Soup Glorious Soup Take II - Thenthuk Soup

I ain't gonna lie, boys and girls. I am not making this soup 'authentically.' If you were to make Thenthuk soup authentically, it would require a 'pulled dough' (which I think is what Thenthuk actually means.) That's a fancy blogger thing to do, and it's not something that most of you are about to do, and then you would skip this soup, and that would be a shame, because this is a good soup. So unless you are one of my super-foodie friends reading this, then, yes, fine, go ahead and make pulled dough. For the rest of you, keep reading.

Spouse (as we were making the soup): what's pulled dough?  

Me: it's like, dough. That you pull. Like this (pretends to stretch a dough in the air.) And then you drop it into the soup. But that's too much work, and I'm hungry .

This is DH. DH has soup when it's cold out. DH is smart. DH is not an annoying internet meme.

This is a great soup to make if you have barely anything in the house other than a tired tomato and some tired greens. When it's cold and wet out (like today. And tomorrow. And the next day.) and you can't be bothered to go shopping for actual food, and you only have bits and bobs around the house - this is the soup you make. 

Thenthuk soup is what happens when chicken soup and minestrone soup meet and have an illegitimate love child in Tibet. I make it with chicken broth and noodles, but it can easily be lent to vegetarian and gluten free. And I play with it and make it ever so slightly different every time, and I encourage you to do the same.

Now. In order to make this soup we need to start talking about the kitchen as a whole. My kitchen, and probably your kitchen too, does not exist in a vacuum. What I mean is, there be this thing called leftovers. And no cookbook that I have ever found seems to take that into account (with the possible exception of Tamar Adler's Everlasting Meal, but that's more cookprose than cookbook.) Which is a shame. Great things happen from leftovers - tiramisu, bread pudding, fried rice, sourdough - and that's just off the top of my head. 

So the beginning of this soup happens when you have leftover chicken/duck/goose/beef bones around the house.

Once upon a time, people appreciated bones and realized you could make great things, like soup broth, from them. I think it's because nobody used to have any money. Nowadays. . . people buy broth. Feh, I say, feh. Stop that. It's expensive and they put additives in to make it taste good.

Here's what to do instead. Next time you roast a chicken, or a goose, or a duck - save the bones. Either put them in the freezer and save them for a rainy day in which you are ready to make soup; or seize the day, make stock immediately, freeze it, and defrost on a day like today.

Take the bones. Stick them in a pot with onion skins, garlic, carrot tops, celery tops, bay leafs, maybe a pepper clove, salt, and water. If you don't have all those ingredients, don't worry about it. Be creative. Use what you do have. I've made pretty good stock from just a tiny bit of onion, bones, salt and a bay leaf. Bring to a boil and cook, for at least half an hour. Taste. Then either proceed to soup immediately or freeze that and wait for that day you need soup broth.

The other things that you will need for this soup are probably lying around in your pantry. Change around as needed. I will tell you how I did it, and you can do with it what you will.

Things you sort of need:

• onion
• tired tomato or two
• hard vegetables - like radish, or kohlrabi, or daikon. Carrots would probably will work, as would beansprouts or celery. 
• green vegetables - spinach/bok choy/cabbage/kale/etc. Or not if you don't have it.
• soy sauce
• broth
• noodles

1. If you have broth, defrost it now. If you only have the bare bones, start your broth now, and don't worry, it will be ready in time for there to be soup.
2. Start water boiling for tomatoes. You're going to want to peel the tomatoes, and the easiest way to do that is to "score" them - cut a very thin cross in the skin, just barely breaking the skin. Then plonk it into the boiling water for about 30 seconds, until the skin starts peeling back, like a bad sunburn. Remove with slotted spoon and let cool. Remove the water from the pot, and either throw it away or be thrifty and reuse it. Maybe even in this soup.
3. Meanwhile, take some oil or even shmaltz if you're lucky. Heat it in the very same pot you just used for the tomatoes (Make sure to dry the pot first or it will sizzle and spit and burn you. Not that I speak from experience or anything.) Cut and fry up the onion. Add the hard vegetables - this time I used a single kohlrabi. Let it cook and sizzle for a bit - maybe 5 minutes. 
4. Keep an eye on that broth. Taste. Add salt if needed. Don't if it doesn't.
5. Chop up and add the tomato to your onion-vegetable pot. Cook a few minutes more. Add your broth if it's ready, and a bit of soy sauce. A drizzle or two will do. Cook until it has become soup. This should only take a few more minutes, but it's forgiving.
6. About 5 minutes before you are ready to eat, add the noodles and cook them according to noodle directions. Then, finally, a minute before eating, add the green stuff (I used strange green things that I got in our CSA) and let cook only a little, until slightly wilted, not sad.

Your result will taste like an Asian minestrone. Please let me know if you pull those noodles - I never have and I am intrigued, but also lazy. Oh, and if you like, some recipes say you can add chopped meat. But don't take my word for it - ask google. 

