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How to use up too-sweet soup?

This was a recipe for Thai carrot-ginger soup. We've ejoyed it when made by the people who gave us the recipe, but our own effort turned out far too sweet for our taste, and not even the right carrotty colour. It's light green. You'd swear there was a lot of sugar in it. I'm blaming the excess sweetness on the sweet potato. Unlike the orange ones we usually buy its flesh was cream coloured, almost white (purple skin.) Browsing online I gather the terms yam & sweet potato as used in the stores could cover any one of a number of vegetables. We didn't taste this one before it went into the soup. The recipe's a .pdf that I can't copy but basically:
Sweet potato
Onion
Carrot
Ginger
Garlic
Veg broth
Coconut milk
Hot hot spices - we omitted them & used Anaheim peppers.

Anyway, what suggestions would you make for using the rest of the pot ? In my experience adding more ingredients seldom works. I lean towards using it as a not-too-liberlaly-applied sauce for savoury not-sweet dishes; maybe a barbecue baste. Ideas?

Mr Magoo; the soup is so sweet it's difficult to decide what to blame. Honestly you'd think someone had dumped a load of sugar in it. None of the igredients could have had that much sweetness. We're proposing to have a spicy chicken dish tonight and will probably experiment with your suggestion of cooking a side dish of rice in the soup - diluted and maybe doctored a bit. Will let you know how that goes.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Once turkey and spuds are a given, I'm with TB:  you NEED some awesome stuffing.  Personally, I'm partial to a simple sausage stuffing -- squeeze the filling out of a pack of breakfast links (or two, if your bird is huge) and fry up until brown.  Add a diced onion, some diced celery and cook until just soft.  Add a whack of stale bread, cut or torn into small chunks, some salt and pepper, and some sage or savoury (and/or the other herbs of your choice) and stir over heat until the bread has absorbed all the fat/liquid from the pan.  Let it cool, then pack as much of it into the cavity as possible -- really lean into it if you have to -- and then seal the cavity with a skewer or tie the drumsticks across the cavity with some kitchen twine.

If you don't like pork, try one or two lamb merguez sausages.  If you can find it, use dark pumpernickel bread, or a good rye bread.  And of course anything else you want to throw in is just value added.

For the vegetables, consider roasted instead of boiled/steamed/pureed/whatever.  Pick any or all of the following, and toss them into a heavy, oven safe pan or skillet with a goodly glug of olive oil and some salt and pepper and optional herbs:

-  carrots, peeled or not, cut in two inch lengths.

-  beets, peeled and quartered

-  brussels sprouts (you might even like them this way!) cleaned

-  parsnip (cut like the carrot, and maybe split on the really fat end)

-  large button or cremini mushrooms, whole

-  baby sweet peppers, if you can find them, whole, seeded

-  sweet potato or yam, peeled and cut in chunks

-  some cauliflower florets, about the size of a toonie

-  celeriac, fennel bulb, kohlrabi, or any other vegetable that looks like it came from the props closet from Alien

-  any sturdy and tasty vegetable I've forgotten or that you like

Shake the pan to make sure everything gets a bit of oil and seasoning, then cover with foil and roast in the oven with the bird for 30-45 minutes.  Remove foil, give the veg another shake, and roast for another 30 minutes or until cooked through nicely.  Some added butter never hurts right before serving.

It's a nice, and seasonal alternative to some of the other cooking methods.  And I'm not kidding when I say it might make a brussels sprouts believer out of you.

 

Oysters are also good as a base for a turkey/capon stuffing...

Mr. Magoo wrote:

A quick repost because I like the picture, and it no longer shows up earlier in this thread where we had nearly the exact same plum discussion a year ago.  :)

i like those prune plums! Green flesh on the inside. My plum tree has 5 varieties on it. But always gets infested with worms or all the fruits fall off before harvesting. I’ll probably cut it down along with the 2 cherry and peach tree because of poor spacing. I screwed up :(

Boston baked contain a lot of sugar (whether molasses or maple syrup) which can be a problem for some people, also in terms of digestion.

Diana Kennedy is a British cook of venerable age who has written extensively on Mexican foods, including books on specific regions such as Oaxaca (where there are many Indigenous peoples who have retained their languages and cultures to a great extent). Here is a relatively mild but flavourful Lenten dish: http://spicelines.com/2010/09/28/recipe-diana-kennedys-stewed-white-bean... This is lenten, so it uses oil rather than lard!

