Sweet potato soup

This is a quick soup that tastes pretty good.

Recipe: Sweet potato soup

Ingredients:
- 1 small sweet potato, peeled and cubed
- a few pieces of fried fish cakes
- 1 sausage or hot dog, cubed
- 1/4 medium onion, thinly sliced
- 5 yo 6 green beans, cubed
- chicken or ham stock
- 1 TB spring onion green, finely chopped
- drops of sesame oil

Procedure:
Boil sweet potato, fish cakes, sausage, onion and green beans in stock until soft (about 20 minutes). Then sprinkle spring onion and sesame oil on top. Serve right away.

Meat soup with apple sauce and olive

Soup is one of the areas where wonders come in the most unexpected ways. Here is a soup that brightens up another of our dark winter nights at home. The two flavors that stand out in this soup are the apple and the olive. I like using the juices from roasting turkeys and hams to make soup (after skimming off the fat). They provide plenty of flavor. However, because they are so salty, I use them only to enhance the homemade unsalted meat stock. To give the soup a rich aroma, I use some extra herbs. Rice is added to make it more filling.


Recipe: Pork rib soup with apple sauce and olive (serve 3-4)


Ingredients:
- 2 quart of stock of pork ribs
- 1 cup of juice from roasting turkey
- pieces of meat (trimmed of fat) from the cooked pork ribs and ham
- 1/2 head of a medium cabbage, shredded
- 1 medium carrot
- 1/2 medium onion
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 4 Spanish green olives
- 1/4 cup unsweetened apple sauce

- 3 bay leaves

- 1 tablespoon (TB) dried herbs mix of rosemary, savory, thyme, and marjoram
- 1 teaspoon (tp) dried oregano
- 2 tp dried basil
- 2 TB cooked rice
- salt to taste (optional)
- water


Procedure:
Boil onion, cabbage, carrot, garlic, olives, bay leaves, apple sauce in pork rib stock in a 3 quart pot. for 1 hour or until cabbage is soft. Add meat, rice and the remaining herbs. Season with salt, if necessary, and mix well. When adding salt, note that saltiness should not be the dominant taste in this soup. Instead, allow the sweet and sour taste of the apple stand out. Let the soup sit for 1 hour without heat on stove top. This will let the aromas of the herbs blend in with the soup. Warm up at serving time.

Creamy vegetable soup with tofu

It's a cold and wet spring day. We snuggle up at home, trying to keep ourselves warm. So I make this creamy vegetable soup.

Recipe: Creamy vegetable soup with tofu (for 2-3)

Ingredients:
- 1 cup meat stock
- 1/2 can of cream of chicken, Campbell's healthy request
- 1/3 package of soft tofu, drained and cut to 1" cubes
- 1-2 oz ham pieces
- 3 TB sweet corn kernels
- 1 TB onion, finely chopped
- 2 baby bella mushrooms, chopped
- 1/3 cup celery leaves, finely chopped

Procedure:
1. Mix cream of chicken with meat stock until fully incorporated. Then add onion, mushrooms and ham pieces to the liquid and bring to a boil. Add celery leaves and boil for 2 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients. Bring the soup to a boil again. Serve hot.

Note that tofu gives out water to thin the soup.

Instant oat bran vegetable soup

Never thought that oat bran could make such a wonderful soup in 10 minutes! It almost makes a porridge. The oat bran has a rather nice chewy texture which goes very well with the canned cream of chicken. It's fast too. I made it with a steak, and thought that it might be too much. But my husband finished the entire bowl. He really liked it. That's how I get him to enjoy fiber---lots of vegetables in a juicy meat stock.

Recipe: Starchy vegetable soup

Ingredients:
- 3 cups strong homemade meat stock
- 1/2 can of low sodium cream of chicken soup
- 2 cups kappa cabbage leaves, chopped to 1"x1" size
- 1 can mixed vegetables (potato, beans, celery, carrots, corns) no salt added, drained
- 1/4 cup oat bran

Procedure:
1. Mix the cream of chicken with meat stock in a pan. Heat to boil. Add oat bran and kappa cabbage leaves. Cook for about 5 minutes. Add canned mixed vegetables. Stir and allow to heat to boil. Serve.

