Suggestive Recipes

I was drooling over the Recipe Redux column in the Times magazine the other day, thinking about making the vintage chocolate rum mousse and wondering whether it was worth investing in a blender (because our ancient yellowed plastic one died and never got replaced because, well, we never use it). But then I got to the reinvented version of the mousse recipe, wherein it had lost the chocolate and picked up some beets. Yeah, beets for dessert. Not only that, it involved a cream whipper, one of those devices that uses nitrous-oxide to make whipped cream - kind of like home-made ReddiWip (but oh so much better).

I asked Talbot whether readers might be daunted by a recipe that calls for an ISI dispenser. “We’ve grown and matured,” Talbot said, “and realized any recipe you put out there, no one really follows it. All it is is a suggestion: you might want to do this.”

That's when I started thinking about cooking and recipes, because that's exactly it. That's what I do - I use the printed recipe as a jumping off point, a suggestion. I substitute, I omit, I add.

I did that over the weekend. We'd received a book by Nigel Slater for Christmas - his Kitchen Diaries, which he describes as "an account of more or less everything I cooked in the course of a year, presented as an illustrated diary". The book moves chronologically through the year, so I started with January, and decided to make the New Year's Day dal and pumpkin soup on New Year's Day. But it called for pumpkin and cilantro and chili peppers, none of which I had. So I winged it.

Here's my version:

Dal and Sweet Potato soup,
adapted from a recipe of Nigel Slater's

For the soup:
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
a walnut-sized knob of fresh ginger
1 cup + 2 T. red lentils
2 cups of water
4 cups of chicken stock
1 ¼ t. turmeric
1 ¼ t. chili powder
1 t. salt
5 smallish sweet potatoes (to make 2 cups cooked)

For the onion topping:
1 medium onion
2 T. oil
1 t. sugar

If you want to gild the lily:
¼ cup heavy cream

Peel the onion and chop it roughly. Peel and mince the garlic. Peel and chop the ginger. Put the onion, garlic and ginger in a medium-sized, heavy-based saucepan. Add the lentils and pour in water and stock. Bring to the boil, then turn the heat down to an simmer. Stir in the turmeric and chili powder and salt, and leave to simmer, covered but with the lid cocked open, for 20 minutes.

While the soup is cooking, wash and microwave the sweet potatoes until they're done (you know your microwave - I used the "baked potato" setting, and a bowl covered with plastic wrap). When done, and cool enough to handle, peel them, and chop the flesh into fat chunks. Set aside.

Meanwhile, make the onion topping: peel the onions and cut them into fine rings. Cook them in the oil in a shallow pan until they start to color. Add the sugar. Continue cooking until the onions are a deep golden brown. Set aside.

Now, add the cooked sweet potato to the lentils, and puree the soup - either in a blender, or a food processor, or with a stick blender right in the pot. Be careful; it's hot.

Serve in deep bowls with a spoonful of the caramelized onions on top. If you're feeling indulgent, pour a spiral of heavy cream on top at the table.

Makes 4 good-sized bowls - or, serves two adults for dinner one night, and one adult lunch for the two following days.

The original recipe called for all water (no stock), pumpkin in place of the sweet potato, minced fresh cilantro at the end, but no heavy cream, and fresh chili peppers and garlic in the caramelized onions. So overall, I made rather a lot of changes, but I think the end result was very much in the spirit of Nigel's original.

I daresay that Nigel would approve.