Are you done with turkey yet? After a couple of days of sandwiches and turkey noodle soup (with parmesan and pesto) and then a few days of putting turkey in enchiladas, risotto with porcini mushrooms and empanada, I was down to my last bit of leftover turkey and turkey stock. I was ready for something new, an exotic taste, something with a lot of flavor and a little heat. It’s also freezing out and I thought that some sort of soup would be a good idea.

I love Thai food, but at home I used to just turn to the red or green curry paste in the little jar and follow the directions on the label. Since using Pim’s recipes for pad thai, beef massaman curry and nam prik pao though, I’ve ventured into unfamiliar territory and have been really happy with the results. Thai food has a few special ingredients that you may not already have, but once you buy some lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce and coconut milk, you’re halfway there and putting it together is usually fairly simple.

Tom yum gai is one of my favorite Thai soups, it’s usually made with chicken, but I had that turkey and turkey broth on hand, so that’s what I used. There are endless variations; two of my favorites are tom yum goong, made with shrimp, and tom kha gai, a chicken version with the addition of coconut milk, which I’ll probably add the next time I make this, because I love that flavor. If you don’t have any more leftover turkey, use chicken.

tom yum turkey

• 4 cups turkey or chicken broth
• 1 stalk lemon grass, cut into 2 inch pieces and lightly crushed*
• 3 kaffir lime leaves, torn into pieces (if you can’t find these, some recipes say to put in a piece of lime zest, but I usually just skip it if I can’t find any)*
• 3 slices galangal (this is a root similar to ginger, which makes a decent substitute if you can’t find it)*
• 2 shallots, sliced thinly
• 3 T fish sauce*
• 1 cup sliced shitake or cremini mushrooms
• 1 cup sliced turkey (or use sliced chicken breast and cook just until no longer pink)
• juice from 3 limes
• 6 large basil leaves, sliced
• 3 T cilantro, chopped
• nam prik pao (spicy Thai red pepper sauce)*

Heat chicken broth to boiling. Add lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal and shallots, reduce heat to simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes until broth is fragrant and strain, discarding solids. Reheat broth and add fish sauce, mushrooms, turkey (or chicken) and simmer for 3-4 minutes (longer if using uncooked chicken). Remove from heat and add lime juice and basil leaves. Place a small spoonful of nam prik pao into bottom of soup bowl and ladle soup over it, garnish with cilantro and serve.

* Available at Asian grocery stores and some supermarkets

I’ve been holding out on you people. I spent a great deal of time in the Balkans in the nineties; I learned how to speak Macedonian (I even learned the Cyrillic alphabet!). In 1992, I was in Zagreb during the war in Croatia and in Albania shortly after they opened the borders to foreigners. I don’t know why I haven’t written about it before.

I have a host of recipes that I cook on a regular basis that I learned there and from people who’ve immigrated to the U.S. from there. I think I haven’t written about it before because most of them are simple, rustic dishes. Nostalgia for the food I ate in Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia overtook me today. The first thing I ate when I first landed in Sophia, Bulgaria was a cold soup. We had arrived at the airport and headed to the city to spend the night before going on to our destination in Macedonia. The restaurant we went to was a large brasserie-style establishment, full of art nouveau tile work, polished brass and red leather. This was a worn-out communist version of the kinds of places you see in Paris. The gorgeous porcelain had cracks and chips, the 100% linen tablecloths were threadbare and mended in spots. But we were hungry, it was supremely clean and most importantly, the staff was as good as the fanciest places in the rest of Europe. You could feel their pride in what they did. I didn’t know anything about the food, so the meal was ordered for me. The first thing to arrive, in a small two handled Austrian porcelain bowl, was taratur. Cold cucumber and yogurt soup. This one had garlic and dill in it and had walnuts sprinkled on top. I think the yogurt at its base was made from sheep’s milk.

