A New Soup!

My First Soup!  This is A New Recipe, inspired by the cooking course that Allison and I took in Thailand.  One thing we made was a terrific soup with a coconut milk base and fresh lemon grass and Thai ginger and cilantro, but I couldn’t get those things here in Japan so this recipe was reinvented with ingredients you can get in Japan without any hassle.  It’s simple and very tasty and healthy and filling, and should take no more than ten or fifteen minutes, cutting included.  Your ingredients and instructions are:

• Soy Milk.


• Garlic.


• Onion.


• One dried spicy red pepper, with seeds.


• Eggplant.


• Tofu.


• Green pepper.  


• Spinach, Romain Lettuce or some other leafy vegetable.  No seaweed.

1) Cut everything up.  Think “I will eat this in soup” size for the onion, eggplant, green pepper and tofu.  Cut the garlic like you like to cut garlic, and as-you-like-it on the pepper, but keep those seeds in.  They’re the spiciest part.  Soak the eggplant slices in a bowl of water until it’s time to add them.  

2) Bring the soy milk to a gentle boil, being careful not to let it puff up, and add the garlic, onion, and spicy pepper.  Stir for a minute or two, and add the tofu and eggplant (don’t add the eggplant water).  Keep it for a good minute or two at a gentle boil or, “simmer.”  This would be a good time to throw in some salt, if you want to.  Add your leafy veggies last (do add a bit more of the leafy veggie than you think you should at the time) and let it all cook together for another one of those good minute-or-twos.  Now EAT!  It seems like this dish would be best with a piece of dense, brown bread or that coarse, brownish rice that’s not brown rice, although that’s purely conjecture since I ate mine alongside two pieces of white bread to cut the spiciness from the two many hot peppers that I put in.  Curse you, crazy Thai hot peppers!!!  

Other good things to add could include ginger at the beginning, and pineapple chunks or some kind of squash—pumpkin or butternut would be amaaaaazing and add a lot of great color—after the tofu stage.  One trick I used to cut the spice (again, Curse You, Thai Chilis!) was leaving some tofu out and adding cold right into the soup bowl to steal some of the flavor concentration and heat of the rest of the dish.  This was a great and very easy soup, very vegetarian, very spicy and tres exotic.  Thank you, Thailand.

Enjoy!!!!