Peanut Butter + Celery Soup

Hey Marko, I’ve only been gone from Rijeka three days, but of course already miss you guys loads. Sorry I didn’t get my climbing gear packed up, leaving was so hectic. Rope and quick draws are probably still there in a pile on the floor. I always intend to start completing tasks with more time to spare, but also procrastinate this task of self-improvement. Anyway, Torino is amazing. Great nature, architecture, history, and a perfect introduction to the Couchsurfing community. I’ll write more about that soon in another post.

So, about our first recipe, Peanut Butter + Celery Soup. I chose this recipe as the first in our series for two reasons:

One is that I want to start to figure out what tastes you like so I can guide my future recipe selections. Maybe you will make this, try one bite, and throw it in the bin. Maybe you will start eating 3 jars of peanut butter / week. Let me know.

The second reason is that this is my very first recipe which I liked so much that I wrote it down in a journal. A few years ago, I was paging through a vegetarian cookbook at the library and saw it and was like, “well huh, that sounds weird, but actually let me try it.” I really enjoyed it and went through a stage where I was eating this every week. I can’t believe I never made it for you when I lived there. Probably mostly because if I ever had peanut butter I would finish the whole jar in approximately 6 hours.

Here’s some other reasons this is a good recipe to start with:

* It’s a confidence builder. It has a delicate but complicated flavor profile (do you know about the five basic tastes?) even though it’s really easy to make. This will teach us not to overthink or have a phobia about making food. We’ll conquer your kitchen phobia in no time!

This will be a place for us to practice the basics:
* how to cut a basic vegetable (celery and onion – two videos of me)
* how to add seasonings (pour the salt, pepper, paprika etc FIRST into your hand, THEN into the soup. don’t pour it in directly or you can over pour and add too much, like I did with that first peach cobbler I made last summer)
* being playful in the kitchen and visible presentation as part of the recipe (Ants on a Log – another video of me)

Lastly: let’s talk about peanut butter for a minute. It’s certainly less popular here in Europe than America (I guess because the peanut is native there and it’s where peanut butter was invented). It’s more common to eat Nutella here when you want something sweet to spread around, or tahini if you want something savory. (By the way, I wonder how this recipe would work with tahini. I’ll try it that way and let you know).

Anyway, we mostly think of peanut butter in the context of sweet and easy kids’ snacks (peanut butter jelly sandwiches or chocolate peanut butter balls a.k.a. “Chef’s Choco Salty Balls”). But don’t let this space age nut goo fool you: peanut butter is very healthy. Different brands have different amounts of added sugar, but the peanut itself is a great way to get protein without eating meat, and contains the healthy fats (omega 3s – you also find them in olive oil and fish. We should do one entry on how to tell the difference between healthy and unhealthy fats).

Also, don’t put peanut butter into a flavor corner: sure it goes with grape jelly or other sweet flavors like chocolate, but it also goes really well with savory, spicy, salty and even sour flavors. For example, when I worked as a chef, the “secret ingredient” in our curry recipe was just one spoon (not a big one) of peanut butter. It worked with the Indian spices and grilled chicken flavors to give a really delicious but slightly exotic undertone.

If you like this recipe, I have an idea for a little series of recipes all containing peanut butter, but if you try it and don’t like it, we’ll try something else next week. Good luck!

THE RECIPE

INGREDIENTS

• 2 big sticks of celery (chopped, keep the leaves for later)
• 1 small onion (chopped, you could trade this for 1 bunch of green onion tops, or like half a head of garlic, but onion goes a little better with this dish than garlic)
• 1 stick (100-115 grams) butter
  (use margarine if you want to save money and satisfy the god’s of vegan grindcore)
  (look on the side of the butter package and it has lines that show how many grams are there) 
• 40-50 grams flour (in a lot of recipes, don’t worry too much about things being exact, that only *really* matters in baking)
• 1800 – 2000 ml “vegetable stock”
  (use Vegeta, follow instructions on the back)
• 500 grams of peanut butter – about half a jar (you can get smooth or crunchy, depending on your taste and what’s in the store. I’m personally a crunchy boy whenever possible).
• juice from half a lemon (if you want to get fancy you can add a little lemon zest, but be careful, it’s quite strong)
• a pinch of salt, pepper and paprika
• ground nuts (if you see any kind of crushed up nuts at the store, you can throw in a small handful of whatever)

Step 1: chop up the celery and onion, and put in a pan with butter, cook them on medium heat, covered, until the onion begins to look a little clear. takes about 7 minutes. don’t turn the heat too high or it will burn the butter.

Step 2: put in the flour and mix it around so it covers most of the vegetables. leave this pan covered on low heat.

Step 3: make the Vegeta soup in another pot.

Step 4: pour everything else into that pot – your vegetables from before, the peanut butter, and whatever else you wanna throw in there.

Step 5: when it’s ready to eat, you can fine chop some celery leaves, parsley (pershin) and sprinkle them on top of the bowl to make it look a little pretty and give it something extra in the mouth. You could probably sprinkle just a few crushed nuts on top at this point also if you had them.