Egg congee

Porridges and congees are great for breakfast, especially before charging out of the house into a cold winter day of work. I once improvised on an egg congee that warmed my stomach so much that it simply made my day! 


Recipe: Egg congee (for 1)


Ingredients:
- 1-2 oz cooked pork or ham or sausage, cut to bite size
- 1/4 cup cooked rice
- 1/2 cup fresh sweet corn kernels
- 1 egg
- dash of paprika powder and parsley flakes
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 2 cups water


Procedure:
Boil meat with rice in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes on medium heat. Add corn kernels and olive oil. When the mixture boils again, beat an egg and stir into the liquid to form a cloudy fluid. Turn heat off and serve right away, with a sprinkle of paprika and parsley.

Mushrooms egg soup

A good meat stock goes a long way in making a winter evening warm. In one of the stormy snow weekends, when we find ourselves short of appetite after being locked in for too long, nothing satisfies us half as much as a light savory soup. In today's soup, our theme is mushrooms. The black shitake mushrooms have a bold aroma and strong flavor, while the enoki mushrooms have smooth and white, noodle-like texture. They go well with white meats such as chicken/turkey. Along with them, I add a few other ingredients to build a complex composition to the soup. The cabbage, in particular, gives the soup a solid feel, while the egg drop makes it a little thicker. Silken tofu gives a smooth bite. Sweet pea add some small packages of sweetness to it. The sesame and black pepper brings forth a different dimension of comfort.

Recipe: Mushrooms egg soup (for 2)

Ingredients:
- 3 large dried shitake mushrooms, soaked to rehydrate
- 1 pack (about 4 oz) fresh enoki mushrooms
- 1/4 cup wild rice
- 1/4 package of silken tofu
- 2 cups cabbage, thinly sliced
- 4 oz cooked turkey white meat
- 1/4 cup frozen sweet peas
- 1 egg, beaten
- 4 cup turkey/ham stock (salty)
- 1 teaspoon red pepper for garnishing
- dash of black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon sesame oil

Procedure:
1. Cook wild rice and cabbage in stock for 1/2 hour on medium heat. Add shitake mushrooms and allow to simmer on low heat for about 15-30 minutes. About 15 minutes before serving time, add sweet peas, enoki mushrooms, tofu and turkey meat. Bring to boil again. Add egg and stir gently for a few seconds. Turn heat off. This gives very thick egg drops. If a fine egg drop texture is desired, then add egg after turning heat off, and stir more, but not over vigorously.  Place in serving bowl, and garnish with red pepper, black pepper, and sesame oil.

My first successful clam chowder!

Today I found chowder clans at 3 for a dollar again! Incredible price. I carried 9 home, weighing over 5 pounds. Thus came my experiment with clam chowder. I've not had much success with thickening my own soup so far, always relying on condensed soup, and always fearful that my own roux would go wrong. This time, the clams simply pushed me forward to brave it. Throughout the afternoon the smell of clams filled my husband's empty belly with anticipation until dinner time.

Recipe: Clam chowder (for 2-3)

Ingredients:
- 9 chowder clans, meat weighing 1/2 pound when cooked
- 1 stalk of celery, cubed
- 1 carrot, cubed
- 1 medium potato, peeled and cubed
- 1/2 medium onion, cubed
- 1 clove garlic, chopped or minced
- 3 bay leaves
- a pinch of thyme or italian seasoning mix
- 4-6 cups meat stock
- about 1.5 cup clam juice from cooking the clam
- 1 dried scallop or 1-2 oz ham
- 1/3 of a half-pint package of heavy whipping cream
- 2 TB to 1/4 cup of cornstarch (depending on how thick one wants, I think 3 TB will be optimal)

