I've always had a soup fascination, and so I guess this is just the next logical permutation of that, but I was thinking:  I pretty much am permanently craving takeout chinese soup.  It's something I've never been able to replicate at home... so they must be using a stock base that I haven't tried out yet.  Lo and Behold:  The answer is pork.  PORK! 

It's asparagus season and I wanted to really dig in to using a big amount of this ingredient.  This soup calls for 2 lbs of seasonally delicious asparagus and is pureed with creamy cashew milk.  The tips (the BEST PART) are left whole and serve to highlight the entire experience.  This is a really quick and relatively easy recipe that I was able to pull off on a weeknight.

Asian soups are great.  Lately I've been obsessed with creating super-flavorful/authentic-tasting bone broth based soups.  This will probably be the first in a series of similar soups I'll be trying out. This one was actually fairly quick and easy to make and went great with a side of brown rice.

I hope everyone's been locating and trying out as many winter squash as we have this season.  Remember that crazy hubbard squash I brought home and roasted?
I ended up getting about 6 extra cups of puree out of it which I put in the freezer in the garage.

Then I saw the apples on the table that my kids helped me pick out and made the connection that it was time for some creamy, delicious squash apple soup.  This one is perfect for a rainy fall day.

I've been looking for a good basic Hot and Sour soup recipe for years. A couple months ago, I found one and decided to try it out and tweak it once the weather turned cold.  Well, here we are. I was expecting this to be too sour and spicy for my kids, but lo and behold they ate it!  They especially liked the mushrooms and chose to eat them first.


Hot and Sour soup is one of the 3 elements that I judge every chinese restaurant I go into by (the 2nd is their eggrolls, and the 3rd is how well they handle their seafood dishes). I'm picky and I've had A LOT of different variations.  The recipe that I'm sharing here is very mild.  Only slightly hot and sour... I'd call it more of a "warming" soup.   You can always add more rice vinegar and chili oil at the table (which Mark and I did and it created a gorgeous, fresh, bracing experience).  The Chinese traditionally use this soup medicinally as a starter course to help get the immune system moving and, with enough chili oil, to get the sinuses cleared. 

It's perfect for cold season and, in my opinion, for every other season as well.

In my continuing effort to proceed with the tomato theme, I put Gazpacho on my list of things to create last week.  We had all the ingredients on hand, ready to go and as I started chopping and stirring and measuring I realized 2 things:  1)  I wanted protein in my "soup"... so I added garbanzo beans and 2) It was 40 degrees and raining outside.  I wanted HOT soup.