Sunday 11 May 2008

Soup?

*raises eyebrows* I just cooked a Western-style dumpling soup, and it's surprisingly good, despite how plain it is! I couldn't follow the original recipe I found online, as I didn't have potatoes in the house, so I tweaked it a little. Here's how I cooked it:

Mix 1 and 1/2 cups of flour, 1/2 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp garlic powder, 1 or 2 tbsp basil and some pepper in a bowl. In a measuring jug, crack an egg and beat it, then add water till it makes up to 250ml and 1 tbsp of olive oil. Mix. Pour liquids into flours, mix till it forms a dough, adding more flour to make it more solid if you like. Chop half an onion and a few slices of bacon. Melt about 30g butter in a pot, tip in onions and bacon and fry till brown, then add as much hot water as you want. Remember to keep it in proportion to the onions and bacon, but add plenty as the dumplings will expand. Bring to boil. If you like, add some chicken stock cubes and seasonings, but take care not to add too much as it is already salty from the bacon. When water is boiling, drop teaspoonfuls of dumpling dough into the soup. Take care not to add too much to one pot. Boil dumplings and soup till the dumplings have expanded. Because of the extra flour on the dumplings, the soup should thicken slightly. Take it off the heat and leave to stand for a few minutes before serving.

Well, that's my recipe.

The original recipe actually called for about 1.3kg of potatoes to be boiled, and a whole onion and 110g bacon to be fried in a separate pan then added to the soup when the potatoes were nearly done. The dumplings didn't have basil or garlic powder in it either, but I prefer them tasty rather than plain, so I added them. Since I didn't need to preboil the potatoes, I didn't see a need for me to fry the onions and bacon in a separate pan, so I just did everything in one pot. Thanks to that, the water deglazed the juices from the pan naturally.

Someone who reviewed the recipe said that the soup was salty enough without stock, but mine was kinda tasteless (I like rich-tasting foods) so I added some chicken flavoured Maggi Shake-Shake into my soup. Damn, it tastes good! It tastes of pork and chicken, and is quite buttery too! Yum...

Just for reference, I got the original recipe here.


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