Procedure:
1. Scrub the clam shells carefully to clean off all dirts.
2. Soak the chowder clams in clean cold water for 30 minutes to 2 hours. Replace the water a few times. This cleans off the sands and dirts in the clams.
3. Boil the clams on high heat in a small amount of water, just enough to cover the bottom of the pot. Once the clams open wide, take them out to cool. Some clans may take longer to open, and may take longer boiling.
4. Once the clans are cooled, remove the shells. Trim the muscles and save them. Carefully cut open the center part of the clam to remove the dark brown soil-like matters. Then chop all the meat and muscles into fine pieces.
5. Allow the clam juice to cool and set. Then filter off the sediment.
6. Place all the vegetables in a medium pot with the meat stock. Bring to a boil. Add all the herbs, ham/scallops, and the clam meat. Add the clam juice to taste. Then allow to simmer on low heat for about 20-30 minutes.
7. About 20 minutes before serving, take out about 1/3 cup of the broth and allow to cool a little. Mix in about 2 TB to 1/4 cup of cornstarch with the cooled broth.
8. Bring the broth close to a boil on medium or med-low heat. Slowly stir in the cornstarch mix. Stir the broth to make sure no lumps form.
9. Then stir in the whipping cream.
10. Allow the soup to heat up on medium heat. When it heats up, it will thicken gradually. Takes about anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Gradual heating seems better.
11. Ready once the soup has thickened.
12. Serve with dash of parsley flakes. Season with salt, pepper and bacon bits.

Kelp and shrimp soup

Spring is near. I decided to have a light seafood soup dinner using salted kelp. Kelp is a type of seawood that is rather big. Its texture is like gelatin, but with a distinctive flavor of the sea. The longer it is cooked, the more it softens. I prefer it a little crispy. Here is the recipe that seems to go well with tofu. The sweet peas, squash and carrot add a little bit of sweetness to the otherwise salty soup. In cooking this soup, the ingredients are added in the order in which they take time to cook. It takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on how much one wants the noodles and the vegetables to be cooked. The shrimps are cooked last because they only take seconds.

Recipe: Kelp and shrimp soup with mung bean noodles (for 2)

Ingredients:
- 1 oz mung bean noodles
- 4 cup meat stock
- 1/4 cup salted kelp, rinsed, soaked and drained to remove excess salt
- 1/2 pack tofu
- 1 tablespoon (TB) sweet peas
- 1 TB carrots sliced
- 1/4 cup raw acorn squash
- 8 medium shelled raw shrimps
- 1 cup Korean cabbage
- a few drops of spicy sesame oil

Procedure:
Boil cabbage and kelp in meat stock for 20 minutes. Add the mung bean noodles, acorn squash and carrots. Boil for another 10 minutes or until noodles are soft. Add tofu and sweet peas, and allow to cook for 2-3 minutes. Lastly, add the shrimps and serve once the shrimps turn pink (about 30 seconds). Sprinkle a few drops of spicy sesame oil on top.

Lotus seed soup

Sometimes, a very simple dessert can be all that one needs in the middle of a drowsy afternoon. I like light dessert with very little sugar, partly because of health reason, but mainly because that's how I grew up. In fact, my desserts are almost sugarless, but then the taste of the ingredients stand out much better.

Recipe: Lotus seed soup (for 2)

Ingredients:
- 2 tablespoons dried cored lotus seeds, soaked overnight to re-hydrate
- 1 tablespoon wild rice
- 0.5 oz dried tofu sheet (about 1 8"x8" sheet)
- 1 tp honey

Procedure
Boil re-hydrated lotus seeds with wild rice in 4 cups of water for 10 minutes. Add tofu sheets. Allow to simmer for 1-2 hours. After 2 hours, the lotus seeds will be soft and powdery, while the wild rice grains have opened up and become chewy. Add honey and serve.

This is such a simple dessert. But I find it's so very comforting.

Festival squash vegetable soup

Some time ago, we had a food exchange with our neighbor. We gave them some of our turkey. They gave us a pot of their chicken noodle soup. It was so fun trying out others' food to get some new tastes on home cooking. Our neighbor's soup had a nicely sweet flavor which came from squash. So I decided to give that a try for a change. In this recipe, the cabbage, onion and potato are the primary ingredients for a good vegetable soup with the ham stock. Only a small amount of festival squash is needed to give a sweet twist to the usual salty taste of a ham soup. The meats are added just to complement the vegetables. The chickpeas give a richer texture to bite. 

Recipe: Festival squash vegetable soup (for 2)

Ingredients:
- 2 cup cabbage, chopped
- 1/2 medium onion, chopped
- 1/2 cup small white potatoes with skin, cubed
- 1/2 cup festival squash with skin, chopped
- 2 tablespoon (TB) cooked chickpeas
- 1 cup dripping from baking ham, skimmed of fat (salty)
- 3-4 oz ham pieces, boiled to remove saltiness before use
- 1 oz chicken/turkey white meat
- 1 TB flakes of basil, rosemary, thyme, savory, marjoram

Procedure:
Boil all the vegetables with ham for 20 minutes. Then add the herb flakes and allow to simmer for 45 minutes. Serve hot.

