Phantom Soups

Traditional Mushroom Soup

2008-08-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

Greetings!

Mushroom soup. A favourite of mine for its simplicity and the flavour. This weekend, Mrs Phantom and I had a friend over for the weekend. I needed something tasty to serve up for lunch and decided that I would make mushroom soup. I hadn't made it in quite a while, so I was very much looking forward to it.

I served it with (as the picture illustrates) some bread, which not five minutes before that picture was taken, had come out of my newly acquired breadmaker. YUM! I'm going to do a post on The Belly Rules The Mind soon about bread. I have plenty to say on the matter (surprise, surprise!)

To make the soup I used:

A heap of mushrooms (about 350-400g)
1.5 pints of vegetable stock
1 onion
1oz butter
1 bay leaf
Dash of double cream
Salt and Pepper to taste

To make the soup, I sweated the onions and bay leaf in the butter for five minutes. Just before they are about to turn brown, I added in the mushrooms and coated them in the onion and butter mix.

Following that, I poured in the stock and simmered for about 25 minutes. I then added in the cream and stired. I removed the bay leaf and I then poured it into a blender and whizzed it until smooth.

It's at this point that I added the seasoning. It's important to ensure that the soup is finished before seasoning, because it's at this point you have the final flavours. If you do it at the start of the process, you end up seasoning just the stock.

Back on the pan to heat up again and it's ready to serve. I really love mushroom soup. Second only to asparagus, I think.

French Onion Soup

2008-08-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

French Onion Soup! Is it Onion Soup as made by the French, or Soup made of French Onions? Either way, it's fantastic.

For my 28th Birthday, eagle-eyed readers of my other blog, The Belly Rules The Mind, will note that I got a bread maker as one of my gifts. It has quite literally CHANGED. MY. LIFE. Cheaper, more tasty, room to experiment; My God, it's like manna from heaven. Anyway, I made a 'quick loaf' which is basically a loaf in under an hour. It turned out ok, not brilliant, but ok. I needed to put more yeast in for a quick loaf, but was unsure as to how much 'more yeast' actually meant.

What's this got to do with soup? Well, I decided to make some French Onion Soup with some toasted bread and holumi cheese. For lunch, using the bread I'd made.

Here's how I made it.

French Onion Soup

3 large onions cut very finely
2oz Butter
1 tbsp Olive Oil
3 tbsp brown sugar (I used Muscavdo)
6 tbsp Brandy
1.5 pints Beef Stock

I place the onions in a pan with the butter and olive oil and cooked them for about 10 minutes, until they were translucent. I then added in the sugar and cooked them for a further 15. They should then be nicely caramelised. Pour in the beef stock, along with the brandy and cook for another 15 minutes on a low heat. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

I then cut up the bread and toasted it on one side. I removed the slices from the grill and then placed them cooked side down on the soup, with the haloumi cheese on top. I placed the soup under the grill for the other side to cook and for the cheese to melt. It was made from 100% pure win!

The pictures really don't do it justice (I need to buy a new camera I think), but you get the general idea. It was a triumph and the haloumi cheese (which is quite sharp in a milky, feta-esque way) worked really well.

Enjoy!

Welcome to 'Phantom Soups'

2008-08-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

Greetings!

I'm the Phantom Chef. My friends always ask me why I chose that pseudonym, but regret doing so when I tell them because it's the most agonisingly boring story ever told (even more so than the story about the time I nearly ran out of diesel). I run 'The Belly Rules The Mind' which is a moderately successful food blog. I've created this blog to separate one aspect of my cooking which I do quite frequently. That is 'soups'.

Amongst my friends and family, I think it's fair to say, I am best known for my soups of all my dishes. I love making soup. It can be as straightforward or as complicated as you like, and on the right day, a good bowl of homemade soup is the bestestestestest thing ever. A basic soup is, on the face of it, a doddle to make. But actually, balancing the flavours in your soup requires a reasonably fine tuned palette.

This blog probably won't be updated as frequently as BRTM, due to the specific nature of the content, but please, stop by and take a peek!