I’ve had many versions of taratur in many places in the Balkans, from a resort on the Dalmatian coast to the humblest grandmother’s house in the hills just north of Greece. It always has yogurt and cucumbers. The yogurt can be from goat, sheep or cow’s milk. The cucumbers are sometimes in large cubes, sometimes shredded finely. There is usually garlic, sometimes dill and it occasionally has chopped walnuts or hazelnuts sprinkled on top. It is a refreshing first course in the summertime, but it is not always served on its own. When the yogurt is thicker, it can be served like its Greek counterpart, tzatziki, as a side dish alongside things like lamb patties, grilled chicken, fish or simply sliced tomato. It can also be used as a dip or a spread with bread.

taratur: cold cucumber and yogurt soup

• 4 cups lowfat yogurt (goat’s or sheep’s milk if you can find it)
• 1 large English cucumber, peeled and shredded (use the large holes of a box grater for this and the onion)
• 1/4 cup shredded sweet onion
• 1 small clove garlic, minced (optional)
• 4 T chopped dill (optional)
• 2 T red wine vinegar
• 2 T olive oil, plus more for garnish
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/4 t freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup walnuts or hazelnuts, toasted and chopped

Place all ingredients except walnuts or hazelnuts in a large bowl and mix well until the yogurt is smooth and creamy. Taste and add more salt if desired. Divide among 4-8 soup bowls and garnish with walnuts or hazelnuts. Drizzle with a little more olive oil.

Curnonsky called it soupe d’or, or soup of gold. A complex blend of some of the best ingredients of the Mediterranean, bouillabaisse is more than just a fish soup. That’s because it’s not just the fish that gives it flavor; it’s the garlic, tomatoes, onions, white wine, fennel, pastis, saffron, orange peel, and olive oil. Add to this the rouille, the preparation made like a mayonnaise with a base of egg yolks, garlic and olive oil that you spread on toast rounds and slather on the fish, seafood and vegetables. Bouillabaisse is a noun derived from the combination of two French verbs. First, bouillir, which means to boil and second, abaisser, which means to reduce. This describes the cooking method perfectly. After a quick saut? of the vegetables in olive oil, you add stock and bring it up to a boil, then you add the fish and lower the heat to poach everything. It really is as easy as that.

Buying fish used to be the thing you did because you knew that it was the best source of low fat protein. These days, it can be tricky to figure out what fish to eat and where to buy it. The best thing you can do is make friends with a fishmonger. Where I live, I have several choices of good places to buy fish. The best one is Gadaleto’s Seafood Market and Restaurant. The owner of this place drives twice a week down to the Fulton Market in New York (now located in the Bronx) to get the fish he sells in his market, in his restaurant and to other restaurants in the mid-Hudson valley. When a friend told us that he’d be working at Gadaleto’s fish market during the Holiday break, the first thing I said was, “Great, let’s make bouillabaisse.” Lucky for me, he agreed and offered to bring the fish and we got together to do this last weekend.

Popular legend in Provence suggests this is the soup that Venus made for Vulcan to lull him to sleep while she cavorted with Mars. Some say Vulcan was a lucky man. While Marseille claims bouillabaisse as its own invention, fish soups such as this one are made all over the Mediterranean. It’s the stew traditionally made by fishermen with the catch of the day. Some historians say that the Greeks brought it with them when they colonized Marseille in 600 BC. The British novelist, Norman Douglas wrote, “Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.” (Siren Land, “Rain on the Hills.” 1911) I wouldn’t want to try that version, but I understand his meaning. Americans are often told that we can’t make a true bouillabaisse here because we can’t get the fish that is found in Southern Europe, especially rascasse, a type of scorpion fish. It’s got a lot of bones and cartilage, which make for a lot of spitting and such while you’re eating it, but it also gives the broth its typically rich, gelatinous quality. Even if we can’t get the right kinds of fish here, I say we should try to make something as close as we can get, because trips to the south of France are few and far between.

This is not meant to be a fancy dish, but it is a celebratory one. Invite over a large party of friends and enlist their help with rubbing garlic on the croutons and chopping vegetables. Make the stock a day ahead of time and freeze some of it for the next time you have a craving for liquid gold. Once you’ve got the fish stock made, this isn’t very time consuming and the results give you two courses. First, a fish broth in which you float baguette rounds spread with the garlicky rouille. Next, serve the fish, seafood and vegetables on a platter with more rouille and baguette on the side. You could round out the meal with some tapenade and nuts with the ap?ritif, a green salad and cheese platter after the main course and a simple dessert of ice cream or sorbet. To drink, you can serve red, white or ros?, French is best. If you choose red, make it a C?tes du Rh?ne and serve it on the cool side. For white or ros?, make it something light and dry and serve it very cold.