Creamy catfish soup

I've never mastered how to make a creamy soup. But it's good to have it once in a while. So I use the canned solution. When I tried this catfish soup, my husband liked it incredibly! It went well in a dinner with a lamb chop, a potato rosemary bread, and a stir fry of asparagus and baby bella mushrooms. What a perfect dinner after a cold day out at work.

Recipe 1: Creamy catfish soup (for 2)

Ingredients:
- 1/2 can low salt and low fat cream of chicken soup
- 3-4 oz catfish nuggets, cut to 2" length
- 3-4 TB frozen sweet peas
- 2 cups meat stock
- 1 cup leaves of celery, finely chopped
- 1/3 cup purple onion, finely chopped

Procedure:
Cook the cream of chicken, celery leaves and purple onion in 2 cups of meat stock until the soup is thickened. Add catfish nuggets, turn heat to low and allow to simmer for 5-10 minutes. Add sweet peas. Let simmer for 2-3 minutes or until the peas are heated up. Serve hot.

Recipe 2: Creamy catfish shrimp soup (for 2)

Ingredients:

- 2/3 can low salt and low fat cream of chicken soup

- 2 cups meat stock

- 3-4 oz catfish nuggets, cut to 2" length

- 8-9 medium sized shrimps, shelled and devined

- 3-4 TB frozen sweet peas

- 2 TB yellow sweet corns

- 1 TB onion finely chopped

- half a medium carrot, chopped

Procedure:

Cook the cream of chicken, carrot and onion in meat stock until the soup is thickened. Add catfish nuggets, turn heat to low and allow to simmer for 5-10 minutes. Add sweet peas and sweet corns. Let simmer for 2-3 minutes or until the peas are heated up. Lastly, add shrimps and allow to cook for 10-20 seconds. Serve hot.

Oxtail soup for a cosy home

This is one of those cold weekdays that one would rather snuggle up in bed and forget about waking up. When I saw my husband off this morning, he felt so down having to go to work. There and then, I was reminded that he was working hard so that I could enjoy the life we had together. So I told him how much I appreciated his labor, and assured him that home would be awaiting his return with good rest and good food. Surely enough, he came back once work was over, and we had a comfy evening dining and unwinding. This is one of my favorite soup recipes for cold days like this. It's a soup rich in meat flavor, but light to the stomach. It's mostly vegetables.


Recipe: Oxtail vegetable soup


Ingredients for stock:
- 2-3 lb oxtail with bone
- 1 big onion
- 1 clove garlic
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 cups red wine
- water


Procedure:
Broil oxtail in oven until browned. Brown onion and garlic in juice of oxtail. Place browned oxtail, garlic and onion in slow cooker. Add red wine and bay leaf. Top with water to cover all ingredients. Use high setting to let boil. Then turn down to low setting and let cook for 8 hours. Let cool overnight. Since oxtail has bone and tendon, the stock will be jelly like. Skim off fat. Meat should come loose from bone easily. (When I save stock for future use, I keep it in small airtight jars without skimming off the fat. When the stock is cooled, the fat forms a hard cover on top to give extra insulation.)


Ingredients for soup (3-4 servings):
- 8 oz meat from oxtail, de-boned and trimmed of fat
- 4-6 cups oxtail stock. 
- 1 tp red wine vinegar
- dash of marjoram and basil
- mixed vegetables such as:
  1 small onion

  3-4 tomatoes

  2-3 leaves of cabbage
  1 leaf of red cabbage

  2 stock celery

  1 small zucchini
  2 carrots
  1 small eggplant

Procedure:
1. Chop all vegetables to about the same size around 1" long. (Optionally) brown them in oil in this order: onion, cabbages, celery, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes. Note: I don't brown eggplant.
2. Heat up stock. Add vinegar, onion, tomatoes and cabbages. Let cook for 15 minutes. Add carrots. Let cook for 15 minutes. Add all other vegetables, herbs and meat. Get soup to boil for 5 minutes. Then transfer to slow cooker on low setting to keep warm until serve. For fresh-tasting vegetables, do not keep warm for longer than 1 hour. If soup is not used at once, let it cool and reheat before serving.

