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dolorosa_12) wrote2025-02-21 05:11 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2025-02-21 05:11 pm
Friday open thread: soup season
Actually, it's not really soup season ('high soup season'?), given that it was 16 degrees celcius today and the crocus bulbs are starting to bloom. However, this has been a very soup-heavy winter, and a prompt like this is about all I can manage at the moment, and thus:
What are your favourite types of soup?
My favourites are definitely the flavour- and texture-rich soups of southeast Asia: laksa, pho, and so on. I'm not such a fan of cooking them myself, however — but if they're available, I will almost always eat them.
When it comes to soups I can cook myself, I have various variants of chicken-noodle soup (Chinese, Malaysian, and Indonesian recipes) which I enjoy a lot. I also love various Turkish soups involving lentils, minestrone soup, a variety of takes on borsch, and a nostalgic, vegetable-and-legume-heavy soup that my mum used to make in industrial quantities throughout the Canberran winter when I was a child (ingredients included dried mixed legumes, potato, green beans, parsnip, carrot, leek, and barley), which I ate for lunch at school in a thermos flask, and as afternoon tea to fuel an evening of gymnastics training, and which a friend of mine with whom I used to carpool to gymnastics still raves about, because she ate so much of it at my place en route to the gym.
I could probably go on, but I think that's enough of a starting point. Talk to me about soup!
What are your favourite types of soup?
My favourites are definitely the flavour- and texture-rich soups of southeast Asia: laksa, pho, and so on. I'm not such a fan of cooking them myself, however — but if they're available, I will almost always eat them.
When it comes to soups I can cook myself, I have various variants of chicken-noodle soup (Chinese, Malaysian, and Indonesian recipes) which I enjoy a lot. I also love various Turkish soups involving lentils, minestrone soup, a variety of takes on borsch, and a nostalgic, vegetable-and-legume-heavy soup that my mum used to make in industrial quantities throughout the Canberran winter when I was a child (ingredients included dried mixed legumes, potato, green beans, parsnip, carrot, leek, and barley), which I ate for lunch at school in a thermos flask, and as afternoon tea to fuel an evening of gymnastics training, and which a friend of mine with whom I used to carpool to gymnastics still raves about, because she ate so much of it at my place en route to the gym.
I could probably go on, but I think that's enough of a starting point. Talk to me about soup!
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I mourn the amazing bak kut teh soup that a local chain restaurant stopped serving as their Tuesday special a few years ago. A rich, complex broth; pork ribs (which actually I could have taken/left, it was the rest that was amazing), shiitake mushrooms, fried tofu puffs, garlic and wolfberries.
But another restaurant at walking distance from work sells tom yum, which is still a great treat, especially as they don't finish it with coconut milk. I wish I found it easier to digest coconut milk, because I love it, but it does not love me, so soups with coconut milk are a cautious sometimes thing.
I like batch-cooking soup then having soup for breakfast. The current fridge soup is a soup that requires several stages. First, at some point, I need to make a pork dinner where the pork is stuffed with garlic and parsley and braised in white wine and stock with fennel seeds. This leaves a large amount of highly flavored braising liquid, which I then use as the basis of a lentil soup with whatever vegetables are on hand - usually carrot and celery, and this time I also diced and roasted some daikon and threw that in.
I was recently sick with something that started very mild, so I had energy to make a big batch of ham and pea soup. (Simmer ham hock in giant pot of water for a couple of hours, eventually take it out to cool and dice, meanwhile boil green/yellow split peas in the ham water, add some sauteed onions/carrots/celery, add the diced ham back in). This was especially great because the gelatin and the peas make the soup turn into rather firm Sludge when it is refrigerated. So, when I ate portions, rather than heating it up, I just took a couple of modest spoonfuls and poured boiling water over them and mixed this up, which was a great way of getting some nutrients and liquid while not taxing my stomach.
Other frequent soups at home:
-groundnut soup // basically peanut satay soup, with peanut butter and tomatoes and chili and a bit of sweet potato
-a very simple chicken soup that is just carrots, celery, parsnips, and chicken, flavored with dill
-a comforting winter soup of smoked fish and green/brown/puy lentils
-a citrusy tomato kale soup where I sautee some onion and LOTS OF GINGER AND GARLIC, dump canned tomatoes and a bit of vege stock on top, and also add a lot of shredded coconut that has been toasted to lightly brown (in frying pan or in oven) then bashed a bit so it's in quite small pieces. While the tomato is picking up the other flavors, I shred and beat up some kale leaves, then add them in for a final 15 minutes and squeeze at least half a lemon's worth of juice in. Or I guess you could do lime. This is a terrible soup if you prefer a smooth consistency but very nice if you don't mind having to chew bits of your soup.
I've never quite warmed to the texture or taste of barley, and I don't like batch-cooking soups with pasta because I don't like the texture of pasta much past al-dente (and it feels like it just gets too soft with all the cooking and reheating).
Oh! And I recently tried this beetroot-apple-ginger soup recipe and really liked it: https://andrealflavor.com/beetroot-and-apple-soup-with-ginger/
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