Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, poppets. But, oh, so tired! I feel like I spent the last five days doing nothing but going to the gym, shopping, cooking, shopping, baking, laundering, washing dishes, washing counters and going to church for very long stretches of time.

We had Polish guests for Easter, so we had Polish Easter food as well as British Easter food, and everything turned out, even my hot cross buns which, ironically, were the most difficult thing to make. 

I also went along to the traditional Polish Holy Saturday blessing service with my guests to have their/our Easter basket (full of food for Easter Sunday) blessed. The Cathedral was absolutely packed, and I have not seen so many babies, children and perambulators in one place for a long time.

"You should be pushing a perambulator," said an irrepressible friend who has not quite worked out the relationship of age to fertility, and I heartily agreed. But meanwhile I had quite enough to do with guests and complicated recipes. To expand your culinary horizons (or flatter them if you happen to be Polish), here is how I made my lovely traditional Easter breakfast żurek (Polish sour) soup:

Seraphic's Easter Żurek 

500 mL bottle of kwas (also known as żur) from your local Polish shop. It is made of fermented rye flour and water. It keeps for a long time but have a look at the expiry date just in case. 

1.5 L of very good vegetable broth (I use Kallo cubes.)

4 white kielbasa sausages (actually pinkish)

bay leaf

1 Tbsp of marjoram

2 allspice grains

4 peppercorns

2 crushed cloves of garlic

1. Make up your lovely vegetable broth and throw in the herbs and spices. Bring to boil.

2. Boil the sausages for 15-20 minutes in the broth. Then fish them out and cut them up.

3. Continue to simmer the broth and lightly fry the sausage.

4. Pour in the kwas. Unless you know you love fermented soup, taste as you go.

5. Throw the  fried sausage into the broth-kwas mix and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes.

5. Squish two cloves of garlic until they are extremely squished and throw them in the simmering broth.

5. Taste to see if you want to add salt.

6. Hard-boil two or three eggs.

7. Put half an egg into each bowl and ladle the żurek over it.  

You can make this dish a day ahead and put it in the fridge, but don't add the eggs until you are about to serve it. It will feed 4-6 people as a breakfast (if they compute soup for breakfast) or first course, served with proper rye bread and not white American/British supermarket bread, the horror. 

I am told every Polish family has its own way of making żurek. My way made both our guests and Benedict Ambrose happy, so it works for me. The amusing thing is that it started out as a recipe I found online but got changed quite a bit, for one of the guests kept making suggestions, some of which I took, and others I rejected. Also, the original recipe wanted juniper berries. Well, who in Edinburgh has got juniper berries anywhere but in their gin, I'd like to know!

The first time I ever had żurek it was made for me by a friend living with her granny in her granny's Warsaw flat. My friend is now a postulant in an enclosed Benedictine order. Goodness knows when I will see her again, but meanwhile żurek reminds me of her.

Beautiful Buttery Carrot Soup

And now for something completely different: a recipe for a great vat of carrot soup. It is very inexpensive if a bit labour-intensive.

This is a recipe that feeds at least twelve. You can give 11 - 12 people big bowls of soup, or you can give 11 - 12 people little bowls of soup and then offer them more later. It is suitable for vegetarians, the gluten-intolerant and Fridays.

You need two big soup pots or one big soup pot and a big frying pan. I use a hand-held blender, but I am sure you could use a normal blender or food processor.

Beautiful Buttery Carrot Soup

4 Tbsp butter
3.5 pounds of carrots (£1 at Tesco last week)
3.5 medium onions
3.5 teaspoons of sugar
3.5 teaspoons of garam masala
10 cups of good-quality vegetable stock (I use Kallo organic, gluten-free cubes)
fine sea salt
white pepper

1. Peel carrots and dice them. This will take a long time.

2. Chop onions.

3. Divide butter between two pots or pot and pan and melt over low heat.

4. Divide carrots and onions between the two pots or pot and pan and fry in butter on low heat until they are soft but not browned. This will also take time. Check on them every once in a while, giving them a stir.

5. When carrots are soft, put the mixture in the pot or bigger pot. It needs to be a very big pot.

6. Add the sugar, the garam masala and the ten cups of stock.

7. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 15 minutes.

8. Take your handy-dandy hand blender and blitz the soup until all the carrots and onions are pulverized. Alternatively, cool the soup and blend in batches in a proper blender. Blend and blend and blend until every bit of carrot is squashed. Then go through the soup with a slotted spoon to eliminate the stubborn bits of carrot that have escaped.

9. Add salt and white pepper to taste.

10. If the soup has cooled, either heat it up again to serve or put it in the fridge to be heated up tomorrow. Serve piping hot.

The garam masala adds "heat" but not "bite", at least if it is the garam masala one gets in jars at Tesco.

Using veggie stock instead of chicken allows the carrots to shine out like the sunny elixir of life they really are.

To make soup for 2-3, just use one pot, two Tbsp butter, one pound of carrots, one onion, one tsp of sugar, one tsp garam masala and 3 cups of veggie stock.