Cooking Club III

This week, to celebrate the cornucopia of fall, and the first weekend below 90 degrees in nine years, we made Red Pepper Soup and Plum Crumble, whilst wearing crowns of autumn leaves and performing our interpretative woodland dance. Which is why the photos are out of focus; my pine needle girdle was very distracting.

The red pepper soup we made a couple of changes to; we used dry sherry instead of wine, and vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. If you make this recipe a) add tons more garlic and b) put in a shitload of salt. We think a squeeze of lemon or lime would also improve it, and so would some really crunchy croutons.

When we finished making the soup, it tasted kind of boring, so we added more hot pepper, black pepper, some smoked paprika, a bunch more thyme, and the afore-mentioned shitload of salt, which improved it immensely. It was a truly awesome scarlet color though, and appealed to our aesthetic senses when ladled into my turquoise melamine bowls. We accompanied it with leftover spanokopita which I made yesterday without no stinking recipe. The soup really was an easy recipe, though I have to say, kind of crappy before Mykull and I applied our creative juices to it. Mmmm... creative juices... We gave it a three star rating - a bit better than meh, but not as good as wow.

While the soup was souping, we made plum crumble. I was hoping Mykull's plums would be much more succulent and appetizing, but unfortunately not. Well, you got to work with what you've got, so we doused them in spices and ginger and sugar and laid them gently in a pie dish, to avoid bruising. We then made a crumble out of a bushel of flour and more sugar and egg, sprinkled these on the plums and then soused the whole thing in melted butter, and slammed them in a hot oven. After baking, it looked pretty good.

It was tasty but definitely needed some icecream or custard or whipped cream or something, as it was very crumbly, as advertised. I thought it could do with more ginger and less sugar, and Mykull thought it could do with less ginger and more sugar. So we had an argument. Cooking with Mykull is just like being married; overeating and arguing and lots of washing up and no sex. Actually, we made up right away so it really is much better than being married. We gave this a four star rating - pretty damn good, though we both thought it would be better with pears and maybe some pecans in the topping.

We also accomplished the notable achievement of cooking this meal without talking about Dubya, which is pretty amazing.