INDEX food


Comfort Joy


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Gather friends and family around your Christmas table and enjoy these dishes, adapted from Jane Lawson’s beautiful book, Snow Flakes And Schnapps (Murdoch, £17.99)


You can make the soup a day before you want to serve if you allow it to cool and keep it in the fridge.


Serves 4


Ingredients For the soup


300g vacuum-packed chestnuts 1tbsp butter


1 small leek, white part only, sliced


1 celery stalk, diced 50g prosciutto (chopped) 2 x 400g cans borlotti beans 1 thyme sprig


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1 x garlic clove, fi nely chopped


1 small eating apple, peeled, cored and grated 625ml chicken stock 125ml whipping cream


For the parsley oil and scallops


2 large handfuls fl at-leafed parsley


1/4tsp grated lemon zest 1 garlic clove, crushed 170ml extra-virgin olive oil 2 tsp walnut oil 12 large scallops, roe removed


1 tsb olive oil


Which wines?


A delightful aperitif and accompaniment to this month’s soup would be a bottle of award winning Ridgeview Fitzrovia Rosé (£31.99) – a Sussex sparkling wine that will provide a refreshing contrast of texture as well as complementing the sweetness of the scallops and chestnuts. Not only that, it will get the conversation fl owing. For the chicken, look no further


than the red grape variety Grenache, or Garnacha as it’s called in Spain. Either La Multa (£8.49) or El Puno (£21.99), both Spanish, would match well with the robust fl avouring in the dish with the latter offering substantially more elegance and depth of fl avour. For more advice and wine suggestions


call in to Wild Ferment Wine Merchants, 21 The Borough, Canterbury. www. wildferment.co.uk Tel:01227 463527.


Borlotti and Chestnut soup with scallops and parsley oil


1 Heat the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.


2 Add leek, celery and prosciutto and cook until softened.


3 Add the chestnuts, beans, thyme, garlic, apple and stock and 375ml cold water. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 20 minutes. Remove thyme, then process soup in batches until smooth.


4 Return soup to clean pan, and stir in cream. Carefully reheat, making sure soup doesn’t boil.


5 Keep soup warm (or reheat when ready to serve) while preparing the parsley oil and scallops.


6 In a food processor, process the parsley with the lemon zest, garlic and the oils. Set this aside.


7 Heat a large frying pan over high heat. Put the scallops and the olive oil in a small bowl, season with salt and toss to combine.


8 Cook the scallops for 1 minute on each side, or until coloured golden and almost cooked through.


9 When you are ready to serve, ladle the warm soup into shallow bowls. Top each with three of the scallops and drizzle parsley oil over the top. Serve immediately.


17


The INDEX magazine December 2011


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