funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund delicious homemade soups paired perfectly with creative breads that's what's cooking today welcome to my kitchen I'm Bo Jack Angus cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen well soup and bread is something that I've always enjoyed serving soup and bread in this part of the country you know this this weather this winter weather is is soup and bread whether I do those a lot at church on our our Lenten suppers we have soup and bread suppers and we just sort of expanded into a lot of a lot of different areas but so that that was the basic inspiration for our soups and breads and then you know you need to refine I always need to refine and hone down the ideas and be sure that that the bread and the soup go together so that there you're you're going to not going to put out a soup that takes two minutes to make with a six hour loaf of bread you know so kind of match the timing and the tastes and everything today we're going to do some recipes from my soup and bread cookbook and we're gonna do a roasted red pepper soup and and then the bread that goes with it is an herbed muffin and then we're doing asparagus soup and we're doing some interesting breadsticks with that so we'll start out by roasting the red bell peppers and I have my own way of doing that and sometimes people say that's not the right way because you're supposed to take the whole pepper and you're supposed to put it in the oven or over a flame onto and keep rotating it and I find that it's just a drug I don't really like to do it that way so what I do is I'll take the pepper and pull them try to pull off the stem cut it in half and then open it up and then remove the seeds and the white stuff in there and that way we don't have all that white stuff to deal with when we're when we're mostly when we're peeling the pepper so we take the peppers and I'll clean this off get rid of all the all these go into my take it to the compost pile and then I'll put them upside down six of them upside down onto a cookie sheet that is covered with foil and what we want to do is just sprinkle them with olive oil and roasting them with olive oil makes them roast much more quickly because the oil picks up the heat in the oven and that will make Li I'm just kind of with my fingers spreading it around okay then we go to the oven and I I create my oven to as high as it'll go on the convection roast into the oven and we'll watch that it will take about 15 to 20 minutes so here we are we've got the outer leaf I'm not going to use the really really fibrous outer leaves but we'll we'll chop the rest of the leek into about quarter inch slices and I'll go up about as far as the dark leaves beginning to show because they won't cook now what else we need is one large onion which I've already chopped and it's ready to go I like to use leeks and onions when I can get them if I can't get them well then I'll just substitute another onion for it but the leeks have nice color and they add an interesting flavor to the pot now when the peppers are roasting we can make our herbs muffins that go with go with this particular soup it's one that I put together in the bread and soup cookbook so the roasted red bell pepper soup and herbed muffins go together we start out by mixing two and a half cups of all purpose flour and a tablespoon of sugar Oh teaspoon of thyme and I'll just take a generous pinch and marjoram those are the herbs and then we need 2 teaspoons of baking powder which I did not measure ahead of time two teaspoons of baking powder we can just put them all together at one time half a teaspoon of baking soda and the reason we have baking soda is because we're going to use buttermilk as as liquid and buttermilk has an acidic quality to it and the baking soda is the base so the two work together to raise the raise the muffins okay then the liquids here Oh got to put my little salt in here 1/2 a teaspoon of salt will stir that in and we're going to add a half a cup of melted butter it's one stick and a half a cup of buttermilk that just gives a nice flavor so we just stir that just until the dry ingredients are moistened just like that add a splash more of buttermilk because in the wintertime the flour is a little bit dry because the air is dry and so sometimes you have to kind of add a little bit more liquid on that account so we're going to do this turn this until all all the dry ingredients are moistened and the reason I call these biscuit muffins is that this looks like a biscuit door so we're going to put them into a muffin tin and that's why we call them muffins muffin tin you can either align them lighten them up in tin with papers but I'm just going to spray them with cooking spray and then we're going to scoop the dough into the muffin tins look it looks like a dry dough but that's why we call it an biscuit dough so it could be we could actually make these into biscuits if you wanted to then you have to kind of divide them equally these go into a 400-degree oven for about 12 to 15 minutes okay looks like our peppers are ready and this is what you're looking for a bullet sort of blackened outside on the peppers themselves and I'm gonna just take them out of the oven and now the next step with this is to wrap them up so that they steam so we're going to steam the peppers and the one of the way easiest ways is to have the peppers sitting on coil and then we're just going to wrap the foil shut and foil does not feel real hot when you take it straight out of the oven so very easy now it'll take about ten minutes or fifteen minutes and the peppers will steam and we can we can pull the skins off our onions are nicely caramelized in the pot and we're going to add our potatoes our diced Yukon Gold potatoes and then we're going to add four cups of chicken broth and let all that come to a boil and they're still steaming look at that okay but they've cooled off enough so I can handle them I've got asbestos fingers anyway and see when we do this how easily the skin comes up and see that and it's just so simple compared to how how juicy and messy it can be okay our peppers are all peeled and they're ready to be cut up to put into the soup now I'm not gonna be real fussy about how I cut them I'm just gonna use a pair of scissors and cut right through them and then turn that thing this whole bunch into the soup pot and stir it around and because everything by now is cooked we can go ahead and and puree this we're gonna puree the whole soup in the blender we'll just put the soup right into the blender container we're gonna have to do it two or three times to to get it all pureed because there's going to be approximately a dozen I bought a dozen couples which would be about eight servings okay we want to blend they're nice and steamy hot and these bowls are from the empty bowl so they're all a little different and I just love them because there are different sizes and they look different and they have different colors and and to me that makes it really fun to serve soup that way now we're gonna going to decorate the top with some sour cream here are our muffins actually they do look like biscuits and they that's why we call them this get muffins and they are actually quite delicious mmm I could smell the herbs in there really good I don't know where I get it from but my interest is always a little bit ahead of that the rest of the world and it I suppose I'm my