Take Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish food out of the library, if you can access it. You'll find a lot of beans, in particular in slow-cooked stews for the Sabbath, when no cooking is allowed. It is work, eh? These are most commonly called cholent in Askenazi cooking and Dafina in Sephardic, but there are many variations on recipes and names. Usually there is at least a bit of meat or bones if the family could afford them, because it is after all the Sabbath meal, but here is a vegetarian one: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/the-nosher/latin-inspired-vegetarian-ch...

Rachel Roddy is my favourite cookery writer at the Guardian; unlike doyennes Kennedy and Roden, she is a relatively young British woman who lives in Testaccio, Rome, with her Sicilian husband and their little boy. But this chickpea recipe hails from Catalonia, quite pointedly:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/03/braised-chickpeas-w... This recipe is vegetarian, with a picada of almonds and garlic (yum).

We haven't even touched South Asia yet! Someone will.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

Yes I’m starting to pick up the habit of having to plan for soaking your beans into the preparation of cooking them. This can take a couple days but is worth saving on the low cost of bulk dry beans.

Absolutely!  I feel a little ashamed if I buy a can of beans, on sale for $0.88.

But try the freezing, if you have room in your freezer.  It couldn't work more perfectly.

Also, a wee pinch of baking soda in the soaking water not only helps the beans soften, it removes some of the ... musicality of them.  Discard the soaking water, keep and use the cooking water.

When I boil my chick peas for humus I use a half teaspon of baking soda so they soften up for the blender. I've considered preping enough to freeze but room is not available and the arangement now works fine.

Thanks

Thanks for the link Mr Magoo but making large amounts of hummus for storage is way over the top for me brother. Perhaps a few years down the road when I get the family into a bigger house/kitchen/facilities and my toddlers have bigger mouths.  My wife likes to bake but at this time attempting flat bread is beyond our reach. But falafel with chick peas and favas  sound like something I can start preparing for in the next couple days?

Today I bought some salted cod and an extra kg bag of dried fava beans. First I’ll do the traditional Portuguese Bacalhau dinner, then the falafels. I will check out a Lebanese site because I believe your right they make the best ones that I’m familiar with. Thanks

Sounds like flat bread is easy to make! We will try it thanks

Ok I did the falafel yesterday. And I didn’t like it. I think I used too much cilantro and the beans didn’t chop properly in the blender. I’m thinking maybe I should have boiled the beans first for 10 minutes probably. I used a deep fryer and used extra flour so I didn’t have any issues with the balls exploding. They actually fried pretty good! But the constant adding them and removing got messy and created a small fire half way through. That’s when I said ok I’ve seen enough, this isn’t worth it. I ate all the ones I made but it’s a fuck of a hell of a lot of work!  Perhaps I’ll just learn from the first attempt and put it behind me and when the times right try again. 

I like sardines but I'd find them jarring in that dish. I tend to eat them as some Moroccan friends do, with bread (flatbread would be fine; they also make leavened bread), red onions, salads.

I don't really eat mammalian meat any more (though I'll eat pretty much anything if invited to friends'; if I were truly a vegetarian it would be different but don't want to impose "mostly veg, fish, some poultry" on people who invite me).

I have been eating poultry livers from time to time because I've been anaemic (nothing fundamental; I had no appetite whatsoever after an infection and ate practically nothing for at least a couple of weeks) and now have some duck livers (frozen, so I don't have to cook them today). I think I'll just fry them in olive oil with the usual onions and garlic, and a splash of leftover white wine, but I'm open to ideas).

I was happy to find a potimarron squash at the market; most of the stands selling them have closed down with the chilly weather.  They are very tasty and such a vivid colour; an orange verging on reddish.

I've always eaten sardines. My mother mashed them up and served them to us on toast or crackers.

Squash is on of the Three Sisters that were the staples of many Indigenous peoples' diets in northeastern North America; there were even more complex systems of planting these and other staples farther south in what is now Mexico and Central America.

