Dear everyone, Christmas is quickly approaching and we would love to share this year's Christmas menu with you.
For us Christmas usually would be spent with a lot of family and a lot of food. There would be one big table and every family member would make something, whether it was big or small, it would all end up on the table to be enjoyed.
My mother and her brother loved experimenting and sometimes we would end up with the craziest dishes on the table. Actually that is how it started to become a tradition to always try new dishes and not being shy at all to experiment.
This year our whole Christmas menu is an experiment, we used the basic recipes and/or products we knew and loved and have changed over time. We will also use recipes that somehow went horribly wrong and we were able to fix at the end. This year you will experiment with us get to try it all this and more.
We will start with “surprise surprise”, with a soup! This soup will be the 5th soup I post on this blog. I hope you haven't gotten bored of soup yet! If you hadn’t noticed it yet, soup is one of my favorites.
Our soup is a fall / winter special with all things that create this warm cozy winter day feeling. But then what is a soup without a side dish, that is why we are also making an insanely fast soda bread. Once the warm bread comes out of the oven, you realize that it would taste even better with a really nice butter to go with it. So the experiment we’re starting with this year, will be a pumpkin and chestnut soup served with soda bread and herb butter.
As the week goes on we will share the rest of our Christmas menu.
Do you want to cook with Katerina at Odyssey?
Click here for more information!
Pumpkin Chestnut Soup
1 small pumpkin
2 onions
1 sweet potato
1 whole gralic
2 small potatoes
1 small piece of ginger
10 chestnuts
(Optional 1 orange)
About 1 litre of vegetable stock (my tip is to add enough water to cover your vegetables and only add water if needed. You want your soup to have a thick creamy consistency; not too runny)
Tips for herbs: you can never go wrong see what you have and what is in season most herbs are a good choice, i used rosemary, thyme, bay leaf
Soda Bread
1 kg of wholemeal flour
700 ml whole milk
2 lemons
2 tsp of soda
2 tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp of thyme
Herb Butter Candle
250 gr of butter
half a bag of odyssey sea salt mixture
a ramequin
a little kitchen twine
a tooth pick
optional: some walnuts do go very nicely
1. Preheat your oven at 180C
2. Add the pumpkin, sweet potato, onion, ginger, garlic, chestnuts (optional orange) in a pan. Make sure the pumpkin has been cut in half, scorched and lathered in olive oil and has been salted. For the rest of the ingredients they all need to be cut, salted and coated in olive oil.
3. Place the baking tray with all the ingredients in the oven at 180 for 30- 40 min or until the pumpkin has a slight golden brown colour.
4. In a pan, heat up a liter of vegetable stock.
5. Once our baking tray has cooled a bit, we scoop out the pumpkin, clean our chestnuts, add both together with the rest to a blender and slowly add half your vegetable stock and blend it until it's a nice thick soup.
6. Once it is all blended we add it into a pan and slowly add the rest of our vegetable stock until we have the consistency we like.
7. We let this boil over once and if we feel the need we pass it through a sieve.
8. One last taste test for salt and pepper.
9. Serve the soup in deep plates if you like.
10. You can add a little bit of cream if you like
1. Preheat your oven to 180C. before you even start with the soup make sure you have already taken out your puff pastry to defrost.
2. Add the lemon juice from 2 lemons to your milk and let that set for a couple of minutes.
3. Add all your dry ingredients to your mixing bowl.
4. Once your milk has become buttermilk, add it and start mixing and kneading your mixture. It will stay slightly wet, that is ok.
5. Add your mixture to a round cake tin, and bake in the oven for 40 min at 180C.
6. Once your beautiful bread is ready, let it cool down a little before eating it with your beautiful herb butter and pumpkin and chestnut soup.
1. Let your butter come to room temperature, add in the sea salt mixture and whip it up. (Optionally add some caramelized garlic from your soup baking tray)
2. Add the kitchen twine and center it in your ramekin with the toothpick, slowly add your butter mixture, make sure you leave enough space for the twine, and let freeze for 20 min
3. Your herb butter candle is ready to be lit
Recipe Type: Christmas
Katerina's Kouzina recipes