An evening with a seafood soup

It was during a biological experiment (to study the cholesterol content in a shrimp) that I discovered the best-tasting seafood soup comes from boiling the shells of shrimps! What a great lab session! The bonus finding at the end of that class was that shrimp shells have very little cholesterol. So if you love seafood, don't you love knowing this? Since then, I always save the shells of seafood to make stock. Seafood stock is easier than fish or meat stock. Just boil the shells in water enough to cover them for 1 hour. Add a teaspoon of vinegar to help soften the shells while boiling. Some people like to add a clove of garlic too. Usually the shells have plenty of salt in it. So it may not be necessary to add extra salt when using seafood stock.


Recipe: Seafood noodle soup (for 2)
- 1-2 oz rice noodle
- 3 cup seafood stock
- 9 oz tofu (about 1/3 package)
- 2-4 fresh shrimps, shelled
- 2-4 oz shark (or tuna) meat, cut to 1.5" cubes
- a large sheet of dried seaweed, crumbled
- 3-4 mushrooms, sliced

- 1 leave of kappa cabbage, cut to 1" slices
- 1 stalk of green onion, chopped
- 1 thin slice of ginger
- 1 small clove garlic crushed
- 1 teaspoon sesame oil


Procedure:
Boil rice noodle, garlic and ginger in seafood stock for 2 minutes. Add kappa cabbage and mushroom to stock and let boil for 1 minute. Add shark (or tuna) meat. Let boil for 3 minutes. Add tofu and seaweed. When soup is still boiling, add fresh shrimps and let cook for 1 minute or just before it completely turns pink. Serve the noodle soup right away with sesame oil and green onions. Keep the shrimps on top while serving. The shrimps will continue to cook in the heat of the soup. 

This seafood soup goes very well with a spicy appetizer of anchovies! 

Homemade soup made perfect

Homemade soup is at its pinnacle when there is a wide collection of diverse but compatible ingredients to serve on a rich stock. In fact, most of the time, a great soup is made of leftover ingredients, carefully combined in appropriate proportions. Here is a soup that plays with the combination of pork shoulder, seafood, tofu, cabbages, noodle and a few spices. It yields incredibly yummy result. This soup tastes so good that my husband suggests that I jot down my own recipe!


Recipe: Homemade soup (for 2)


Ingredients:
Main ingredients

- 2 cups of thick stock of pork shoulder bone, skimmed of fat

- 1/2 pack of soft tofu, cut to 1/2" thick pieces
- 5 large leaves of kappa cabbage, chopped to 2" big pieces
Ingredients for enriching flavor, aroma and texture
- 1/2 small purple onion, chopped to 1" pieces
- 1 large leaf of purple cabbage, cut to 1/4" slices
- 1-2 oz polska sausage, cut to 1/8" slices
- 3-4 fish balls
- 2-3 oz cooked shoulder cut pork, cut to 1/2" pieces (meat from the stock)
- 1 teaspoon (tp) small dried shrimps
- 2 tablespoon (TB) dried (not cooked) small anchovies
- 2 TB rice noodle, use the broken pieces
- 8 hua jiao pepper corns
- 2 TB Sriracha hot chili sauce
- 1 TB sesame oil


Procedure:
1. Use a 3-quart pot with lid. Boil purple onion, purple cabbage, polska sausage, fish balls, cooked pork, dried shrimps, anchovies and rice noodle in 2 cup of stock. Let it boil on med-high heat for 10-15 minutes.
2. Add the white parts of the kappa cabbage into pot and cover lid. Let cook for 5-10 minutes. The cabbage will cook partly in the liquid and partly in the steam. Stir occasionally to make sure every pieces of cabbage has a chance to be soaked in the hot liquid. When the kappa cabbage softens, it gives out water. So no additional water is needed to make the soup. After all the white parts of the kappa cabbage is soft, add Sriracha hot chili sauce and the green parts and cover for 5 minutes. Stir occasional to let all the leaves cook. When all the kappa leaves are cooked, transfer all solid ingredients out of the pot to a serving bowl. 
3. Use the remaining liquid to cook the tofu with hua jiao pepper corn for 5 minutes. Then transfer everything from the pot to the serving bowl. Sprinkle sesame oil on top and serve.

