Last night we had a lovely dinner with friends at The Helmand in Baltimore. I had plenty of leftovers for my dinner tonight. So my hubby made this soup for his own dinner! I thought it looked pretty so I snapped a photo.
The base is a soy ginger broth from Trader Joe's. Hubby added noodles, shrimp, baby napa, fungus, shitake, and green onions. He said the broth was a little too mild for his taste, so he added some Sriracha when eating the soup.
Last night, Sheu and I decided to make a miso-based soup. We sort of made it up, going by a mish-mash of three different recipes we found online and whatever ingredients we had on hand. Boy, did our soup have potential! Check out our ingredients list:
Brocolli, julienned carrots, silken tofu, baby bella mushrooms, Taiwanese bokchoy, some kind of seaweed, scallions, rice noodles, and miso broth. We put sliced boiled eggs in our bowls of soup, and Sheu also added fish cakes to his.
Unfortunately the soup didn't taste as good as it looks. We used 1/3 cup miso paste (in 6 cups water) to make the broth, and after tasting it, we decided to put in MORE miso paste, because it just wasn't flavorful enough. It still didn't seem quite right...why didn't it taste like the miso I've had in Sheu's parents' house and restaurants?
Today in the Asian grocery, we looked more closely at the containers of miso in the refrigerated section. Oops, it turns out there are many kinds of miso! Last week was the first time I'd ever bought miso, and I just grabbed a container without paying attention to the type. It turns out that we bought shiro miso (white miso). This is a lighter, sweeter miso. What we probably should have bought is aka miso (red miso). After reading up on it tonight, I found that aka miso is the darker, saltier type. It probably would have been better for our soup. :(
We did the noble thing and decided to finish the shiro miso before buying a new container of aka miso. Sheu said we can just add twice as much shiro miso to our soups (to give it a stronger flavor and use it up quicker, hee hee).
Another thing about the soup is that we overcooked the rice noodles a bit. Today we bought udon noodles, which should be better for soups, I think...? We'll find out the next time!
Tonight I threw together a soup (or stew?) with whatever we had on hand. I've had difficulty with making up soups in the past -- usually the broth turns out bland. Tonight I finally achieved a good flavor!
The soup contained:
Generous drizzle of olive oil
Chopped carrots
Chopped red onion
Minced garlic
Equal parts water and vegetable broth
Cubed potatoes
Salt, pepper, oregano, basil, cumin, bay leaf, thyme, cayenne pepper
Petite diced tomatoes (canned)
Lentils (canned)
Green beans (frozen organic, handful from the bag)
Chopped spinach (frozen organic, several handfuls)
I ladled some of the finished soup to a separate pot for Sheu and added boneless chicken breast (sauteed with rosemary and cut into small pieces). He gave it a thumbs up. Yay!
I started buying frozen spinach in bags instead of those solid bricks of boxed spinach. The bagged kind doesn't need to be defrosted -- you can just grab a handful and throw it right in soup, pasta sauce, or whatever! For recipes that DO require thawed & drained spinach, the bagged kind thaws sooo much faster than the boxed kind.
