The ladies at the market must love it when they see me coming. I knew they would overcharge me, a towering white girl with no Vietnamese, I mean who wouldn’t? It isn’t by much, but I am sure that I’m paying the requisite white tax. I don’t mind though, I deserve it with my lack of language skills paired with my lack of knowing any better. Plus I can still buy more than enough meat and vegetables for a week for the kind of money you’d find under the cushion of your couch or abandoned in the pockets of rarely worn pants. I expected to be brazenly ripped off by the kindly looking ladies selling vegetables, what caught me by surprise was the pity purchases they suckered my in to.

Pity purchases? Subtly they made me feel sorry for them and reconsider buying from other vendors. It goes a little like this, approach one stall, select some tomatoes and eggplant, pay. Step aside and survey the next stall. The stallkeeper points at her eggplant and tomatoes, picks them up and waxes lyrical about their freshness and taste, all in Vietnamese. I mime my state of ‘already purchased’, which she knows full well of course. She sighs, frowns, replaces the vegetables and commences vigorously pointing and extolling the virtues of her cucumbers, herbs and carrots. With every shake of my head she becomes more downtrodden and sad, but perks up when I finally decide that her beans are the best and start negotiating a price. Beans successfully bought I attempt to leave, when she points at a wedge of pumpkin and the whole game starts again. This time she has no luck, as I’ve already bought pumpkin, herbs and spring onions and I’m not interested in anything else she offers, until she points some plump fresh carrots. Sure, I could use a carrot or two, but this lady is so excited she has already loaded up a kilo on the scales and I can’t bear to disappoint her again. I pay with a few scrunched up thousand dong notes and leave, quickly before I’m sucked into buying anything else.

So what do you do with a kilo of unexpected carrots? Make a simple sweet savoury soup, serve it warm with some dry dukkah, yoghurt and mint, and secretly thank the pushy peddler.

Carrot Soup
Adapted from Gourmet Traveller.

This soup needs flavourful carrots and good quality homemade chicken stock to make it work, otherwise it will be insipid at best. The honey enhances the sweetness but should be balanced by the savouriness of the stock. This soup is very simple and the dukkah is necessary to add interest. Without it this is really just a bowl of liquidy carrot, delicious but boring. Make this when carrots are at their best, or when they are foisted ‘pon you in the market.

3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 kg carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 litre chicken stock
1/4 cup honey
unsweetened natural yoghurt to serve.

Heat olive oil in a medium sized pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and stir for a few minutes. Add the carrot and let fry until lightly golden, being careful not to burn the onions. We want to get the vegetables a bit caramelised, but not burned. This stage may take up to 10 minutes depending on how big your pan is. When ready, add the honey, garlic, chicken stock and salt and pepper, turn down the heat and simmer until carrots are very tender. Blend soup, and serve with dukkah, yogurt and bread.

Simple Dukkah
Please make this recipe to taste. Use your intuition and see what tastes good to you. Or find another more orthodox dukkah recipe

roasted nuts (hazelnuts are traditional but difficult to come by here, so I peeled and roasted my own peanuts)
sesame seeds (I used a mixture of toasted sesame seeds and black sesame seeds)
sea salt
black pepper
coriander seeds, freshly toasted
cumin seeds, freshly toasted.

Grind cumin seeds in a mortar and pestle. Mix with chopped nuts and the rest of the ingredients.
Alternatively mix all ingredients and chop in a food processor.

Tastes change.
I used to hate mushrooms, though you’d never know it if you saw me inhaling the garlic mushrooms at a Tapas bar. I also turned my nose up at Brussels Sprouts until very recently and now I can’t get enough of the little cabbagy delights. As children, we often deem strong tastes repulsive, pushed to the edge of the plate and ignored, unless the threat of “no dessert!” forces them down. Sometimes these tastes last til adulthood and beyond, other times palates expand and embrace these new flavours.

Personal (non-food) tastes change too, sometimes at an alarming rate. Friends become friends no longer, or maybe you start to see through their hazy layer of deceit and catch glimpses of the nastiness, or vacuity underneath.

Blue cheese is one of those divisive tastes, I don’t always agree with “you either love it or you hate it”, but sometimes it’s right. Now, I neither loved nor hated blue cheese, I enjoy a sliver on a cracker at a party, or upon the end of my carrot stick when turned into a dip. I had tasted a divine blue cheese custard, but I feared tiring of the flavour. I was worried to make it the defining taste of a main course, scared that after a few mouth fulls i’d be blue-cheesed-out, like spending too much time with a friend who is no longer. 

I finally took that lonely wedge of blue, which was on its last legs for sure, and turned it into a warming and savoury soup with cauliflower and thyme. I took the plunge and luckily me fears were unfounded. Rather than being like a blue cheese punch to the face, this soup is quite mellow and creamy with the cheese adding creaminess and interest. 

Sometimes it pays to try those flavours that were once banished from your directory, because tastes change.

