Soup

This comforting soup is delicately spiced with classic flavors and ingredients of the Southwest.

The sweet potatoes in this comforting soup need nothing more than traditional Southwestern spices and a topping of jalapeños and toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds).

If there is a recipe that truly captures the scent and essence of Mexican cooking, this is it. There are so many reasons to love this soup. Besides being easy to make and healthful to eat, it offers deep, rich flavors brightened by fresh ingredients. This is a great soup to serve for company, because it is not only delicious, but the contrasting colors of the deep amber soup base and the bright green and white from the toppings make for a stunning presentation. It is also a conversation piece, because everyone can get involved in the assembly of their soup bowl.

When I was little this was one of my favorite things to eat after a day of playing in the snow. After we moved to Arizona, my standards changed and now any day under 70 degrees works for me. Fresh tomato soup sounds like a pain, but, trust me, it’s easy and well worth the effort.

Homemade chicken soup is easy to make and tastes so much better than the stuff you get in a can that it’s worth the extra time it takes. I use a whole chicken to make the broth, but only put the dark meat in the soup. You can use the white meat to make Chicken Salad Pitas or Barbecue Chicken Pita Pizzas and save yourself the step of cooking the chicken.

I adore tortilla soup, but a lot of restaurants make it too spicy for me. I’d rather make it at home where I can control the heat by using milder salsa. This is an easy version that can be made from start to finish in less than 30 minutes.

Chicken and dumplings is a great cold-weather dish. When we lived in the Midwest, we would always have this after a day of sledding or building snow forts, but when we moved to Arizona this tradition became a problem. Now when I want chicken and dumplings, I turn down the air conditioning, close the blinds, and pretend it’s snowing outside (if I don’t close the blinds, the palm trees kind of ruin the effect).

This is the way the rest of my family makes of wonton soup. When I make this for myself, I use vegetable broth and sauté a cup of cabbage to use instead of the pork. I also like to whisk in a beaten egg before the wontons go in for my own version of egg drop–wonton soup.

Cheese, or no cheese, that is the question. I like cheese melted on top of the croutons on onion soup, but I also like the crunchiness you get when you add the croutons just a few at a time. So depending on my mood, I will either melt a couple of slices of provolone or Swiss cheese over the croutons, or not. But for the best of both worlds, I sometimes melt the cheese over the top and then push it into the soup and add more croutons as I go.

I was intimidated by the prospect of making a broccoli cheese soup, but I like it so much, I had to try. The recipe we came up with turned out to be one of the fastest, easiest soup recipes I’ve ever tried. Just to clarify, a bunch of broccoli is what you buy rubber-banded together in the store: a stalk is one of the pieces within the rubber band, and florets are the flowery tops.

This is Megan’s version of split pea soup, my version skips the croutons and includes ham. But, because we occasionally have to make something she will eat, I just add the ham to my bowl. If you don’t have a vegetarian in your house, putting ham or a ham bone in the soup while it is cooking adds a great flavor.

Soft and chewy sticky rice dumplings have a nuanced natural sweetness that is savored by fans of East and Southeast Asian cuisines. As the recipes in this book show, they lend themselves to many occasions, cooking techniques, and fillings. Regardless of type, sticky rice dumplings never fail to please. Old-fashioned cooks pound just-cooked sticky rice to create their dough. Modern cooks like me reach for convenient glutinous (sweet) rice flour for our favorite sticky rice dumplings. Preparations involving poaching the dumplings and serving them in broth (like a sweet soup) are common in Asia. I grew up with this classic Vietnamese rendition, not realizing that fried shallots contributed to their richness until my mother revealed it to me one day. The intersection between sweet and savory contributes to these dumplings’ allure.