Kale and bean

It's taken me quite some failed experiments and grouchy stomachs before I finally accept that kale (that big coarse kale sold cheaply in grocery store) really takes a long time to cook. It's not a vegetable for salad or stir-fry. Instead, it does much better with ingredients that take long cooking, such as beans. I was so happy when I had my first success with this vegetable in a bean soup.

Recipe: Kale, beans and wild rice soup


Ingredients:
- 1 bunch kale (finely chopped to 3-4 cups)
- half a small white onion
- half a small red onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 cup chicken stock
- 3 oz pork tendon or rib meat
- 3 tablespoons (TB) wild rice
- 1/4 cup red beans
- 1 leaf of kappa cabbage, thinly sliced
- 10 cup water


Procedure:
Boil white and red onion, garlic, pork tendon, wild rice and red beans in chicken soup and 4 cups water on med-high heat for 1 hour. Keep the liquid boiling hard to prevent sticking to the bottom. Whenever liquid has been reduced by half or more, top up with water and continue boiling. Add chopped kale and keep boiling for 1/2 hours on med-high. Then turn down heat to medium and let simmer for 1 hour to 1.5 hours or until served. When the soup is done, the kale should be very cooked, the wild rice should be opened up, while red beans should remain in whole pieces and crush on biting. Just before serving, add sliced kappa cabbage and let cook for 2 minutes. The kappa cabbage gives a fresh crunchy taste and light color to the soup, and brings out the soup's vegetable nature.

Autumn pot pie

There is a season for every dish. This morning, when my husband went off to work, the chilly air slipped through our door and delivered a fallen leaf. Autumn is here. How nice it would be to come home to be greeted by the buttery smell of a flaky crust. How warm it is to be filled by some comfort food after a day of labor. What about a little pot pie!

I just learnt from a friend how to make the flaky pie dough. It's a recipe from "Baking with Julia", mastered in my friend's expert hands. My friend's pumpkin pie had such a wonderful crust that I ate the pie for its crust. So I decided to try making my own crust today, and make it my first pot pie. Julia's recipe makes 4 pies. After quartering it, I got some weird measurements like this:

Recipe: Flaky pie crust

(1/4 portion of recipe from "Baking with Julia", make one 9-inch pie)

Ingredients:

- 1 cup + 5 tablespoons (TB) all-purpose white flour

- 3/4 teaspoon salt

- 3/8 stick unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

- 1/4 cup + 3TB shortening, chilled

- 1/3 cup iced water

Procedure:

The procedure can be found in reference cited above, which is not repeated here. Basically, the idea is to keep the butter and shortening as solid as possible while forming the dough. The flour and the salt are mixed first in a big bowl. Then, the butter and the shortening are broken into small pieces (1/2"x1/2"x1/4") and mixed with the flour. It takes only a little mixing to coat the fats with flour. I use hand to break them into finer pieces, making sure that they are not totally melted into a flour ball. A lot of the flour will not come in touch with the fats. At this point, water is added to incorporate the flour sitting at the bottom of the bowl. Mix and push everything into a dough. Without kneading, the flour won't form a smooth dough. Instead, the dough will be clumpy and grumpy, looking very much like it's going to fall apart any time. But that's how it should be. It will be ok after chilling. Before chilling, I partition the dough into 4 parts. Each part is about the size of a tennis ball. Then the dough is wrapped in plastic and chilled in the fridge for an afternoon.

While the dough is chilling out, it's time for the filling. I discovered that the filling of the pot pie can be cooked before baking. That's a great idea. It ensures that the filling is cooked when the crust is done. Here is my simple first attempt.

Recipe: lamb/beef pot pie filling (for 2)

Ingredients:

- two mini soup pots (1 cup each)

- 6 oz cooked lamb and beef (3 oz per person)

- 2 teaspoons of herbs

- 4-5 mushrooms, sliced

- 1/4 cup of leaves of celery, finely chopped

- 1 cup of sweet pea and sweet corn mix

- red wine 1 glass

- water

- 1/2 can of cream of mushroom healthy request

Procedure:

Boil meat with mushroom and celery leaves with red wine and water enough to cover ingredients. When vegetables are cooked, add sweet corns and sweet peas, and cook for a few minutes. Mix in cream of mushroom to thicken the soup. It should be a bit watery, thinner than a chowder.  Add water if too thick. Make 2+1/2 cups.

