Creamy Leek and Potato Seafood Chowder

I got woken up early this Saturday morning by a parcel delivery. My bell makes a really loud angry buzz noise, and it startles me every time. It also makes me think that the person at the door is angry and impatient (but they're always just lovely, well mostly...), so I scramble to the door phone as fast as I can every time.

I'm in an upstairs flat in a building without lifts, so I feel bad for making the post man / courier man / delivery man walk all the way up just to give me my stuff. This means that I gotta go all the way down to get it.

In mah PJs.
Half asleep.
With real (non-sexy) bed hair.

So after the excursion down to the front of the building (with me running down because I worry that if I make them wait, they'll leave) and then back up again, I'm wide awake.

What do you do when you're up early on a weekend? 

I decided to head down to the local market, which I don't get to do during the weekdays. After walking around a couple of fruit and vegetable stores, and deciding that nothing was terribly exciting (as in exotic or at least uncommon), I picked up some cheap and fresh deals instead.

What caught my eye were some beautiful bright green firm leeks. I haven't had leek in a while, but it's one of my favourite vegetables. Inspired by the wintry gusts of wind this morning, I picked up some more winter vegetables (isn't it supposed to be spring already!?) to make a soup. Or a chowder, as it were. A seafood chowder, with fish and crabmeat.

While I love a good leek and potato soup on its own, I find adding some fish gives it another dimension. The only problem is that it significantly increases the price of this dish... #studentmoneyproblems

I popped into Tesco to have a look anyway, and found some kippers for £1.15 - i.e. £6.49 a kilo! Kippers are smoked fish (similar to smoked mackerel I think) but need to be cooked again before eating.

The instructions on the packet say to boil them in the bag in boiling water for 15 minutes. I adjusted this in order to get maximum flavour out of the kipper into the chowder: I poached them out of the bag in some milk, and then reserved the milk for the chowder. My kippers also came with a knob of butter, which I chucked in as well, but that's probably optional. The smell of this cooking was incredible - smoky and fishy, but in the best way.

The rest of the chowder is pretty straight forward. The hardest part, to me, is the chopping. You gotta slice up the leeks (and wash them thoroughly to get all the sand out) into discs, dice the onion, and peel and cube the potatoes and carrots.

Then it'll all go into a pot and cook.

It looks like quite a lot here, and it is! The higher your vegetables to liquid ratio, the thicker, creamier, or chunkier your chowder will be.

There's not much to it after this. Just add stock, mash / blend (or don't), add your kipper infused smoky milk, and stir in your kipper bits.

As an added bonus, I added in a can of crabmeat. Because it's not really seafood chowder if you've only got fish - it's fish chowder.

I love crab, and canned crabmeat is a far cry from the real deal, but it's affordable, and convenient, so I use it. It's no good for dishes where crabmeat is supposed to the star, but in this chowder, it works brilliantly. You're not relying on the crabmeat for flavour, but texture, as it makes the chowder nice and thick and chunky, and really adds to it feeling like a filling meal (especially if you've blitzed the ritz out of the vegetables!)

This winter soup will warm you from the inside ;)

Full recipe -->

Portobello Mushroom Soup

My local market doesn't understand the use of labelling. I love shopping there, don't get me wrong, but I really think they should start labelling things properly.

So it probably doesn't matter much with things like banana, cherries, broccoli, etc. but it's very unhelpful to label various sizes, shapes and colours of potatoes all as potatoes. Oh sometimes, they put 'large potatoes', 'small potatoes', and 'washed potatoes' but that isn't very informative either. So when recipes tell you to buy some floury varieties like Desiree, Maris Piper or King Edward, I just have to guess and check.

Are all flat-capped mushrooms with black gills called portobello mushrooms? A Google search of portobello mushrooms does show up mushrooms like these. The only reason I wonder is because this entire bag (weighing 1.7kg!) only cost me £1.50! Whereas, in Hong Kong, the supermarkets could sell at up to HK$40 for 4. To put that into comparable terms, that's just under £3 for 4 mushrooms. 

How crazy is the price difference?

These mushrooms certainly look, feel, and taste like the same portobellos I buy in Hong Kong. I'd love to know if they really are the same thing.

I ended up with this whole bag because the man at the store convinced me that a small bag (for 50p) wouldn't be enough. "Eh pet, you sure you don't want a big bag, them mushrooms'll shrink and you'll be left with nothin', go on take a big bag"

So now I have close to 2kg of mushrooms to devour.

The quickest way to use up as many mushrooms as possible is to make soup, I thought. So I went a-chop-chop-chopping.

I used about half my bag - 800g ish. 

Now a lot of mushroom soup recipes call for a variety of other vegetables - potatoes, leeks, onions... but I wanted to let my shrooms shine (well also because I didn't have any of those other vegetables at hand...) so I kept the other ingredients to a minimum.

When cooking portobello mushrooms, I find they have much meatier texture and richer taste than normal white button mushrooms, so I may have been able to miss this next step. But I love mushrooms, and the more the merrier, so I soaked a small handful of dried wild mushrooms too.

With some butter sizzling on a very hot pan, I fried some minced garlic until fragrant, and then poured in my diced portobello mushrooms.

I cooked mine in two batches because I wanted to properly sauté the mushrooms, rather than boil / steam them as can happen when the pan gets overcrowded. It's like tanning on a hot beach, if it's empty and quiet then you can relax and get nicely evenly brown, but if it's crowded, you just feel like is hot and sweaty, and not in a good way!

It's tempting to stir your mushrooms, but I find that if you leave them in the pan to do their own thing,  they'll cook much better. As long as you have enough butter to cover the pan, they shouldn't stick too much. 

The mushrooms will then give off all their water, and at this point I reduced the heat to medium, and let it boil off and then begin to caramelise. Then, I used the soaking water from the dried mushrooms to deglaze any brown sticky bits from the pan.

Add in your now soaked dried wild mushrooms, all diced up too, and give a quick stir.

Top with 1L of milk and chicken stock. I used 500mL of each, but you can vary it according to how creamy you want it. Add some sprigs of thyme, and boil for 5 minutes or so.

If you want it smooth and creamy, scoop batches into a jug blender and blitz all the chunks of mushroom into oblivion. Now season to taste. 

Then you can just gently reheat the soup to serve, with some extra thyme, and sautéed mushrooms. 

It's magical mushroom essence, with all the notes of the outdoors - the trees, forests, muddy woodlands, and tiny sparkly fairies. The velvet texture of the soup also resembles the feel of the tops of raw mushrooms. I can see why the fairies like to perch there.  

I got a good crusty loaf of bread from my local market as well for 50p to dunk with the soup ;)