Everything Soup & Dragon Salmon

There wasn’t much thought behind selecting these two recipes. Mostly, my dad was visiting for the week and requested that I make soup. As for the other dish, I was really just craving salmon. 

Everything Soup 

It’s hard to put into words how pleasant it is to find a lighter soup in a fantasy-themed cookbook. Most cookbooks are full of hearty stews and soups, meant to put meat on the bone. 

This recipe is for more civilized folks - halflings to be exact. It’s the soup that hosts prepare when they know they have guests arriving. The dish uses ingredients that a halfling might have on hand in their kitchen, hence the name Everything Soup. 

Before I made the soup, I started by making my own herb-infused butter, with a little bit of rosemary and garlic. I wouldn’t say this step is absolutely necessary but it does add a little more depth of flavor to the dish.

While the butter cooled, I started on the soup. I noticed at this point that the description provided didn’t quite match the ingredient list. For example, the description says you’ll be adding four colors of carrots but the ingredients only said to put in three. It also said the soup had peas in it but the recipe has no mention of peas at all. 

I heated up some butter and added my onion, carrots, red pepper, bay leaves, and some thyme. I let the veggies soften before covering the pot and really letting them cook and release their juices. 

Next, I added my chicken broth and potato. Once again the recipe and description of the soup differed, with the recipe calling for chicken broth and the description mentioning turkey stock. 

Finally, I added the green beans and let them cook just a bit before adding the rest of the ingredients that make this soup, everything soup - leek, corn, and chicken.  I let everything cook for just a couple more minutes to ensure that the leeks were nicely wilted and the corn and chicken were warmed through.

I served it with the drizzle of herb-infused butter and took a bite. The flavor was fine but the soup did feel like it was missing something. It was a perfectly adequate soup, not bad but also not amazing. That being said, given how quick and easy it is to make, I could see myself making this again. It would be an especially good soup to make if you were sick and needed some chicken soup to cure you. 

Dragon Salmon

I love to eat fish but I’m pretty nervous about cooking fish. Fish can dry out so quickly and undercooked fish isn’t delicious. But the only way to get better at something is by doing it.

To make matters more complicated, the salmon I was working with was not already in filets. I tried cutting even portions but I know for a fact I did not. This is another skill I clearly need to work on.

Once I had managed to cut four filets, it was time to cook the fish. Now I’ve watched a lot of cooking shows and I’m pretty sure I learned that to get crispy skin, you need to cook the fish skin-side down first. I’m not sure if that is true or not but I do know that the recipe told me to put it skin-side up first and my resulting fish did NOT have crispy skin. 

The recipe gives guidelines for what to look for while the filets are cooking as well as time estimates. Unfortunately, the time estimates were very unhelpful for me given that my filets were all different sizes. This meant that I had to rely on the guidelines for what to look for. 

The one that proved most useful was to feel the fish for firmness. As the salmon cooked, I kept lightly pressing the salmon and you really could feel the fish transform from very soft to firm as it cooked. 

Once my fish was done cooking, I popped them into the oven to keep warm while I prepared my sauce. I heated up some shallots and thyme in a pan, letting the shallots get soft. 

Then I added the Pinot Noir and broth and let that simmer for a while. Cooking shows always talk about cooking the alcohol out of a dish and this sauce really demonstrated what that meant. At first, the presence of the alcohol in the sauce was strong enough that you could smell it. As it reduced, you could actually taste the alcohol disappearing, leaving just the fruity notes of the wine. I finished the sauce with a little bit of extra butter to give a bit of creaminess. 

I plated the salmon with a little bit of sauce and took a bite. The sauce was delicious. My salmon was moist but admittedly a little overdone. 

This recipe would be great for a quick dinner. There isn’t much cleanup or prep work and it’s really quite a tasty dish.