Bouillabaisse

• 2 T olive oil
• 1 fennel bulb, sliced (use the tops and the fronds for the stock)
• 2 medium onions, peeled and sliced
• 4 leeks, cleaned and sliced (use the green parts for the stock)
• 8 cloves garlic, peel, crushed and chopped
• 8 plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded and diced
• 6 Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and sliced into rounds
• Peel of one half orange, chopped into three or four pieces (use the other half for the stock)
• Bouquet garni: use a small piece of kitchen twine to tie together 1 bay leaf, 10 branches of parsley, 5 or 6 branches of thyme
• 1/2 t saffron threads
• 12 cups fish stock (see below)
• 1/2 cup pastis
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• Approximately 6 lbs. fish and seafood from at least 3 different varieties of non-oily, salt water fish. Some good choices are red snapper, sea bass, tilefish, grouper, striped bass and halibut. For the seafood, you can use any combination of cuttlefish, squid, shrimp, mussels, clams, tiny crabs (called favouilles in French). Have the fish cleaned and cut into filets with the skin left on, peel the shrimp and debeard the mussels. Give everything a rinse before you put it in the pot.

For serving

• 1 baguette, cut into rounds, toasted and rubbed with garlic
• Rouille (see below)

Heat the olive oil in a large pot and add the fennel, onion, leeks and garlic. Cook over medium heat until vegetables are translucent, stirring occasionally, about 5 or 6 minutes. Add tomatoes and cook for another 5 minutes. Add all of the rest of the ingredients except the fish and seafood and bring it all up just to a boil, then add the fish and seafood and lower the heat again and simmer until the fish is cooked through, about 8 minutes. Turn off the heat. Serve in two courses. Strain some broth into a soup tureen (or large bowl) and bring it to the table along with a basket of garlic toast rounds and a couple of small bowls of rouille. Ladle out the soup and have your guests add their own croutons and rouille. Next, use a slotted spoon to transfer the fish, seafood and vegetables to a large platter. Pass this around the table along with more rouille.

Fish stock

• Green part of 4 leeks
• 2 medium onions, cut in half
• Tops and fronds of one fennel bulb
• Peel of one half orange, chopped into three or four pieces
• 2 large carrots, broken into pieces
• 2 ribs celery, broken into pieces
• 5 or 6 lbs. of fish carcasses, preferably red snapper (my fishmonger gives me these for free, one more reason to make friends at the fish market)
• 1 bottle dry white wine (Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc are good choices)
• Bouquet garni: Bouquet garni: use a small piece of kitchen twine to tie together 1 bay leaf, 10 branches of parsley, 5 or 6 branches of thyme
• 10 peppercorns
• 1 t sea salt

Place all ingredients in a large pot and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 2 or 3 hours. Skim surface foam from time to time. Strain stock and chill in refrigerator overnight. The stock should be a near solid gel in the morning. This is a good thing.

Rouille

• 2 egg yolks, cold
• 2 t French mustard, cold
• 2 cloves garlic, smashed to a paste with a mortar and pestle
• 1 cup extra virgin olive oil, or a mix of olive oil and vegetable oil if you like it less strong
• 1 t paprika
• 2 T lemon juice
• Several threads of saffron
• 1 small piece of bread
• 1/8 cup fish stock or warm water

Place saffron, bread and fish stock or warm water in a small bowl and set aside. Whisk together egg yolks, mustard and garlic in a small bowl. Add oil in a thin stream (another good job for a friend), whisking constantly until a thick mayonnaise forms. Add paprika, lemon juice and bread mixture, whisk to combine. Refrigerate until ready to use.

I’m sick in bed with a cold, day two. Yesterday we ate the last of the chicken noodle soup from the freezer. Today I want more soup. I’m remembering when I was a kid; I would lie on the mushroom colored velveteen couch and watch TV and my mother would make me tomato soup either with crackers or a grilled cheese sandwich. If you grew up in Middle America like I did, your mother probably did the same thing. Or she made you something else that you now only think about when your head is stuffed with cotton and you have a growing pile of Kleenex on your nightstand.

My mother never used many recipes that had a can of something in their ingredient list. We never had anything made with mushroom soup. I wanted to be one of those people who had the green bean casserole for Thanksgiving and who had Tang for breakfast. I talked about this with my mother recently. She was surprised, because she only remembers the guilt of snack foods, sugary drinks and frozen vegetables. And of course there was the bread issue. When she was growing up, her mother made the bread her family ate. Once a week. Always. There were 13 children, 2 cousins whose parents had died, my grandmother, my grandfather and anyone else who showed up for dinner. That’s a lot of bread. My mother remembers being embarrassed at school that everyone else had store bought bread for their sandwiches. What comes around, goes around. Now we have different things to be embarrassed or guilty over. And frozen vegetables are good for you.