Putting the pot pie together:

I decide to make the crust only for the top, not the bottom. One part of the flaky pie dough (a quarter of the recipe above) can make the cover for two 5" mini soup pots. Separate chilled dough into 2 parts. Roll out to 5" diameter sheets, about 1/8" thick. If the dough is good, there should be small chunks of fat, within the dough, that spread well into patches in the crust. Pour cooked soup into mini soup pots and fill to near top (about 1+1/4 cups). Cover with dough sheet. Poke a few small holes to allow airing. Bake at 450F for 5 minutes. Turn down to 350F. Bake for 30 minutes, until crust is golden brown. Serve hot. When done, the soup will thicken into a chowder. The crust becomes a thin layer that hardens on top. (For the health conscious, each pot pie crust has 3/8 TB butter and 7/8 TB shortening.)

The making of this pot pie was like all my other first-time baking experiences. I found myself peeking into the oven every 5 minutes to see if it's ready. I thought the dough was going to rise with heat. It did not. Perhaps I had not done it properly. Maybe it's too thin, or the soup was too liquid, or maybe there should not have been empty space between the crust and the soup. It also took 45 minutes (much longer than I was told) for the crust to turn brown. I felt skeptically suspicious of its taste when I took it out of the oven. However, when my husband and I sat down to take the first bite, it felt as if a whole choir of angels suddenly appeared around us, singing "Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!" Despite the imperfect appearance, its taste was absolutely perfect. It had the rich buttery taste with a fine touch of salt. The soup had evaporated to 1 cup in the pot, leaving the bottom of the crust cover crispy with the rich taste of soup. My husband and I found ourselves savoring the pot pie as if angels had delivered them from Heaven. We have not had such great excitement for a while. Though we constantly make every dinner special, some nights are just exceptionally memorable.

So today's page is dedicated to the friend who has brought such a wonder into our home through her skills and patience.

A theoretical onion soup

This is one of my funniest cooking experiments that came out of a friendship in graduate school. My friend was from Serbia. She had traveled a lot, and was a walking encyclopedia. We both were living in Italy then, and away from home. I was struggling with daily life without knowing an Italian word. She became my translator. Soon I found myself digging into the magazine Cucina Italiana, and kept asking her to help me understand the recipes. With her broad knowledge, she knew all about cooking, but never cooked. I knew nothing about European cooking, but I loved the kitchen. So we formed a perfect cooking team of a theorist (she, a mathematician) and a practitioner (me, a computer scientist). She became my "cooking professor", and I became her "kitchen technician". 


One day, I asked her about the French onion soup. She gave me a recipe off the fly:


Recipe of "A theoretical French onion soup"


Ingredients:
- a few onions
- 1 egg yolk
- the crust of some hard cheese
- a little olive oil for browning onion
- a pot of water


Procedure: 
Slice onions and fry in olive oil until brown. Add water and boil until soft. Add crust of cheese and boil some more. When soup is done, beat one egg yolk in a bowl. Add soup slowly. Serve hot.


I loved this recipe. It was so simple. The next day, I bought 1 kilogram of onions and invited her to come over to my home to try out the recipe. She wasn't too excited, especially since she did not like onion smell at all. But I needed her badly to guide me through. I needed to figure out precisely how many onions qualified to be "a few", and whether "a little" oil meant a tablespoon or half a cup. Above all, I had never seen how onion soup looked like when it's done. So I needed her there to tell me when "done" happened. 

As it turned out, my friend made her lifetime discovery that browning 3 onions needed more than 1 drop of oil. Perhaps 2 tablespoons would do. It took us a few hours to discover that "when done" meant the onions had caramelized after hours of cooking, yielding a sweet and gentle flavor, which was heightened by the melted cheese crest. A good cheese would melt well and not stick to the bottom, leaving behind the hardest part of its crest. 

That evening's cooking was long. It was past 10pm when we sat down and ate. But we had the most satisfying experience ever with our onion soup. It was smooth and almost creamy. I liked it greatly. Even she liked it so much that she finished a whole bowl.

The downside of cooking onion soup is that the smell could stay in the house for a week. For this very reason, I don't plan to cook it again, no matter how satisfying it tastes.