On how I made three soups.

As some of you may or may not know (doesn't that phrasing technically cover everyone in existence? Talk about empty phrases.), I made soup last week. And, like most people addicted to social media, I posted pictures of each soup I made to the Bookface. And, like with most things I post to the Bookface, I have since fielded several requests for recipes.

Here's the problem, though. I don't really do recipes. It's not that I think they're beneath me or anything, it's just that I've been cooking for long enough that I identify techniques, maybe gather a couple of ideas from the internet, and just throw things together with a fairly decent success rate. Plus I'm lazy when it comes to writing things down. And while this is totally awesome in that I can MacGuyver dinner out of pretty much anything I can dig out of the fridge or the sale rack, it also leads to frustration when people ask me to replicate something and all they get back is a shrug and an ''I dunno."

So while this last weekend is still fresh in my mind, let me share with you how I made the three soups I ate.


Soup 1: Congee

1) Order ramen off of GrubHub for myself and my Nemesis, being sure to include soft-boiled eggs, because ramen without soft-boiled eggs is like a baby seal sitting quietly by itself. It's sad, but you're not entirely sure why. When finished, combine leftovers into one container for space conservation reasons.

2) The next day, warm up the leftovers a little (because the gelatin in the ramen broth is thick enough to set up solid in the fridge), and strain into a small pot. Scrape out the leftover rice from four days ago into the same pot, and add enough cartoned chicken broth to cover. Add a nub of ginger that's been sitting in your freezer for probably a year now, and set to boil while you eat the leftover noodly bits and stray vegetables in the strainer with a spoon.

3) Drop to a simmer and let it hang out for an hour or something - I don't know, I took a nap and wasn't watching the clock. Stir every once in a while, and maybe add more broth if it starts to stick at the bottom.

4) Remove ginger nubbin and eat.


Soup 2: Turkey, Butter Bean, and Baby Bok Choy

1) Dig out the 'Turkey London Broil' (basically a wide, flat turkey breast marinated in garlic, parsley, and lemon) I picked up from the coop because it was on sale, a can of butter beans from the pantry to be rinsed, and a head of baby bok choy Nemesis left a couple of days ago.

2) Pour the rest of the carton of broth into your soup pot and add an equalish amount of frozen homemade stock. Realize that's way too much liquid and pour a bunch of it out for later use.

3) Sear both sides of the turkey and cut down into cubes. Wash the bok choy leaves and cut into a chiffonade. Dump everything into the pot, bring to a simmer for however long it takes for you to toast some bread.

4) Ladle into bowl, add a healthy gloomp of extra virgin olive oil, and consume alongside large slabs of bread toasted in chicken fat.

Soup 3: Poulet Roti with Roasted Potatoes

1) Order a poulet roti from that French place I've been eyeing up. Eat the dark meat and the wings with a couple of potatoes that came on the side, skipping most of the severely over-roasted vegetables that came with the platter.

2) Pull the breast meat off the carcass (eat the skin), and with my hands, pull apart the breast and back bones. Stuff all the bones from the chicken into a pot along with an onion, the beets and cabbage that came with the poulet, the extra liquid you poured off the day before, a square of fat back from the freezer that I think came from culinary school four years ago, and enough water to barely cover the whole mass. Bring to a boil and simmer in a 200 degree oven for the rest of the day.

3) The next day, strain out the stock, gently pressing on the solids to get every drop of liquid chicken you can out of it. Skim the fat off the top, but do a sloppy job of it.

4) Slice a big fat clove of garlic into razor-thin slices. Fry them in some of the fat skimmed off the stock until dark brown. Cut down the chicken breast, the rest of the potatoes, and what apparently used to be zucchini and carrots into bite-size pieces.

5) Add the stock, some dried thyme, and all the chopped-up stuff from last night's dinner. Simmer and eat, again with slabs of bread toasted in chicken fat.

