Cookbook challenge

This is another recipe from The Adventurous Eaters Club by Misha & Vicki Collins

Purple Soup

Serves 6

2 tablespoons butter
½ cup roughly chopped yellow onion
2 medium raw beets (about 8 ounces total), roughly chopped (about 1 ½ cups)
2 medium yellow potatoes (about 12 ounces total), roughly chopped (about 1 ½ cups)
1 large carrot, roughly chopped (about 1 cup)
Sea salt to taste
4 cups water
1 to 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Sour cream for garnish

Melt the butter in a medium pot over medium heat. Toss in the onion and cook until softened, about 5 to 6 minutes. Add your chopped veggies, salt, and water and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer 25 to 30 minutes, or until the beets are very soft.

Let the soup cool slightly before pouring it from the pot into a blender. Blend until ultrasmooth and purple.

Return the blended soup to the pot and add the lemon juice. Stir and adjust the seasoning. Serve the soup in mugs or 6-ounce ramekins.

Kid’s job! Swirl in sour cream to create a purple fuchsia cyclone.


Notes:
My onion I had saved for this had gone off and it was storming out, so I subbed in onion powder. I don’t remember how I calculated it, but I came up with 1 ½ tablespoons.

I also used just under a half a cup of extra beets because I had that much left over and I wasn’t going to waste it.

My blender is not big enough to handle this much soup at once, so I had to do it in batches. It makes quite the extra mess. If I do it again, I am going to try using the potato masher and see how that turns out.

The beets I had defied all color logic and were no where near the any color normally associated with beets and were instead blood red. Everyone I sent a picture to with no context asked if I was making soup from the blood of my enemies for dinner, except one who wondered what “hella spicy” sauce I had conjured up. So just know that is a possible visual outcome.

Taste wise, it was quite good. It tasted most like buttered baked beets.

Confetti Frittata
The Adventurous Eaters Club by Misha & Vicki Collins

Ingredients:
1 leaf Swiss or rainbow chard
6 eggs
1 cup milk
Sea salt to taste
2 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup grated mild Cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated Swiss cheese or Gruyere cheese

Preheat oven to 350° f.

Wash and dry the chard. Hold the stem at the bottom, like a handle, in one hand. Use your other hand to tear the leaf away from the stem in one swoop. Set aside the stem or use it for a duel. Using child scissors, snip off tiny pieces of the leaf to make teeny green confetti. Set aside. (They assume a child is helping you.)

Combine the eggs, milk, and salt in a medium mixing bowl and wisk until well mixed.

Melt the butter in a medium-sized pan (preferably cast iron) over medium heat. Swirl the butter so it coats all sides of the pan. Once the pan is evenly coated, pour the excess melted butter into the whisked eggs and give them a stir. Set aside.

Add the chard confetti to the pan and stir until just wilted. If there's water in the pan after sauteing the greens, press the greens into the pan with a spatula and tip the pan to pour out the excess into the sink.

Pour the egg mixture into the pan. Top one side of the pan with cheddar and the other with Swiss or gruyere. Pop the pan in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Stick a toothpick in the middle: if it comes out mostly clean, it's ready.

Let the frittata cool for a few minutes, then slice into wedges and serve.

Notes:
While my sister turned her nose up at this, my mother and I enjoyed it, and my mother would like this in regular rotation. I did have to sub the chard for okra and the Swiss cheese for a very similar cheese. Even using a cast iron pan, 2 tablespoons of butter was excessive, but it didn't hurt anything.

I had to "talk to type" this to type it and I think I caught all the typos, but if there are any, that's why.

Goat Cheese & Mushroom Strudel (Puff Pastry or Phyllo Dough)

Recipe is from Craft Beering.

Ingredients:
2 tbsp butter + more for brushing the dough*
2 garlic cloves, chopped
18-20 oz mushrooms (cremini recommended)
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves (or ½ tsp dried)
1 tbsp fresh chopped parsley
2 tsp flour
1tsp salt (or to taste)
½ tsp pepper (or to taste)
6 oz goat cheese
2 sheets puff pastry (or 24 -30 phyllo sheets, about 5-6 ounces, or 1 recipe strudel dough)

Instructions:
1. Clean and trim the mushrooms and chop as finely as you'd like. Over medium heat melt 2 tbsp butter and saute the mushrooms with the garlic and thyme. Once most of the mushroom moisture has been released and evaporated add the chopped parsley, the flour and season with salt and pepper. Stir and cook for another minute or two. Remove from the stove and let cool down a bit. Fold in the goat cheese.
2. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Melt the rest of the butter. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
3. Spread out the puff pastry onto a clean surface and brush each of the two sheets with a bit of melted butter. (If using phyllo, start with 3 sheets, brush and so on until you have 2 separate piles comprised of 12 to 15 phyllo sheets each.)
4. Divide the filling and spread it over each sheet of dough. Leave a little room at the ends. Fold the short end inward and roll along the longer side. Brush seam with butter, place seam side down onto baking sheet. Generously brush with butter.
5. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the surface is deep gold color. Allow to cool down for 5 minutes before slicing.

* You will need from 4 to 10 tbsp of extra butter melted. 4 if using puff pastry, about 6 if making your own strudel dough and about 10 if using phyllo.

This was extremely tasty, but I did have some problems with this one. To start, it says prep time: 10 minutes, cook time: 35 minutes, for a total of 45 minutes. It took me two hours from start until I got it in the oven, but that could be just a me problem.

Substitutions: I added more garlic, mostly because when I pulled off two cloves from the bulb, they ended up being many more than that each. I ended up with 24 ounces of button mushrooms and only 4 oz of goat cheese, because that was what was available.

I went the puff pastry route, which is why the strudel dough recipe is not here.

It was a lot of fun watching the mushrooms cook down.

At one point, I did have to track down the picture version of the instructions because how they wanted you to fold it was not clear to me. Apparently, they want you to fold it like a burrito.

They also neglected to mention cutting vents in the top like you do for pie, which I did do, but it still should have been in the instructions.

My oven must also not have been hot enough, because after 35 minutes in the oven, it had still not reached a “deep gold color” but it was cooked enough to eat and we did, after letting it cool for 5 minutes.