The start of it all. A very comforting beetroot and hemp seed milk soup

This is me, starting a community project

I have long been inspired (well, since I moved to Adamsdown) to create a portrait of my community. Adamsdown is an incredibly diverse community and seeing so many different people on the street I couldn’t but be curious about the worlds that they inhabit.

Food has long been a passion of mine, especially since I moved to the UK. I love cooking, I love taking photos of healthy, tasty, comforting food made from seasonal, healthy and nourishing ingredients.

So this project is where my interest in food meets my curiosity to get to know my community. I have been granted a funding and for the next half a year or so I’ll be photographing the members of my community and recording food recipes. You can say this is a food heritage project for the future, where I record what people eat in Adamsdown at present day.

I am looking for people who are passionate about food, who have tried and experimented with different tastes and have made well-known dishes a bit their own. Or maybe it’s a dish with some family story, or a traditional dish that represents your roots and your culture.

I’d like to take a natural and relaxed portrait of a person as well as one of their favourite dishes. I’d like to participate in the process of making (by observing) a dish and then writing down the recipe.

The results of my project will be posted on here on Onesmallspoon.com which is mainly a food blog.

It will also become some kind of a publication – possibly a community recipe book, or similar.

This is just the first part of my project. There are some exciting plans being drawn for the future regarding food and a community of which I will talk later on.

A very comforting beetroot and hemp seed milk soup

I love food that is simple, nourishing and comforting. Food that would be equivalent to sitting by the fire wrapped in a wooly blanket in a room imbued with smells of smoke and cold. That’s the kind of a recipe I’m about to share with you.

I dug out this recipe from an old recipe book from Lithuania that probably belonged to my grandma who was a professional chef. One important note is that the hemp seed milk has to be home-made.On a plus side there is no pre-soaking, just heating in the pan and then grinding.

tiny hemp seeds

Another plus is that it only has 3 ingredients: beetroots, hemp seeds and onions (assuming you have the essential stuff such as oil and salt), it is easy to make (maybe apart from hemp seed grinding part), and it does taste of autumn, of cold and smoke, and is insanely comforting.

Ingredients:

2 large boiled beetroots
0,5 cup of hemp seeds
1 onion
2 cups of water
a pinch of salt

Fry hemp seeds (I was using unhulled ones) until they start popping.
Grind hemp seeds in a coffee or spice grinder, or with a pestle and mortar (which is quite labour intensive). Add 2 cups of hot water and leave for 10 minutes. Then sieve it.
Cut the boiled beetroots in sticks, dice the onion. Add some oil to the pan, then add the diced onion and fry it until golden. Then add the beetroots and fry for 4-5 minutes.
Finally add the hemp seed liquid that was left after sieving to the beetroot soup. Add a pinch of salt. Boil for 5 minutes. Your soup is ready!

To make it more nourishing and filling you can add boiled potatoes and sprinkle some dill and salt over it.