Greetings from my kitchen! This week, I’ve been making soup. Why soup? Well for one, it’s bloody freezing. Really, the other morning I started warming my hands over the rising steam from my boiling breakfast egg. That’s when you know summer is over and you have to forget about icy poles and remember soup.  For two, there’s a sick person in the house and we all know soup is the only thing for it when your immune system has failed you.
Unfortunately though, something crap happened when I started thinking about soup; I was bored. Each soup I made last winter seemed duller than the last. Meeting soup as often as I do in winter, for dinner, for lunch at work, and being bored by it makes for a beige winter eating landscape. I need some grand soup recipes. I need to see some fireworks explode from my soup pot!
So, I had a crack at three whole new soup recipes and I think I found my mojo, look what I did!

Mushroom noodle soup
As I don’t always have homemade stock lying around, I like to make soup in which the stock is built into the recipe. For example, this mushroom noodle soup, which is an adaption of the mushroom stock from the book by the Ideas in Food team. You take a bunch of mushrooms, add soy, sherry and onion and create a stock using those ingredients. Then you simply add noodles and greens to cook in the pot and finish with herbs, chilli, lime or anything you want. Take 600g of quartered, cleaned mushrooms and place them in a big pot with ½ a cup of dry sherry, 4 tablespoons of soy sauce and one peeled, sliced onion. Bring to the boil and simmer for one hour. Bring it back to a boil and add a sliced knob of ginger, a peeled, smashed garlic clove and a bunch of Chinese broccoli. After two minutes, add 200g of rice noodles and cook briefly til the noodles are cooked(check the packet for directions!). Finish with spring onions, herbs, red chilli, hard boiled eggs or anything else that takes your fancy.

Kale, lentil and pancetta soup
Also known as black cabbage, kale is a vegetable that is struggling along in my vegetable garden at the moment. I wish it would lift it’s game because not only is it pricey but it’s tricky to find in Melbourne. To my mind, it’s totally worth the bucks though. Sweet, earthy and slightly bitter, this green has the power to make a soup. Take two slices of flat pancetta and fry very gently in your soup pot. When the fat has rendered down a bit and you have some nice colour, add one diced onion to the pan and continue cooking very slowly. After five minutes, season with salt and pepper, stir and cook for five more minutes. When it’s very soft, add one diced carrot and one diced celery stick, and four cloves of chopped garlic. Cover and sweat for ten minutes, or until the vegetables are tender. Add one litre of vegetable stock and simmer for half an hour. Add ½ a cup of cooked lentils and one bunch of black cabbage, chopped into bite sized pieces. Simmer for ten more minutes. Locate and remove the pancetta pieces, return them chopped up to the pan. Check for seasoning, then spoon into hot bowls to serve.

Cullen Skink
This soup, along with the delicious late night chippie snack chips, cheese and coleslaw, are two favourites I took away from a stint in Glasgow. Cullen skink is a slightly more dignified choice for a dinner party than the chips but both are memorable in their own way. Traditionally made with smoked haddock, I’ve Australianised this most Scottish of soups and added smoked trout to the leek and potato base. Take two whole smoked trouts and place in a big deep frying pan. Cover with water and add a bay leaf. Very gently bring to the boil. Set aside to cool. In a little olive oil and butter, very gently sweat one onion chopped onion and two leeks cut into chunks. When softened but not coloured, add two large chopped potatoes. Add the trout broth and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Remove the meat from the fish and place in the pot. Remove half of the mixture and mash or puree. Stir back in and add two cups of milk. Season and serve with chopped chives. (Adapted from Felicity Cloak’s How to Cook the Perfect… column in the Guardian.) 