Winter is Coming - Never Fail Soup Recipe

Let's talk about soup.

Soup is good for three reasons that immediately come to mind:

1. It's cheap
2. It's good to eat when it's cold out
3. It saves old vegetables when they're about to die.

In this blog post, forgive me, but I may delve into those horribly irritating superlatives that you often see in food blogs. YUM! Delish! NOMNOMNOM. OMG this is an amazing never-fail soup recipe!

Ok, I hate myself already. I'm going to stop that now.

Back to soup.

I believe there are two types of people reading this entry - those that really do not know how to make soup, and are chomping at the bit to get my soup recipe tips; and those who think they already make the best soup, so why on earth should they read this because they already know how to make amazing soup.

If you are of the second sort and I haven't lost you already (or never had you in the first place) bear with me, this soup technique makes a TRULY DECENT soup that....drum roll please...uses no MSG or broth.

Allow me to get back up on that soap-box of mine for a minute, please? [get up on soap box]. One of my biggest, awfulest, most guaranteed to bug the crap out of me every single time, is PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE SOUP WITHOUT SOUPMIX. OMG. SERIOUSLY. Soup-mix has not been allowed in my home in years. Years, I tell you. For all you trepidatious readers who do not know for the life of you, what to do when a soup recipe calls for broth, I have three words for you: Just. Add. Water.

There. [gets off soap-box. Or would that be soup-box? heh heh. Get it? Soup box?]

This soup is a blended soup, and it's delicious every time [fights to not slip back into annoying food blogger mode.] Here are the approximate instructions for this soup, and you will see why I love it so much:

1. Take all or most of the vegetables that are about to go bad out of the fridge.
2. Put them in a pot and cook them.
3. Stick into a blender and dzudzh (sp???)
4. Eat soup.  

 In short, this is a great recipe. Bookmark-worthy, even. There. I said it.

Now for the slightly longer version:

Really Decent Vegetable Soup in about 30 minutes

Originally I thought I stole this soup recipe from my guru, Alton Brown, but I just rewatched his soup episode and it turns out that I diverged quite a lot. That's ok - that means this may even be an original recipe! And really no-one better to trust with blended soup recipes than yours truly, considering I had my jaw wired shut for seven weeks (don't worry, it was years ago) and had to live off of blended soup for quite some time.

Ingredients: 

• Oil - a few tbs
• Onion - always an essential to soups, in my not so humble opinion
• Several different kinds of dead or dying vegetables - can include vegetables like: 
• radish (yes, radish! I am so glad I learned that radish makes a good soup, because before I kept thinking I should make it into pickles, never did, and kept throwing them out.) / fennel / tomato / daikon / cabbage / potato or sweet potato / carrot / celery or celery root / turnip
• Probably should not include vegetables like:
• lettuce / cucumber (yes yes, officially it's a fruit. I know. Get over it) / endive
• Can also include spinach or mushroom, but then I wouldn't blend it and/or add them at the end.
• Water
• Kosher salt
• Optional seasonings (turmeric, cumin, nutmeg, that kind of thing)

Directions:

1. Take a medium or large pot, set over medium heat. Add a little bit of oil, just enough to cover the bottom of the pot, and heat. 
2. While the oil is heating, roughly chop the onion and plonk it into the the heated oil.
3. Now, take your time. In order of hardest to softest, roughly chop up your vegetables and chuck into the pot with the onion. When you've got enough veggies in there that the bottom of the pot is covered, add the kosher salt. Stir. Keep adding veggies and stirring every now and again. The heat should be on medium-high, enough to start browning the veggies but not enough to burn them. Keep cooking like this for about 10 min, including chopping time. 
4. This here is the step that I added that I firmly believe makes the soup go from just ok to pretty damn good - clomp on the lid. That's right, no water. Just lid. Turn the heat a bit lower and keep cooking, covered, for another 10-15 minutes. Stir every now and again to make sure it doesn't stick. What this step does is stew the veggies in their own juices - literally - and gets them all nice and tender and tasty. What it also does is trap that steam inside the pot, which probably keeps things hotter and retains the taste. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. 
5. Finally, now that veggies pretty much cooked at this point, add the water and seasonings if you want to. You do NOT want to boil the water. I know many soup recipes tell you to, but this soup doesn't need it, and somehow I think it wouldn't taste as nice. If you want to add some soft veggies, do it now. Cook on a SIMMER, not a boil, for another 10-15 min.
6. At this point the soup is pretty much done. I like it blended, though, so I now take either all or some of the soup, stick it in my plastic blender, and blend. If you only have a glass blender, probably a good idea to wait until the soup cools (but who can wait that long??). Also a hand-blender would do the trick, I just happen to not own one. 
7. Blend. Add salt if needed. Serve. Great soup, every time. I promise.