made and the citrussy top notes are fresh and bright. Compare that to the Winter 6 Veg Broth which is at it's best when it's been allowed to get itself together overnight to allow the flavours to infuse, and for the barley to make the broth silky.

One of the beauties of soup is, like spirits, there are so many variations. As we only opened in October we've been focusing on the hearty, deep flavoured autumn and winter vegetables or some of the more fiery middle-eastern combination. As spring rolls around we'll start bringing out lighter, fresher soups that are all about subtlety.

Unlike spirits, you don't wake up with a sore head and a mouth like a shag-pile carpet after a night sampling them.

But there's a thought. What about a night combining soup tasting, drinks and other sundry delights from a variety of artisan food producers. That's got to be a good idea...

Bite magazine review

Lovely review of us by Leila from Bite Magazine.

If you’re looking for a delicious lunch and, perhaps some inspiration for your own home-cooked soup recipes, I can’t recommend this place highly enough. I had a tour ‘backstage’ to the kitchen, where all the creations come together, using locally sourced organic vegetables wherever possible. It might be the scientist in her as Elaine’s knowledge of spices and ingredients seems encyclopaedic, evidenced in the well-stocked pantry. Read on...