ear is tuned to new ideas and sometimes the new ideas register and I'm not even sure they register but I that's one way to keep the expression but I also want to know for sure that I'm using things that are that are you know in season it's a real funny thing but chantrelle soup tastes the best in the fall when the chanterelles are fresh and I didn't realize that until I one time and I was in I was in Germany in the first part of December and talking with a friend and they said you know lab cookin does not taste as good other times of year and I realized pumpkin pie doesn't taste as good for Easter as it does for Thanksgiving what is it it's the seasonal thing things in season always taste better and I kind of keep that in mind when I'm doing menu it's always checking to see what is fresh and new you next we're going to make an asparagus sipping soup and some creative breadsticks I'll start out by chopping the onion and this is one of those nice sweet onions then we cut the onions into dice and they don't have to really don't have to be really particular about that because we're going to end up pureeing the soup anyway into my heavy pot we add four tablespoons or half of a stick of butter and then we're going to add the onions and while they are beginning to cook we're going to clean the asparagus we're going to need approximately a pound and a half of asparagus but what we have to do with asparagus is cut off this tough ends so doing it that way this is two pounds of asparagus and by the time we get the tough ends cut off we're down to way down to the pound and a half that we need for the soup now we want to cut them into approximately 1 inch pieces and I'll just we don't have to be real fussy about that either because we're going to puree the soup anyway now I can save a few little ends just for decoration some of the pretty ends of the asparagus to us at that aside and the risk will go into the pot with the onions takes about four minutes for the onions to get kind of almost transparent and then we're going to throw in three cloves of garlic because that just adds to the flavor and again we don't have to be real fussy about how we do that that goes in with the onions okay let's take our asparagus and put it in the pot to cook once they get all covered with a little bit of the butter that's in there we're going to add three cups of chicken broth and now that has to cook it'll take about 20 minutes for this to cook down to the point where we can run it through the through the blender again because this becomes a smooth soup while the soup is cooking we'll make the dough for our breadsticks and they're going to be kind of fun something you might want to do with the kids if you have kids around we for the breadsticks what we need is a cup and a half of warm water a package or a scant tablespoon of dry yeast then we're gonna add a teaspoon and a half of salt and approximately one tablespoon of honey this is a special honey that is grown right in this area and I got this at the farmers market what else we add to this is a quarter of a cup of canola oil or vegetable oil and then we're going to add two cups of whole wheat flour these are healthy stir that in then we're gonna add a cup and a half of flour let's sprinkle my work area and I'll do this right on the counter top with flour and turn the dough out now I'll dust the dough with flour and do some kneading and a lot of people don't know what you mean by kneading and how we're doing when we're kneading is folding the dough back over itself like so and in doing that what we're doing really is mixing all the ingredients together really well now we're going to shape the breadsticks and what I want to do is do the breadsticks two different ways so I cut the dough in half and I'll set that one aside and this one I'm going to cut into into bigger breadsticks so it again does the area with flour and take the dough and spread it out I have some egg whites that have been in the refrigerator and they're left over from some other project and I like to use them to make the sesame seeds and sunflower seeds stick to the brick to them to the bread sticks so there we are we're going to sprinkle sunflower seeds and these are the ones that are they're roasted but not salted and then we're going to sprinkle them also with sesame seeds I like the crunch and the flavor of both the sesame seeds and the sunflower seeds and we're going to cut the dough into strips now wait once we do that we can roll it around like this and we'll end up with you just take it and that that gives it kind of a pretty texture and we can put them right away into a 300 degree oven for about 30 minutes now we're going to take the second half of the dough and I've cut it into quarters and we're going to put it in the pasta maker and shape very creative breadsticks and I just want to be sure that we've dusted the dough well with flour because if you don't if you will have some problems okay we start out by rolling the dough on the widest possible widest possible length dust both sides again with flour because you don't want it to get all sticky inside the pasta maker so be sure you've got plenty of flour around that's the same thing that you do if you were making making pasta so I'm going to run that through one more time okay we're gonna take the fettuccine cutter coming through okay yeah you can shape them however you want you can make them into into you know different kinds of shapes separate them a little bit and make it look like stem of a flower or of a plant oops there's some more and that is kind of that's really really kind of fun isn't it now again we'll brush them with some egg-white and we'll put these into the oven to bake these bake much more quickly than the other ones so while these bake and the other ones are finishing up we will be able to finish up our soup we're going to put it into the blender while it's still hot we'll put it back into the pic into the pot to warm it up again mmm smells like spring then we turn the blender on to blend and I always keep the cutter on because it can happen that it'll spit right in your face if you just turn it on without without having a cover on it here we go I like to serve the soup and demitasse cups kind of like these you might have I've got two different kinds here but this is kind of fun to serve and people can just sort of stand around and eat and have their soup and then munch you're on a breadstick at the same time our breadsticks are ready to take out of the oven it does there's a little bit of leeway time there so if you want to keep them in a little bit longer you can or you take them out before but you want to be sure that they're gonna be nice and crispy so here we go I'd say pretty you so here we are with our breadsticks with sesame seeds and sunflower seeds and we're ready to serve and they really do hold up for a long time so you don't have to worry about putting them into the you know covering them and keeping them warm because they're they're kind of they're kind of good they'll wait for you if they last my soup and bread book is number 29 that's the 29th book and I was just asked to do a proposal for a new casserole book and I'm also working on my memoirs which is cooking up a book so if those come out that'll be number 30 or 31 or whatever 29 books is I figured that should be a good number but I don't know we'll see funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund