Dan sent me a link to this Bon Appetit winter miso soup earlier this week. It’s recommended as a healthy reset soup (perfect for the week post-Thanksgiving), and the ‘recipe’ is more of a template than a recipe. Thank goodness, because I didn’t really follow it very well.
I hadn’t been planning to make it this weekend, but our farm box – which arrived on our doorstep Friday morning – had kale, shiitake mushrooms, and leeks, all of which were useful for this recipe. I didn’t do any other shopping for it, so just used what I had.
Which never includes fishy things like seaweed and katsubushi/bonito flakes. And the description of a broth with both those things in it tasting ‘like the sea’ was not anything I was interested in (though Dan would have loved it). Instead, I used the open box of beef broth I had in the fridge and some water (very different flavor). I used a lot of the kale from the farm box. I sautéed some of the leeks (we didn’t have green onions) and all of the mushrooms. And we had some udon noodles but no soba noodles, so we used those instead. I also added some ground ginger since I didn’t have any fresh and a bit of fish sauce just as a nod to Dan… I don’t think it was enough to actually add much flavor.
I also added tofu and soft boiled some eggs. I’d never soft boiled eggs before. Their consistency was great, but Dan and I wondered if there is a trick to peeling them.
Anyway, it was pretty good! Especially once I heated mine more to make it super hot and added chili garlic paste. Then it was temperature hot and spicy hot and made me so warm-feeling that I had to take my top layer off.
The ‘recipe’ was pretty easy and quick. The only downside was the number of dishes. There was the pot for the broth, the pan for sautéing, a pot for cooking the noodles, and another pot for soft boiling the eggs. But Dan did the dishes, not me, so that didn’t bother me too much :-).
The vegetables on the side you see in that second picture are roasted mixed vegetables, one of my perennial winter go-tos. Yum.
On another note, a link at the bottom of this recipe led me to information about a book called The Food Lovers Cleanse that BA is putting out on December 22. Does that mean they’re not doing it this year? That it will only be available through this book? Sigh. As I’ve mentioned before, I was really looking forward to it…
**Update**
A few days after we ate this, Dan sent me this link with common miso-soup-making mistakes. I do admit that I probably committed 1 (though I don’t know whether my miso is good or not), definitely committed 2 and quite egregiously (see mention of beef stock above), committed 4 (but was following the recommendation to sauté the mushrooms from the original recipe/template I used!), and committed 6 (even though the recipe/template I used told me not to… I actively decided just to do it). So. Okay. Guilty.
she eats and other things 