Ya some people really hate sardines. I guess they’re similar to anchovies (yes I like anchovies on my pizza). I was surprised my fave bean stew was so delicious with a pound of sardines in it.  But my son didn’t have as much as I would prefer so I think next time I make fava bean stew I’ll use deboned chicken instead of Portuguese sausage or sardines.  Sardines are something cooked on their own and served with a side or something like that. I’ll admit they are overpowering. But super healthy!!!

Indeed. My duck liver and red onions dish was very good; as well as the bit of white wine and lemon I had on hand, I also added the juice of a rather wobegone orange, so it was a bit sweet and sour, without adding any white sugar etc.

With only one liver, you are better off slicing the lobes (removing connective tissue) and simply sautéeing them, ideally in duck fat, if not in olive or sunflower oil, depending on your tastes and how you are serving the duck. Important not to overcook them; they cook very quickly and can turn into little hockey pucks.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

I’ll admit they are overpowering. But super healthy!!!

You just awakened the bugbear! :)

If you wander through the vitamin/supplement aisle of your local drugstore, you might see "Fish Oil" capsules.  Why would people buy fish oil pills, but then obey the recipe when it says "remove the skin from the salmon before cooking"  or "if you don't care for mackerel, substitute sole"?

Canada technically has access to three oceans, and fish oils are good stuff.  No need to buy a pill.

Not at my house! Salmon skin is actually the most tasty past. The skin of salmon trout and char have very small tiny scales and is delicious when fried. I guess sardine skin is similar. I find the skin from pickeral bass perch and sunfish has large scales and I don't recall ever wanting to eat that part?

Unfortunately, unlike Timebandit, I live alone now ... well, except for my small, fussy black cat. Of course I love cooking for friends, but I have to be very careful to avoid discarding food, especially since my appetite has decreased considerably in the last decade.

Yes, I'm making spanikorizo tonight. And poultry stock - probably the thing that keeps me most from being "really" vegetarian.

The spanikorizo is vegetarian though, and vegan if no feta is sprinkled on it;

https://www.olivetomato.com/greek-spinach-and-rice-spanakorizo/

The bass (large and small mouth) pickerel sunfish perch and crappie my wife and I ate were the ones we caught in Pigeon lake when I had a small fishing boat. We would keep our limit for the bass and pickerel and always have an assortment of the others. When we bring them back I literally would have to spend 3if not 4 hours gutting and cleaning so I always leave the skin on to save time. Throw a few in the fridge for the next couple days, a couple in the skillet for that night and the rest in the freezer for winter/spring or until they ran out. Do this a bunch of weekends during the summer and the freezer would get full. I always found the scales and skin would just peel off when frying. And we would only keep the larger perch crappie and sunfish. I tried musky once but I didn’t like it and with the restrictions I won’t keep em.  On our honeymoon in China, at a tourist city called Yangshou in Guangxi province we had carp and catfish. It was real good! Now catfish is a real good fish to eat, but for some reason catfish and carp never really caught on in southern Ontario among white Europeans?

WWWTT wrote:

@lagatta4 and Timebandit

Wow you guys sound like you take your cooking real serious! I'm sure there isn't any leftovers around your home!

Yes, we do! There are often leftovers, we eat them for lunches most of the time. My younger daughter loves a hot lunch, so leftovers in a thermos is a good solution. 

Lagatta, I was just thinking the other day about how our cooking habits will have to change when the girls leave home in a few years' time. 

I keep dried dill in my spice drawer, just in case I can't find it fresh - or forget to look for it.

I expect we'll still be cooking, but scaling back quantities. I've picked up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store because of a time crunch, but we just eat a lot later than most people. It's rare to sit down before 7pm at our house. Elder daughter's boyfriend is used to our habits now, but was really thrown for a loop at how late we eat when they first started hanging out together!

I hear you about the herbs! Even cooking larger quantities leaves me with extra. I put it in a glass with water, like a vase of flowers, and it lasts a bit longer.

I had leftover sauerkraut after making szegedin goulash (pork goulash with sauerkraut! tasty!), so we went home for lunch one day and I made reuben sandwiches on the griddle. OMG, good! Mustard, corned beef, sauerkraut and swiss cheese. Heavenly.

I haven't! I consider it now and then, but I've had other things higher on the priority list. And there are a couple of good delis nearby, so that removes some motivation.