Warming red beet soup with horseradish

This soup looks so amazing, don´t you think?!? It also tastes amazing…so soothing, warming and energizing! Too bad pumpkin season is long over here, I miss the pumpkins dearly 😦

To make the soup, first sautee some sliced onion in a pot with a small amount of sesame oil and a pinch of salt. Add chopped up carrot, hokkaido pumpkin, parsley root, red beet and a small piece of apple – you have to play with the ratios and each time you will end up with a different soup depending on which vegetable you decide to emphasize! 😀 Sautee together for a while, add a bit more salt and cover with hot water so that all the veggies are submerged. At this point you can add bayleaf, allspice and whole cloves (adds great depth of flavour). Boil slowly with a lid on for 15-20 minutes until the vegetables become soft. Season with ume plum vinegar. Blend the soup in a blender or use an immersion blender (I think that´s the easier way to puree soups, because you don´t need to transfer it anywhere!).  Don´t forget to take out the spices before blending…After blending, let the soup simmer for a while longer and then turn off the flame and mix in some finely grated horseradish – the amount depends on how spicy you want your soup to be… You can still season the soup with some lemon juice and add a nice green garnish, such as chopped fresh parsley.

31.10.

The nice yellow soup in the picture is pumpkin soup – cooked up hokkaido pumpkin, blended in a blender with added shiro miso (white, shortly fermented miso) and some ginger juice to taste – I personally think pumpkin soup just needs ginger in it! 😀

For grain I had brown calasparra rice mixed with red thai cargo rice and quinoa – all pressure cooked togethe for 45 minutes, served with a sprinkle of gomasio. I got a bit addicted to mixing different grains together, makes cooking much more interesting. But I must admit that I am not so fond of pressure cooking the quinoa with the rest – normally I cook quinoa without pressure for just about 15 minutes, a longer cooking time makes it too slimy and tasteless 😦

I sauteed pointed cabbage with green beans together with some mirin and ume plum vinegar – pointed cabbage rules!! So tender, compared to round cabbage.

And the beans are black hokkaido beans – first rubbed in a wet kitchen towel (instead of washing, so that their skin doesn´t “fly off” during roasting), then dry roasted for a few minutes until their skin cracks and becomes a bit golden, then pressure cooked with a double amount of water, for 45 minutes. When they´re done I added some kuzu to their leftover cooking water to make a sort of thick sauce (and a nice glaze on the beans), tamari (instead of salt) and rice malt – lovely combination!