Harira happiness

Occasionally you come across a recipe which is the culinary counterpart to Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.  Despite my penchant for hyperbole, I believe this classic Moroccan soup is it.   It’s complex, beautiful, lingers in your gustatory memory long after your last mouthful.  I’ve had this recipe since, again when Cath Claringbold was a regular food writer for Melbourne’s The Age and after all these years I finally made it!  According to the doyenne of Middle Eastern cuisine, Claudia Roden, harira is the generic term for a soup full of pulses with little meat, few vegetables and brimming with herbs and spices.  Every day during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset, the smell of this soup permeates Moroccan streets as every household has it's own version to be eaten when the sound of the cannon heralds the breaking of the fast.  How torturous that would be inhaling this divinely aromatic elixir all day only to wait till darkness unfolds before you can eat it!   On a more prosaic level, this would be analogous to my school days when I often had a cold salami and tomato sandwich and watched the lucky few eat their lunch-order hot pies and sausage rolls on cold wintry days.

I have perused a few recipes from various sources and astonished to notice that one ‘high brow’ cooking periodical used  tinned chickpeas!!  Anathema if you want flavour of the highest calibre.  Have I convinced you to make this?  Go to the effort of soaking your chickpeas overnight, making a proper chicken stock and you will be rewarded ten-fold.  As my children were unlikely to partake, I took the liberty of adding harissa at the end and didn’t use the luxurious saffron as stipulated in Cath’s recipe. Serves 6 – 8

 

Olive oil
500g diced lamb (leg or shoulder)
3 brown onions, finely diced
1 capsicum, diced into 1cm pieces
4 cloves garlic
2 carrots, chopped coarsely
2 celery sticks, chopped coarsely
1 tbs ground cumin
2 bay leaves
2 tsp sweet paprika
1 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tbs tomato paste

1 cup chickpeas, soaked overnight, rinsed and drained
10 cups chicken stock
400g tinned tomatoes
1 cup baby lentils
coriander leaves, chopped
1 tsp ground cinnamon
lemon juice
salt to taste

Heat some olive oil in a large stockpot and over medium to high heat, brown the diced lamb in batches and set aside.

Add some more olive oil and pan fry onions and capsicums till soften, about 5 mins then add garlic, carrots and celery.  Saute for a further 5 mins stirring through the spices and tomato paste in the last 2 mins.   Return the lamb to the pot with the chickpeas, stock and tomatoes.  Bring to the boil then reduce heat, cover and cook until both the lamb and chickpeas are tender which will take approximately another 1.5 hours.  Taste and adjust for seasoning adding salt as required.

Rinse and drain the lentils before adding to the soup pot.  Cook until tender (another 30 mins).

To serve, add a generous amount of chopped coriander, ground cinnamon, lemon juice and salt.  Serve with warm pita bread and, if you're going to eat like a Moroccan, dates.

Perfect-as-it- is Avgolemono soup

I like to gild the lily.  If something tastes great, I like to think if I add a pinch of smoked paprika or an extra dash of tabasco, I can make it better, make it taste absolutely sensational.  Sometimes this superfluity can lead to delightfully surprising outcomes, other times it can lead to disaster.

This mantra of 'if a little is good, then a lot is better' led to my downfall as an undergraduate Chemistry student.   Fondly I recall my Chemistry lab experiments at Uni where I often shamelessly pipetted too much hydrochloric acid, or other type of acid, into a solution and remaining agog at the toxic gases produced.  I even had my supervisors bewildered with the mysterious reactions that were occurring in the incubators of which I presided.  Invariably there was smoke, there were menacing hissing noises, dubious smells, dangerously overheated test-tubes, holes in my lab coat ...Alas, I was not a highly sought after lab partner!

But I'm learning that sometimes it is best to do as little as possible, add as little as possible to a dish and the results can be absolutely sensational.  Like this avgolemono, from Stephanie Alexander's the cooks companion - a Greek lemon-egg soup which needs to be served straight after cooking. It is certainly not one of those soups that can be reheated and served later as it tends to go gluggy.  This has to be one of my favourite soups.  And please, do not even think about buying the cartoned chicken stock!  Quelle horreur!!  Serves 4....

1.5 litres home made Chicken stock
90g long grain rice
3 large eggs
juice of 2 lemons
salt and pepper

Bring stock to simmering point.  Adjust seasoning and drop in rice.  Simmer for 15 mins until rice is cooked. 
Beat eggs and lemon juice vigorously (or use hand held mixer) till frothy. Add a ladleful of hot stock to egg mixture and continue to whisk..Remove stock from heat and allow to cool for 2 -3 mins. 
Swiftly tip in egg mixture, whisking to mix well.  Taste again for salt and pepper.  Serve at once.