Ripe tomatoes are so easy to be made into simple yet delicious soup. I followed the recipe in my cookbook of Party Food and Appertizers. In fact the recipe calls for sun-dried tomato paste so that the soup has intense flavor. However, I didn’t have that kind of tomato paste so I went ahead using normal tomato paste. The soup was still tasty though I wondered how the authentic taste would be like.
We can choose to cook with either chicken stock or vegetable stock, and I picked vegetable stock to get a real fresh and vegetarian soup. I made the toasted cheese croûte with baguette slices and grated Parmesan cheese.
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Long gourd is a kind of cheap vegetables that most common families can afford for daily meals in Vietnam. It’s mostly used in cooking soups. There are various soups using long gourd that base on meat stock of some kinds. Pork ribs make good stock too and many Vietnamese housewives like using pork ribs in soups.
What make this soup even more flavorful and tastier are the presence of fresh ginger and mui tau, a kind of veggie-herb well-known to Vietnamese cooking.
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Blue cheese has a strong and distinctive flavor, which is so outstanding in this soup. I like having this soup with freshly baked hard-crusted bread. As this type of bread stales quickly so whenever I make them, I often plan to prepare some soup to serve with bread as our main meal.
Blue cheese is already salty. My soup this time was a bit salty for our taste even if I used home-made chicken stock – to which I do not often add any salt, but after doing several seasonings, the final soup was still salty after I added the blue cheese. In addition to that, the bacon was a little salty, the hard crust bread was also a little salty, we could only get through our meal with a glass of water. So be careful with seasoning when you make this soup.
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This pasta soup is easy to make. In fact, this is the first time I made pasta soup. At first I wanted to make something with butternut squash and I came across this recipe. It was just perfect as I like both pasta and soup.
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It’s great to have this stewed beef soup on winter days. The soup is served hot right from the stove and warms us up by its deep taste and fragrant flavor. I like this kind of soup with both meat and vegetables. In the lack of time when I cannot cook more than one dishes, this stewed soup still provides me enough substances. During the cooking process, I still can do other things and just need to attend to the soup several times until all are tenderly cooked.
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This is a sour fish soup which is also very popular in Vietnamese cooking. Only one point is that more people prefer fresh water fish than salt water fish. Of course people from coastal provinces often use seafood to cook into sour soups, and their sour fish soups are also great.
It doesn’t matter for me where the fish come from. Of course some fish cannot be cooked into soups like this one, while some are really perfect to make sour soup with. This time I cooked with king mackerel.
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This soup is just great to enjoy with bread slices. Let’s imagine that you are dipping a crispy bread slice into a warm thick soup with beautiful orange color and creamy texture, then gradually taking a first bite, feeling the first impression coming from the good smell, you’ll appreciate a good treat of the day.
It is very easy to cook this soup, it matters only that you gather all the necessary ingredients. Cooking time is just within 30 minutes and you will have a pleasant soup for either breakfast, lunch or dinner, but I prefer having it for dinner with the freshly baked bread which I spent the whole afternoon to make it.
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I am not sure how to categorize this soup as I learned them in one of my Western cookbooks for party foods. But two ingredients, tofu and soy sauce, are typical in Asian cuisines. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter as long as the food is delicious and has something special to remember and persuades you to cook and eat it again.
This soup is definitly very simple, but the taste and flavor is not just boring. When having this soup, I felt the purity of the food and the peace of the meal. Tofu and vegetables are always our favorites and inspirations in every day meal.
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