My Second Soup

Cream of Sweet Potato Soup, with a few surprises

Soy Milk, maybe a third of a carton.
1 Packet of Dashi (powdered katsuo dashi)
½ Onion, chopped.
Garlic or toasted garlic powder.
1 Spicy Dried Red Pepper, with seeds, chopped up.
1 middle-to-big sized satsumaimo—that’s a Japanese sweet potato—sliced small and thin.
Black Sesame Seeds, a little pile, finely chopped.

Dashi is a fish or seaweed based bullion that’s in most dishes Japanese. It comes in little packets of powder or else you can make it yourself with dried seaweed in water. I use katsuo dashi powder for most things; it’s from the same fish, katsuo, that bonito flakes come from. Probably easy to get at an Asian grocer’s.

Stir dashi into soy milk and bring to a boil. Once you’re bubbling, add your onions, red pepper and garlic. Simmer for a good minute and add the potatoes. Then you’re gonna want to cook it for about seven-to-ten minutes. At some point when they’ve softened up a lot, start mashing up the potato pieces with your spoon or use an immersion blender if you don’t mind the messy hassle. Really, a spoon should do just fine. Keep the liquid bubbling; you’re going for a creamy consistency. Lastly stir in the sesame seeds; you should see a nice color to dark greenish depending on how much sesame you add. And that’s it: read to serve! This works really well as a soup, but I think it’s much better as a pasta sauce (I haven’t really figured out which is the best pasta for this yet) or on top of brown rice. It would probably also be fantastic as a sauce for fish. Ooo. That sounds good.

An easy improvement to this would be adding spinach, either chopped up real fine or blundered. And ginger…ooo. I can see this recipe being really superb if you were to take out the spicy pepper and the garlic and put in Thai ginger and coriander (cilantro) instead. Ooo, and serve it over a red pasta! That would be great! Like you know the sun-dried-tomato pastas they have, the reddish noodles? This would be phenomenal on a bed of that. Yes! YES!!