/food /Pink Soup

02.05.09

Admittedly we are not the biggest fan of cabbage. Nevertheless we do have a tendency to buy locally grown seasonal food. Furthermore we buy most of our food on one day of the week, which limits the amount of perishable vegetables we can buy. All the above together means we do buy cabbage, despite not being its biggest fans. As a result of this cabbages tend to spend some time in the fridge, waiting for a nice recipe to come by.

This time the reason to pull out the red cabbage we bought two weeks earlier came from my partner. An overwhelming urge to eat red cabbage soup triggered me to cut up and prepare the cabbage. When cooking cabbage I try to combine tastes to a combination of flavours where the cabbage is only one in a complex taste, for obvious reasons. Not only was red cabbage mandatory in the soup, but it had to be combined with dill. I then dove into my fridge to dig up other vegetables lazing around for sometimes even longer times, which I knew could be used to improve the soup. A couple of potatoes, a kohl-rabi, some onions, garlic and a more recently acquired bulb of fennel seemed promising enough to make the red cabbage soup into something beyond mere red cabbage soup. And it worked out well, the numerous vegetables, combined with a goat cheese/creme fraiche mixture and a dash of anisette, turned the soup in a delicatesse, both pleasing for the eye and the tongue.

The soup came into being using ingredients in the quantities available to me at that time, which are, if I recall correctly:

• 1 red cabbage, sliced
• 3/4 kohl-rabi, diced
• 2 onions, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• 2 potatoes, washed and sliced

All this slightly fried in butter, then covered with vegetable stock, cooked till done and pureed. Then I added:

• lemon zest and juice from 1 lemon
• about 75 grams fresh goat cheese
• 125 ml creme fraiche
• 50 ml anisette (pernod/ricard)
• pepper and salt

I served the soup with

• thiny sliced fennel and
• fresh dill

And the next day the soup was even more intense in taste in color.