Kitchen dispatches

I made an approximation of lamentables's beetroot, lentil and tamarind soup: approximate mainly in the spicing. I suspect that my chillies were less fearsome than hers (because I am a wimp). Also, discretion was the better part of tamarind: there was indeed some at the back of the shelf, but the wrapping (which I had had the foresight to cram bodily into the glass jar) said "Best before: December 1999" - and that joke about things being a bit last millennium has been going strong for over a decade, and... So I squeezed in half a lime (might have used more if there had been more, but there wasn't) and added about a quarter of a stock cube just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, it was delicious, and the red lentils gave a lovely smoothness to the beetroot, so I shall stock up on tamarind and try again. Note, therefore re quantities: I used a bunch of beetroot (this being how they sell them at the greengrocers - five or six small ones) and three ounces of lentils. It would take more lentils, I think.

I served it with a dollop of sour cream, and Dan Leppard's cider rye loaf. The bread recipe was rather unnerving: no sweetening for the yeast to work on, no fat, bake in a covered pot which you place in a cold oven and turn on the heat. But (apart from stretching some of the timings to suit my schedule) I did what it said, and it worked very well. It was quite dense, but I like that in a loaf; well-risen, springy and moist. The scent of the cider was very distinct, even at the point when I took it out of the oven, but it wasn't particularly noticeable in the bread itself.

Bread and soup II

And while I'm on the subject: you could live well in Iceland on bread and soup. (Unless you are vegetarian, of course. I'm not sure what Icelandic vegetarians eat, but whatever it is, it'll be an expensive import). You wouldn't want to: there is also skýr, and skýr cakes. But you could.

The basic soup is a very meaty lamb broth, available everywhere; in Akureyri I ate a smooth, creamy cauliflower soup; and in Blönduós there was seafood soup, which turned out to be a dark savoury bisque, bursting with shrimps and chunks of fish.

The bread that accompanies the soup may be white, or it may be dark rye (I've posted already about the traditional rye bread, one of the reasons I was eager to try baking rye bread in a covered pot). Geysir bread is baked slowly in the natural heat of the volcanic earth: the result is open-textured, chewy and very good.