And...I'm back (with Jerusalem artichokes!)

Hello again.

 

Things have gone quiet on this front. I realised after I cooked France that I had skipped Belgium (whoops). I went back to do it, but again, I was confronted with missing ingredients (Gah! More chicory!). That combined with Belgium featuring a stew just when the weather was getting warmer meant this all seemed a bit too hard.

 

So over the past few months I've been cooking (just not this challenge) and traveling. While in Thailand I took a fabulous class at the Time For Lime cooking school on Koh Lanta. Desperate to authentically recreate the dishes I learned there, I have been on something of a hunt for un-ripened papaya. I tried the Otara market, the French market and on the hunch of a friend, the Avondale market (which is at the Avondale Racecourse on Sunday mornings). Bingo! While I found the papaya I was searching for, I also stumbled across Jerusalem Artichokes which I had been looking for almost 6 months ago when cooking the dishes for Denmark.

 

When that's brought me back into the proverbial fold and the cooking challenge is back on.

 

So here's the Jerusalem artichoke soup that I was supposed to have cooked in Denmark.

 

 

Pretty simple huh? Well the artichokes were quite a pain to peel. I contemplated not peeling them, but was worried that I might have a dirty looking soup.

 

Those worries could have been skipped as I wound up with a bigger problem due to an error in the cookbook. Living in New Zealand I now try and live the in the metric world and so followed the recipe under the metric instructions. Which called for 2 litres of stock. After I poured the first litre in, I couldn't help looking at the pot thinking...this is a lot of water. So I added only another half litre in. Which was still too much as the conversion of 2 pints / 2 litres was incorrect. It should be 2 pints / 1 litre. While it tasted nice it was WAY too watery. It lost all thickness from the potatoes/artichokes. I ended up adding the soup to another 2 potatoes and 1 artichoke to get it to the desired consistency.

 

Watery-ness and consistency aside, I liked this soup and Matt enjoyed it as well. I froze the leftovers (after I added the extra ingredients above to thicken it) and it was just as good re-heated. I'm not sure if it would be a regular feature at our house with the difficulty in both finding Jerusalem artichokes and then peeling them.