Soup marks the beginning of many Asian meals, and a little bowl of delicate wontons floating in fragrant broth is a fine way to kick things off. The clean flavors prepare the palate for anything that may follow. Shrimp-laden dumplings star in this simple recipe, but you may want to adorn the finished soup with some blanched leafy greens, such as spinach, bok choy, or watercress, and perhaps even slices of roasted Cantonese Char Siu Pork (page 224). Instead of the shrimp filling, you can use a half batch of the pork and shrimp filling for the Fried Wontons on page 69.

One of the common ways to enjoy Korean dumplings is in a fragrant beef stock. A hot bowl of mandu guk is extra satisfying on a cold winter’s day. It’s easy to assemble if you’ve got frozen mandu and stock on hand. Any dumpling filling will do, but meat dumplings are generally preferred. For fun, you could mix different kinds or even make them out of different colored doughs (see page 23). The shape of choice for Korean dumpling soup is the big hug, though you can shape your dumplings anyway you’d like. The stock imbues the wrapper with its flavors and also thickens a tiny bit from the starches in the dough. For Korean New Year celebrations, chewy slices of dense rice cakes called duk are added to the stock for bowls of duk mandu guk.

During the month long observance of Ramadan, devout Muslims are asked to go without eating anything substantial from sunup to sundown. Harira is a soup that is traditionally served to break the fast after sundown in Morocco. Although harira is most often prepared with lamb or chicken, a mighty savory version can also be prepared without meat.

All right, Armenia can’t really be considered “Middle East,” but it is part of the botanically very important Trans-Causcasian region that begins in Iran. Botanically important because nearly all of our favorite stone fruits (cherries, peaches, apricots, etc.) had their beginnings in this region. This unusual soup combines the apricots of the region with lentils and vegetables. There are many variations and many ingredient possibilities, including bell peppers, tomatoes, mint, allspice, cinnamon, and paprika. In some versions, the lentils and vegetables are left whole; in others, they are puréed. Vary the soup to suit your taste.

This classic Greek soup is one of my favorites when I want to “lighten up” from a gustatory standpoint. It makes the perfect chicken soup substitute when you are just not feeling up to snuff, or a good light dinner when you’ve had enough of the restaurant-and-fine-dining circuit. It is traditionally made with chicken broth and small bits of chicken, but I think the meatless version yields even truer, clearer flavors. A touch of ground cumin adds yet another dimension to the flavor.

Most split pea soup recipes are ridiculously predictable. Some onion, a bit of carrot, maybe some cut-up spuds. A ham hock. Inevitably, split peas are the main attraction, usually cooked to a mushy consistency. But I was looking for texture and additional flavor, so I added some dried chanterelle mushrooms; half an onion, thinly sliced well browned; some chopped tomatoes; fresh celery leaves; carrots; and spinach. I considered adding liquid smoke because the ham hock was out. But as luck would have it, one of my wooden spoons caught on fire, so I let it burn, then put out the fire and stuck the charred spoon in the soup. If a winemaker can use charred oak to enhance flavors of her wine, then why can’t I use charred wood for that desired essence of smoke in my soup? (P.S. DO NOT try this at home! Using a smoked salt should achieve similar effects without the fire!)

One of the great joys of my childhood was having my mother read to me from Heidi. Heidi drank goat’s milk from a bowl for breakfast and had soup for dinner. In the Swiss Alps, Heidi enjoyed a feast that has sustained and nurtured people the world over for many centuries: soups, sometimes featuring the simplest of ingredients (as simple as some oats or flour, a nip of onion, and some broth or milk). Soups like this one have been made and drunk in France’s mountainous regions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All you need are some really flavorful ingredients, a creative mind, and a loving heart. Note: Don’t buy hard, flavorless tomatoes in the dead of winter and expect this simple soup to taste good! Use the best, freshest tomatoes you can find, preferably from your own garden, picked at the peak of ripeness on a late summer’s day. This is not a winter soup.

It’s delicious. It’s typical of the kind of peasant soup you might find in a mountainous region where barley grows plentifully, and mushrooms are to be had in season. And best of all, it’s a put-the-stuff-in-the-pot-and-walkaway-from-it no-brainer.