We did have Campbell’s soup in our cupboard. It was usually either chicken noodle or tomato. Apparently, their condensed tomato soup was one of the original five varieties, which also included consomm?, vegetable, chicken and oxtail. Oxtail is the only one no longer on the market. Now the oxtails probably end up with all the other bits and pieces used in sausage and hot dogs. It was Joseph Campbell’s nephew, John Dorrance, who invented the condensing process in 1897 that made these soups cheaper to package and distribute, thereby reducing costs. Dorrance traveled the U.S. himself to market the soups. He apparently was able to convince women that they were high quality, inexpensive and time saving. The best part was his side stepping of the comparison with homemade soups. The Campbell Soup Company website quotes Dorrance, “they are something different with a taste all their own.” He got that right. These days, I don’t buy many things in cans, I find that the convenience is just not worth it and that if I spend time making something, I can usually make enough so that I put some of it in the freezer and have “instant” the next time I want it, sans the salt. Or I’ll make something on Sunday and we’ll have the leftovers for lunch for a few days.

Andy Warhol changed our vision of industrialized food products with his iconification of the Campbell’s tomato soup can. Food is art. Everyday objects are beautiful. An artist can make art out of anything. Not everyone sees this in the tongue in cheek way that artists like Warhol or Marcel Duchamp approached it. Ironically, the Campbell Soup Company has co-opted the tomato soup can as art into its own advertising.

The last time I made tomato soup, I followed the recipe from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. My family is a Joy of Cooking family, but when I got married, my husband came complete with his own copy of Marion Cunningham’s book. I sometimes compare the two; usually the Joy wins out. Not for tomato soup. Inside this book is a tomato soup recipe with one of those wondrous tips passed from cook to cook that seems either really odd or just plain magic. This recipe calls for a half teaspoon of baking soda added after the tomatoes have cooked. Recipes don’t usually explain themselves, but this one says adding the baking soda will keep the milk from curdling. Harold McGee, the guru of food science, has nothing to say about using baking soda in tomato soup in his book, On Food and Cooking. He does discuss baking soda’s alkalinity, though. Sodium bicarbonate effectively neutralizes the acidity of the tomatoes reducing the chance of the milk from curdling in the soup. Just don’t boil it once the tomatoes and the cream are combined.

If you’d like to see the original Fannie Farmer recipe, see Pure Cream of Tomato Soup at epicurious.com. I’ve made several changes. I thought that using some chicken broth would make for a more flavorful soup. I also cut out the sugar and added a couple of cloves of garlic. I used less flour, because I don’t like a cream soup to be too pasty. As for seasonings, there is just salt, pepper and bay leaf. I liked it like that, but rather than use a half of a bay leaf, I put in a whole one. A half of one just seemed strange to me. What would I do with the other half? I also used an immersion blender and didn’t strain the soup. The original recipe calls for five tablespoons of butter. Whenever I see a recipe with this much butter I cut whatever they say down to two tablespoons to see how it tastes. It was fine. I’m sure you could use olive oil instead of butter and soy milk for real milk. But it would be something different.

Cream of Tomato Soup

• 2 T butter
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 T flour
• 2 cups whole milk, at room temperature
• 2 cups chicken broth, at room temperature
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t baking soda
• 26-28 ounces of chopped tomatoes (I use Pom? brand, it comes in a 26 ounce box, if you use something else, two 14 ounce cans will work)

Melt the butter in a large pot on medium heat. Turn heat to medium low and add onion, garlic, bay leaf and salt and cook, stirring occasionally until onion and garlic are softened and only slightly caramelized. Sprinkle the flour over the pot and continue to stir and cook for 2 to 3 minutes. Turn heat off and allow mixture to cool slightly. Add the milk, turn the heat back up to medium low and simmer until slightly thickened, stirring occasionally. Stir the baking soda into the tomatoes and let rest a minute or two until most of the foam subsides. Add the tomatoes to the milk, and bring just to a simmer. Pur?e using an immersion blender. If you don’t have one of these, you can use a regular blender, but let the soup cool or you could blow the top off things. Remove from the heat and serve with crackers or grilled cheese sandwiches.

Makes about 8 cups.