Cauliflower and Blue Cheese Soup
Adapted from A Year in My Kitchen by Skye Gyngell
Serves 4

1 medium cauliflower, trimmed and cut into small pieces, stalk included
15g butter
1 large onion, chopped
6 sprigs of thyme
1L chicken stock
250g blue cheese
100ml cream

Melt butter in a large onion and sweat over medium heat for a few minutes until softened and transparent. Add cauliflower and thyme and season lightly with sea salt and cracked black pepper. Add chicken stock and bring to the boil. Simmer covered for about 20 minutes or until cauliflower is soft.
Crumble blue cheese into the soup, and stir to combine. Add cream and cook over low heat until the cheese has melted. Remove from heat, cool then blend until really smooth.
Return soup to the heat, when warmed thoroughly, re-season and serve.

As a child, cauliflower was the unnecessary vegetable. Revoltingly pungent, squishy and grey. But recently I have started to love its subtle flavour, its different faces, its ability to transform in different situations.

Paired with chilli, cumin and cooled with coconut cream, this soup highlights and spikes the gentle cauliflower.

Spiced Cauliflower Soup

1 large head Cauliflower, trimmed into florets
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
2cm piece ginger
2t cumin
100ml coconut cream (or more) *
300 ml chicken or veg stock *
1 red chilli
coriander to serve.

Fry chopped onion in a little oil. When lightly browned, add garlic, ginger, cumin and chilli and fry until fragrant. Add cauliflower, coconut cream and most of the stock, season with a little salt.
Simmer the soup, stirring regularly until cauliflower is just tender. Cool slightly, then blend until smooth. Return to cleaned pan and heat until bubbling. Taste again and season. Stir through a handful of chopped coriander leaves and stem, serve.

* the amount of liquid required is very variable, dependent on the size and consistency of your cauliflower, and the desired viscosity of your soup.

I was just finishing up the newspaper (from the previous Saturday , eeep!), when i noticed a recipe for Moroccan Lamb and Chickpea Soup which sounded delicious snuggled up in bed and pre-breakfast. It seemed easy and quick to prepare, so despite its strange cooking technique – boiling, I gave it a go.

Of course, I tinkered with the recipe (adding more vegetables, chilli and garlic and reducing the amount of cinnamon), but was pleasantly surprised by the fragrant yet robust outcome.

Moroccan Lamb and Chickpea Soup
500g lamb shoulder, cubed
2L chicken stock
1 onion, finely chopped
100g green lentils
400g can chopped tomatoes
4 ripe tomatoes
mushrooms
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1 tspn ground turmeric
1 tspn ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
400g can chickpeas, drained
3 tbsp orzo
lemon juice
coriander
4 cloves garlic
1/2 green chilli

Place lamb in large pot with stock (or water) and bring to the boil. Once boiling, skim away the froth and add the onion, lentils, tinned tomatoes, spices and garlic. Simmer for up to an hour, or until the meat and lentils are tender.
Add the chickpeas, vegetables, pasta and chilli and simmer until the pasta is cooked, about 10 minutes. Add lemon juice, coriander, salt and pepper to taste and serve immediately.

I don’t often follow savoury main recipes. I have my own way of doing things which is completely at odds with my cookery training. See, I have a thing about vegetables, something along the lines of a mantra of plenty and varied. This makes it difficult to highlight an individual vegetable as they get overshadowed by the lashings of onion, carrot, zucchini, capsicum, tomato, onions, beans and mushrooms all jostling for space in that same pasta sauce. I could just make vegetables on the side, but thats just too much effort and washing up for a mid week meal.

Thankfully, sometimes I manage to step back and ignore the fact that I’ve only eaten 3 different coloured items in the day and focus my energy on just more green. Just such a thing happened recently when huge bunches of english spinach appeared in the vege section, 99c each, double the size of a regular bunch, each leaf perfect. I couldn’t resist, I mean, how could I resist?

I had some ideas for this haul, but foremost in my mind was a subtle, gentle spinach soup – I pushed my need for a many and varied cornucopia of vegetables to the back of my mind, and there it stayed. This soup is so quick and easy to make, and to eat. It’s gently and soothing with a well rounded complex flavour, accentuated by dots of creamy ricotta and mouthfuls warmed with chilli.

Spinach Soup
This is very light, so best served with hunks of good bread for lunch or as an entree.

2 bunches English Spinach, picked and washed very well and roughly chopped
1 spanish onion
3 cloves garlic
100mL cream
Chicken stock/vegetable stock/ water
1/2 red chilli, diced
100g ricotta
olive oil
1/2t lemon zest
nutmeg, salt and pepper

Chop onion and sweat in some olive oil without colouring. Add garlic, lemon zest and chilli and cook until fragrant. Add stock or water (the amount will depend on how thick you want your soup), and cream and bring to the boil. Add your spinach, stir well and cook until soft, wilted and bright green. Season to taste with nutmeg, salt and pepper and more chilli if necessary. Blend until smooth, and serve immediately dotted with ricotta.
Eat!