Midweek Harira Soup

The tanneries at Fez...smelly, smelly place!

Baby brother and I were lucky enough to spend a week in Fez about 12 years ago. It's the most fabulous city and the food is the best in Morocco. It was the first time either of us had eaten Harira soup (or briouates or b'stilla for that matter) and it was a powerful memory - a chilli hot lamb broth with tomatoes, spices, pulses and pasta.

Apparently there are endless versions of it, which of course gives you a fair bit of latitude when you come to make your own. So armed only with yesterday's lamb broth and some stuff from the larder I set out to make some.

Harira soup

Fez pottery - It'd be rude not to bring some home.

About 2 pints of lamb broth, skimmed of fat, plus the shreds of meat that came off the bone
500g carton of passata
2 cloves garlic
100g cannellini beans, soaked overnight
100g chana dal
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp vegetable stock powder
3 tsp Turkish mixed spice (a cinnamon, gingery, clovy type)
1 chili, chopped
Juice of half a lemon
Large handfull of short vermicelli

Somewhat embarrassingly, I just put everything in a pot apart from the lemon and vermicelli, brought it to the boil and cooked for an hour and a bit. When the beans are tender, put the vermicelli in and when that's cooked (a few minutes), put the lemon juice in and serve.

This was gorgeous and while I know it's not that traditional (the real thing involves hours of faffing about and lots of different bowls of stuff being added at crucial moments) it's very doable on a weeknight and put me right back in the happy place - traipsing round the Mdina with baby brother, duking around the souks and riads and showing him how to haggle (for a really lovely chess set). And of course making him carry my Berber rug and about a brazillion plates all the way home.

Back with an Ad Hock Soup.....

Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor

I'm back! Right back where I began actually. Back from yet another trip to Side, my favourite Turkish town, with a suitcase full of cheap fags and an empty bank account. Teeth fixed up beautifully by Halile the sainted dentist (again), ate and drank too much (again), went white water rafting for the first time (never again!). I am happy, relaxed, tanned and skint. So very, very skint.

I ate so well in Side but the highlight was definitely Emir's Pansion where we ate the best meze and fabulously fresh fish and lamb followed by perfectly ripe, fresh fruit for about a tenner a head. On two of the occasions we ate Chez Emir he brought us gorgeous soups which I am determined to recreate at home. One was lamb and runner bean, the other lamb and okra, both were soooo rich and simple and good I could have eaten a pan full.

So off to the cut price vegetable section in the supermarket where I found a big bag of mixed carrot, turnip, leek and onion (20p), a bag of chillis (20p) and a bunch of coriander (12p) and fashioned a lovely soup out of them with a bit of cooked ham out of the freezer. Essentially carrot and coriander, but the ham definitely improves it! Nothing at all like Emir's, but that's for another day. A day when runner beans or okra can be found in the reduced section.

Ad Hock soup

1 bag soup mix veg (carrots, leeks, parsips & onions)
1 clove garlic
1 chilli, chopped
2 tsp Marigold stock (or Kuckarek stock, which I think I prefer these days and is very cheap!)
Small bunch of coriander
200g cooked, smoked ham hock

Sweat the veg and garlic in some olive oil at medium high heat for ten minutes, add everything but the coriander plus 4 cups or so of water, bring to boil and simmer for 45 mins, add coriander, liquidise.

Better than Pea & Ham Soup

Two days into the new year Tesco offers little in the way of cut price sustenance. They are absolute beggars for  pushing not-very-special-offers this weather (you know, "50p each or 4 for £3" or as the picture shows, an offer of Indian snacks which was mindbogglingly poor value, yet which managed to clear the shelf.). The place was coming down with them.

I suppose you can't blame them for making a few quid out of silly sods who are so distracted by yellow barkers that they lose the ability to do simple division. The 800g of Taw Valley Cheddar (a very pedestrian cooking cheese which I stockpiled at 30p per 400g just before Christmas!) for £10 made me laugh out loud.

However amidst the highway robbery I did notice lovely big 3lb gammon joints reduced to £3.50 and I picked up a 1lb smoked kielbasa (Polish sausage) for 50p! A pack of soup vegetables and we're ready to go make the sort of soup that will raise the dead (and may need to given the chesty colds flying around).

The killer ingredient for me was using chana dal instead of split peas. Chana dal is a split Bengal chickpea - it's very nutty and tasty but miraculously it keeps its shape when cooked. It's my all time favourite pulse but I have never tried it in soup till now. I'll be doing this again, the flavour was tremendous and I got about 3lb of delicious cooked ham and sausage mix for the freezer out of it too. So this is real feed an army for a fiver stuff! You can get chana dal in the bigger supermarkets or in your local Asian grocers.

Better-than-pea-and-ham-soup Soup

3lb unsmoked gammon

1lb smoked kielbasa

2 onions, peeled and halved

1 pack prepared soup veg, washed (choose one with hardly any carrot but plenty of leek & parsley)

12oz chana dal

Put everything except the dal in a stockpot, cover in water, bring to boil, skim any foam off the surface, simmer for two hours. Remove the meat, liquidise the veg into the stock. Add the dal, boil for 10 mins, simmer for an hour. When the gammon has cooled, remove all skin and fat and chop up the lean meat; chop the kielbasa up too. Return about a pound of it back to the soup. Freeze the rest of the meat, it will make good pie filling, pasta sauce base or could be added to a chicken casserole.