Pickle...soup? Yes!! Zupa Ogorkowa or Polish pickle soup is one of the most delicious soups you will make all winter. It's a creamy vegetable soup with a delicious flavour from chopped up pickles and pickle juice and enriched with sour cream and cheese. It went viral on TikTok and now you can give it a go here! If you love pickles this is a pushy recipe Dear Reader.
Laura first put me onto pickle soup. She's always on TikTok finding new things to make and she recommended the Crinkle and this pickle soup. Now that we are in the depths of winter I thought it was a good time to try this pickle soup. It is essentially a vegetable soup with a base of carrot, potato, onion, garlic and celery. To this you add some chicken stock or broth and some chopped pickles, pickle juice and dill. Then at the end just swirl through some grated gouda cheese, sour cream and chopped fresh dill and you will have one of the most delicious soups ever!
I didn't base this exactly on the TikTok recipe by Delishaas but I adapted it because Zupa Ogórkowa is a recipe that has been around for years. Zupa means soup and Ogórkowa means cucumber in Polish. Traditionally it is made with leftover meat bones that are cooked to create a broth and it can be thickened with a flour roux or sour cream or cream. You can serve it as is or with buttered rye toast.
Tips for Making Pickle Soup:
1 - Use your favourite dill pickles in this recipe.
2 - You can sub rice for potatoes in this. You can also use other root vegetables like parsnip, turnip or swede as they all work well in this.
3 - You can omit the sour cream and cheese and thicken the soup using a roux. At the end of step one melt 3 tablespoons of butter and then add 3 tablespoons of flour and cook for 1 minutes. Then coat the vegetables in this mixture and then add the stock 1 cup at a time. Then add the pickles, pickle juice and potatoes and simmer to thicken for 10 minutes before adding dill and seasoning. It won't be as creamy as adding cream or sour cream but it will have a nice texture to it.
4 - Use lots of dill! Luckily dill tends to come in these enormous bunches and is so expensive at the moment so you can make the most of it. Alternatively you can use dill in a tube.
Speaking of pickles, one of my favourite phrases relating to pickles is "getting yourself into a pickle" which of course means getting into a conundrum. And Mr NQN and I are in a bit of a pickle with our house. I wouldn't call this house a money pit although it does certainly feel like we've got a lot of expenses especially with this unseasonably cold winter. A friend once told me that her first year after she moved into her new home was the "Arctic phase" when they had to quickly figure out how to warm up the house.
Our house is a federation house and has the original federation front but an extension added on to this. It has been so cold inside and even though we have heaters and split system air conditioning this doesn't seem to do anything. Mr NQN went around filling all of the gaps especially in the stained glass windows and that helped somewhat but we needed professional help. I've had countless tradespeople in to give us quotes on everything from ducted heating, hydronic heating, solar, curtains to double glazing.
There doesn't seem to be a clear path and of course once they come and have a look they all say, without exception, "This is going to be a tough job" shaking their head. Some proved too costly - the double glazing for just two rooms totalled around $35,000 and that wasn't even doing all of the windows. Our upstairs bedroom and ensuite has 17 windows which looks great but is cost prohibitive to double glaze. Adding curtains to one single room came in at $15,000 for two windows - granted they are huge windows but we weren't quite prepared for that.
Then one day the ducted heating guy came and spent around 30 minutes trying to figure out where the ducts could go. He climbed his ladder and went into the ceiling cavity. He let out a whistle and a tsk, "Hey do you know there's no insulation in the ceiling?" he said. Yup the reason why the heating was disappearing was that there is absolutely no insulation in the ceiling! It still boggles the mind that people could live in this house for 100 years and not even think that insulation might be a good idea. But let's just add that to the other expenses that we need to move this house out of the Arctic phase into the summer...
So tell me Dear Reader, do you have any tips for heating a house? Do you like pickles? Have you ever tried pickle soup?
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