Soup of the Week, Part 5 or... Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right.

Today's unfortunate contender for the Soup of the Week is the infamous cabbage soup, purported to be the ultimate detox food. 

I am not a fan of diet recipes (who is, you may wonder) but this head of cabbage kept staring at me every time I opened my fridge so I was adamant to try out a new recipe to use it up WITHOUT a trip to the grocery store. Every now and then you will see me embark on one of these fridge-cleaning escapades where I will cook a dish or two only with the foodstuffs I have at home. 

Red lentils were another ingredient I had too much of and had not cooked in a while (hence qualifying it for the fridge-cleaning dish) and the only recipe that combined the two came from a nondescript diet-recipe book that I had never as much as opened.  

It promised miraculous results to whoever was crazy enough to eat this soup for lunch and dinner for AN ENTIRE WEEK. 

Other than cabbage and red lentils the recipe did not call for much, a dash of salt and pepper and that was it.  I guess it relied on the fact that whoever was going to eat this would be so hungry from dieting that they would be ready to eat a street rat for main and a handful of mosquitoes for dessert. In comparison, this marriage of cabbage and lentils sounded mouthwatering. Well, it was anything but.

Having taste-tested the end result, I realized I had to add some Chinese pickles and a generous  spoon of Ajvar Almighty if I was not to go to bed without dinner. It made the dish palatable, if not remarkable. As ajvar would make even the aforesaid rat and mosquitoes edible, it doesn't really count, does it?

This entry closes the Soup of the Week contest. The winner is the Cream of Spinach. Hands down.

Soup of the Week, Part 4

I may have stumbled upon my ultimate spinach soup this evening. It's too early to tell as I plan to play around with spinach and miso paste some more but it's hard to imagine that these two could produce a more flavorful and surprising combination than the one I came up with tonight.  

I love Kevin from www.closetcooking.com. The reason I used his Cream of Mushroom Soup recipe as a starting point for making what is basically a cream of spinach soup was not only to pay my respect to him but also because he 1) used an interesting combination of thyme, sage and miso paste 2)made an incredibly light soup whereas all other Cream Of... Soups call for copious amounts of heavy cream and/or butter. This is what he got (for the recipe and Kevin's post, please go to   (http://www.closetcooking.com/2008/04/cream-of-mushroom-soup.html).

As I went a little crazy today at the green market and got back home with about 1.5 kilos of fresh crispy spinach, I knew that was going to be my star ingredient in today's contender for the Soup of the Week title. Other than using spinach instead of mushrooms, I followed Kevin's recipe to the t. As With all ingredients pureed, my meal was running the risk of ending up looking like it was made for a 6-month-old baby so I added a handful of whole grilled button mushrooms, My own twist to this dish was to omit the boring, omnipresent chicken stock and replace is with more than a couple of drops of oyster sauce (yes, I was back at Block 70 yesterday).

Wow, the unusual spice mixture works surprisingly well together here. This soup shifts shape as it smells Mediterranean, tastes Japanese at first but then the oyster sauce almost takes over and turns it into a complete Cantonese madness before the sour cream and the grilled mushrooms make you realize you are back at the Mediterranean.

Soup of the Week, Part 3

Today's contender for the Soup of the Week was a modified version of Egg Flower Drop Soup
from amazing Ching-He Huang's recipe book "Chinese Food Made Easy". I got it as a birthday present couple of years ago and have been heavily relying on it ever since.

Instead of nori and fresh tomatoes that the original recipe calls for, I used tomato puree and fresh lettuce as I   realized I had ran out of nori only after I started making this soup. I made a mental note to stock up tomorrow when I drive back to Block 70 for more silken tofu and some other Asian foodstuffs. Other ingredients in the soup are tofu, eggs, leek, sesame oil, soy sauce, carrots. Nothing special, yet so tasty.

To call this dish a soup is an understatement. We had it just with only a side of lettuce. After she finished her bowl, my dinner companion sigh and said that she was stuffed. The acidity from tomatoes and egg protein make it a perfect hangover soup.  After all, isn't that what Bloody Mary, the ubiquitous hangover cure, is all about?  I was not hung over when but I WAS dead beat from a daylong shopping on 4-inch heels (pls see the previous post). After a bowl of this soup I felt invigorated. I am definitely going to be making this soup again soon.The fact that it took me whole 10 minutes to whip it up is an added bonus. Thank you, Ching-He Huang, from saving me and my cousin Maja from another mediocre bowl of instant chicken noodle soup.

Soup of the Week, Part 2

I am still too weak to leave the house so don't expect any fashion or Belgrade photos in this post. The Soup of the Week Challenge is still so this is what I came up with:

I am still very much into miso paste, so today I combined it with some cauliflower, carrot, leek, tofu and my mother's rye pasta (manually cut flat and wide by yours truly). Now, I don't know if it was the cold that wrecked havoc on my taste buds but the soup seemed just a tad bland.... The trap many a soup has fallen into....Of course I blamed it on the cauliflower. Somehow, unless drenched in eggs and/or flour, dishes that feature cauliflower frequently turn bland. To save the day (AND my lunch) I knew the dish would profit greatly from a tablespoon or two of apple vinegar. Then I went a step further and  spiked it up with a few drops of sesame oil. WOW! A world of difference.
The vinegar rounded the taste really nicely and I realized that was exactly what the soup had been missing. Sesame oil gave it that little je ne sais quoi. Think of it this way: apple vinegar was a black hat on a French woman dressed all in black and the sesame oil were here yellow shoes. Blandness never, nevermore.

Soup of the Week, Part 1

This Sunday, I finally found the time to go to the famous Block 70 in Novi Belgrade (something like  Belgrade's Chinatown) to get some Chinese foodstuffs  I've been craving for a while. I came back home with miso soup paste, soy sauce, a variety of pickled salads, goji berries, tofu (can you believe it costs 100 dinars, which is less than a euro, per kilo) soybean noodles, and some other stuff.

 That was a good judgment call because the next day I woke up with a bad case of cold. I did not feel like embarking on any great culinary adventures and had just enough energy to roll out of bed and put together a miso soup. It was so good I decided to cook another batch the next day. That was when I decided to try to kill two birds with one stone, cure the cold and engage in a bit of an experiment. So I will be subsisting mainly on a variety of soups either until I run out of ideas or until my appetite returns. By then I will hopefully figure out which seasoning-veggie-protein-noodle combo works best for me.

Today's lunch and dinner was a standard miso soup fare, featuring

noodles, Swiss chard, leek, tofu and miso paste. I could not find any soba noodles so I used the soybean long-life noodles:) I bought at Block 70 (where else?!) a month or so ago. To say it brought  me back to life is an understatement.