So there you go, guys. Making good food isn't always about getting the right combination of ingredients. It's about understanding how to put things together and using what you have on hand. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go make another pot of soup. Roasted a chicken yesterday. Can't let that go undevoured.

On some things I've learned about soup.

So the three of you that actually read this blog might have noticed that I missed last week. It is, after all, the time of year for me to come down with whatever sickness is circulating in my region.

But wait, there's more. I happened to fall ill just as I was scheduled for three days off in a row. And just as I had a chicken carcass waiting for me in the fridge, with backup homemade stock in the freezer. The conditions were right. It was time for soup.

And so I spent nigh on a hundred hours drifting in and out of sleep, jacked on NyQuil and warmed by slumbering cats, forging one iteration of soup after another. And in this plagued delirium, truths became known to me. Gone were ideas of recipes and plans. There was only bowl and spoon and water and light.

And so I come to you, dear readers, to share with you what facets of soupitude I've gleaned.

Proportions

You can read recipes until your eyes bleed, but the fact is, no one knows what you want in a soup better than you do. How much stock should you use? Enough. How many vegetables or chunks of meat should you add to your pot-au-feu? Enough. How many potatoes should you puree to get the consistency you want? Enough.

Let go of the numbers and use your eyes and tongues. More so than any other dish, you can always add a little of this or a bit of that to get what you're looking for. Trust yourself. Taste as you go. Discover what you love. Ever wonder why restaurants always have a rotating soup of the day? It's because you can make a soup out of pretty much anything.

And remember, if it tastes good together on a plate, it'll probably play nice in a soup.

Gelatin

The backbone of almost any good soup is a good stock. And good stocks come from bones, because bones give you gelatin. And everyone has an assload of veal or chicken bones to make stock from on a regular basis, right? Right?

Right. So you're working with cartoned broth. If you can't get the real thing, do yourself a favor and snag some unflavored gelatin. You'd be surprised how far a little body to the liquid can go, especially in the clear soup game.

Fat

Actually, while we're talking about body, let's talk about fat. It's not really one of those things you think about when you think soup, which means it gets overlooked all the damn time. But don't underestimate the power of fat - hell, just watch the first season of Mind of a Chef and you'll see what I'm talking about. If you're making your own stock, be a little lax about skimming the fat off the top. Drop a pat of butter or a gloomp of extra-virgin olive oil into the bowl. Let the lipids cling to your tongue, let that lushness bring dimension to the flavors you've worked so hard to combine.

I've only scratched the surface here. The world of soups is vast and glorious, with as many permutations as there are ingredients and cooking methods as there are in creation. It's winter, people - play with your soups and reap the rewards.

On dipping dumplings.

Aaand we're back. And we've got some catching up to do. It's been over a year and a half since my last post here on Thinking Foodwise, and it's safe to assume I've eaten a whole lot of things in that time.

We're going to keep it simple today, because quite frankly, I'm rusty as hell when it comes to writing, and after fighting writer's block (or, xmore accurately, neural constipation) for the last five days, I need to ease myself back into this sort of thing.

Let us consider the Chinese restaurant fried dumpling. A perfect parcel of pork and pasta, seared off in sixes and served with sauce. Delicious sauce, rich with savory soy and snappy scallion, a wonderful balance of glutamates and a hint of sweet. A charming compliment for the humble dumpling.

Except for one glaring design flaw. The dumpling itself is waterproof. Which means when you dip your dumpling into that little thingy of sauce, you come up like this.

It's sad. It's really sad. Because by this standard, you have to take one almost entirely sauceless bite out of your dumpling before you can go in for the saturated bliss you're seeking. You're looking at a 50% disappointment rate, which is frankly unacceptable.

But this is a problem easily remedied. All you have to do is breach the perimeter, like so:

And you've just opened up your avenue to success. Soak, my friends. Soak, savor, and see you next week.

Mental note: Suck less with images in posts.