Having used the word “gross” three times in my last post on chestnuts, this week I decided it was time for something actually good. Fennel is really good and looking super hot in the market at the moment, so here come some ideas for cooking with fennel! 
There are a great many ways to eat this beautiful vegetable. This week alone I tried baked, caramelised, raw and sauted and didn’t even come close to exhausting the fennel preparation well. Whichever way you eat it, make sure you remove the outer leaves, as they are really tough and unpleasant to eat.
All of the recipes that follow can be made with regular bulb fennel but if you have a wild fennel source close to your house, a few leaves from the plant will improve your dish. A common sight along train tracks, vacant lots and creeks, it’s like fennel to the power of a thousand. All you need to do it chop a couple of stalks off. Don’t do what I did when I saw some in Italy, don’t try and dig it up and expecting a pure white bulb on the end because there isn’t one. Yes, I’m embarrassed to admit I suck at foraging and I tried to dig up wild fennel because I thought it was just like bulb fennel. Enjoy!

Winter chopped salad 
I used to think chopped salad sounded like a horrific train wreck, a salad with everything from salami to feta to grilled chicken to blue cheese dressing.  But it was a classic case of ignorance because I had never actually tried a chop salad. So this week, I got right into the chopped salad spirit and I loved it! The key is not to be stingy and make sure you have plenty of the good bits included. Start with one finely sliced fennel and one finely sliced spanish onion. Then add all of the following, chopped well, one head of radiccho, two slices of pancetta cooked til crisp, half a cup of green olives, a handful of wild fennel fronds, and hazelnuts. I shaved some parmesan over and dressed with just olive oil, salt and pepper. (Adapted from a Rosa Mitchell recipe that was featured in Gourmet Traveller.)

Fennel, mustard and potato bake
This is the perfect dinner for people who secretly think that the best part of roast dinner is the sides. The recipe comes from Holly Davis’s cookbook Nourish, which is rammed with other genuinely awesome whole food recipes. (As in not just pretending to be healthy and awesome and then turning out to be healthy and bland, but really awesome.) Potato and fennel are cooked long and slow in a mustard-lemon sauce, cooked beans are added towards the end of the cooking time, then when everything is collapsing and caramelised, it’s ready. Take one fennel bulb and three large potatoes and cut into wedges. Lay in a baking tray and mix with four chopped garlic cloves, add a little salt and olive oil. Mix well. Stir together; 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard, ½ a cup of stock and the juice of one lemon. Pour over the vegetables and toss a little to make sure everything is well coated. Bake at 150 celcius for an hour, stirring occasionally. When everything is going slightly brown and beginning to collapse, add a cup of cooked haricot beans. Bake for a further 20 minutes, serve topped with the feathery fennel fronds. (I used chickpeas for the version you see above, which I think was an error, beans are much nicer.)

Pasta con sarde
When I first saw the list of ingredients for this dish, I thought it was all too much. Sardines, wild fennel, garlic, currants, pinenuts and breadcrumbs all find their way into this dish. But I was so wrong! This pasta is amazing. Fry a finely sliced onion and one sliced fennel in a pan with a little olive oil, til tender(roughly ten minutes on low heat). Add three minced garlic cloves, salt and pepper and cook until you can smell the garlic. Add six preserved sardines and break them up a bit. Then add chilli flakes to taste and two tablespoons each of pinenuts and currants. Lastly, squeeze one lemon in, check for seasoning. Add cooked pasta and some of the cooking water if the pasta is a little dry. Finish with breadcrumbs. (Adapted from Food52.)

Caramelised fennel
I saved this one til last if I put it first, no one would bother reading til the end because you would already know the best ever fennel recipe. Sweet caramelised fennel is the best thing ever. This is a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe. Melt a little butter with olive oil in a big frypan, when it’s foaming, add the sliced fennel pieces. Cook for about one minute either side or until you have they have a light golden colour. Remove the fennel from the pan. Add two tablespoons of caster sugar, salt, pepper and a teaspoon of fennel seeds, cook for thirty seconds then return the fennel to the pan. Cook for 1-2 minutes on either side or until brown and caramelised. Finish with a bit of orange zest, salt and fennel fronds.