Wild Rice and Mushroom Soup

Our favorite holiday soup. Looks impressive and is great to share. Adapted from James McNair's Rice Cookbook. Many nice recipes and excellent pictures.

Serves 6 as soup course. 3 as the main dish.

1 Cup wild rice
2 Quarts stock vegetable or chicken
1 Pound misc "wild" mushrooms
2 Tablespoons butter
3 Tablespoons minced shallot or onion
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
2 Cups Heavy whipping cream
1 Tablespoon minced fresh thyme or 1 Teaspoon dried thyme crumbled
Dry sherry or white wine or lemon juice

In a large soup pot, combine stock and rice. Bring to a boil, reduce to low, cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Scoop out about half the rice and set aside. Blend remaining rice, either with an immersion blender or any other blender and about a cup of the stock, until smooth. Put all the rice (blended and unblended) back in the soup pot. The blended rice gives a smooth texture to the soup, the remaining rice gives some body to the soup. Return to a simmer.

Pull off woody stems from mushrooms. Finely chop mushrooms, a quick pulse in a food processor make this quick. A longer pulse with the woody stems makes them usable.

In a skillet melt the butter and saute the shallot or onion over medium heat till lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Add mushrooms and lemon juice. Saute till the mushrooms are soft and most of the liquid is gone, about 5 minutes. The mushroom mixture will absorb the butter and lemon juice fairly quickly, you will need to wait a minute or two for it to soften up enough to give up the liquid that you want to cook off. If in doubt just stir occasionally for the full 5 minutes.

Add the shallot mushroom mixture to the soup pot and add the cream and thyme. Stir while bringing to a boil. Reduce to a simmer uncovered until thick about 15 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and sherry or wine.

African Peanut Soup

We had a modified version of this soup made by the 2nd-6th grade children at our church (Mar07). We liked it so much we asked for the recipe. The source site (www.soupsong.com/rpeanut4.html) says this was adapted from Vegetarian Times from 1995. In Ghana this is called Nkate Nkwani in the Twi language.

Serves 8 as a soup course. 4 as a main course.

2 Tablespoons oil
2 medium onions, chopped into big pieces
2 large red peppers, chopped into big pieces (original recipe said green)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 28-ounce can of tomaotes, whole quartered or minced, juice reserved
10 cups vegetable stock
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, coarsely ground
1/2 teaspoon dried crushed red chili peppers
1/2 cup brown rice
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
Garnish with crushed peanuts

In a large soup pot, heat oil, saute onions, peppers and garlic until they begin to brown. Add tomatoes and remaining spices and cook over medium high for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally till they cook down. Add reserved tomato juice and stock. Bring to a boil, add rice then reduce to simmer, partially covered for 45 minutes. Add peanut butter and stir till dissolved and broth is smooth.

At this point we removed about half the solids, used immersion blender on broth till smooth, re-added the solids, reheated to a simmer and served topped with crushed peanuts.

Variation: serve with a scoop of rice we like a packaged 7 grain mixture.