Garbage Soup

What a terrible name for a delicious soup- but I can't help thinking of this soup like that! I THINK but am not 100% certain that Tamar Adler, in The Everlasting Meal calls it that- so blame her.

It really is delicious, in spite of the name- as evidenced by the fact that I almost emptied my bowl before I remembered that I wanted to take a photo.So what is in garbage soup? Well- the base of it is made-from-scratch veggie stock. Fill your stock pot with all your week's veggie peels, stems, skins, pods and so on. In my case, I include things that I probably ought to chuck- limp bunches of celery, slightly frostbitten spring onions- edamame pods (the chooks love them so I figured they must be good). Cloves of garlic, half an onion or two. Some slightly wrinkled carrots. Rice wine, soy sauce, some miso. Star anise. ONE clove (I ruin soups with too many cloves! ONE clove suffices!). Ginger. This time, a packet of wonderful, weird Chinese soup base:

I like a pretty decent ratio of veggies to liquid- I JUST cover them. Simmer a while- but not too long or I find things just end up tasting like nothing. Maybe an hour? Then I drain the stock, give the chooks the over-cooked veggies (they love them).Back into the stock go the veggies I want to eat. Not-so-limp-celery, carrot, onion, more star anise etc. A head of cauliflower in tiny pieces that really needs to be eaten NOW. About a cupful of adzuki beans. Dried shiitake mushrooms.

Finally a can of seitan "chicken". This stuff will get its own blog post soon, it's really good! After dinner, about a cup of cooked basmati rice was added to the soup as well. Very tasty, thrifty, healthy and declared excellent even by my meat-lovin' spouse!