lemony chickpea soup with salmon

The last scoop-in-the-pan of home-cooked chickpeas is usually too watery for hummus. But it is a perfect starting point for chickpea soup.

The following recipe is slightly too much for two. No, maybe it isn’t.

I sauté a cup or so of finely cubed carrot and half a cubed onion in olive oil. If you have really fresh really red peppers, you could add some of these as well. A little later, I add a chopped clove of garlic and cook everything a little longer. Now the chickpeas enter with their cooking water - the amount is a little up to taste but I guess that I’d use two or three cups of chickpeas-as-if-drained and as much water as there is. I add fresh water until there is enough soup and bring the whole to the boil. I mash some of the chickpeas with a fork against the side of the pan, but not too many.

In the meantime I have been in the garden for some fresh mint.

salmon again

As an elaboration of an earlier post about salmon slices on a bed of savoy cabbage

I am posting here Salmon on a spinach bed

Start by pre-heating the oven to 390 degrees F (200 C). Retrieve from the freezer 3 cups of hacked, frozen spinach, or use the amount of fresh spinach that would cook down to three cups (carefully rinsed and coarsely chopped) while four tablespoons of good olive oil are heating up in a skillet. A large quartered or two small halved garlic cloves are very carfully browned until dark golden. The spinach is now added, together with a pinch of nutmeg, salt and freshly ground black pepper. It should bubble for the time it takes to slice fresh Salmon for two into half-inch thin bits.

Take an oven dish and cover its bottom with the spinach. Distribute the salmon evenly on top, sprinkle with salt and some lemon juice. Bake in the oven until the salmon is done.

It seems so simple - turned out as the best dinner of the past weeks.

quarky salmon on savoy cabbage

Sometimes, as with the tomatoed chicken thighs a few days ago, spontaneous kitchen improvisation produces quite nice results. But sometimes one is, in all humbleness, totally knocked over with the outcome of an experiment. Like today.

I had to get rid of about 1 1/2 cups of quark [scroll down on the page], a traditional German and Austrian fresh cheese, for reasons of its own called Kesella in Sweden (if you are looking for substitutes it will be helpful to know that Kesella has 10% fat). Other interesting contents of the fridge were: the soft, light inside of a medium-sized head of savoy cabbage (yesterday the green leaves all went into cabbage roulades), around 200 grams of fresh salmon and an almost empty jar of goose fat from Christmas. The following recipe serves two.