Friday open thread: soup season
Feb. 21st, 2025 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Actually, 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!
no subject
Date: 2025-02-24 07:54 am (UTC)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/
no subject
Date: 2025-02-24 01:26 pm (UTC)