"Whatever's in the Fridge" Miso Soup

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, on eHow.com, and today I'm showing you how to make whatever miso soup. Alright so this soup is a great way to use up leftovers or anything you have in your fridge that you want to get rid of and it's a really good soup to come home to on a cold day when you want to warm up. So I'm starting out by browning some white scallions, the white part of the scallion, just throw those in in a little bit of olive oil, give them a little bit of flavor. Okay I'm going to add some ginger that I minced up. Ginger is a really great ingredient to add to your food in the cold weather. It's very warming. It's used in Chinese medicine actually to warm up the body so this is really nice if you're feeling chilly. Okay I have some shiitake mushrooms that I diced up. Shiitakes are really delicious. They're kind of a mild mushroom. They have a nice texture and they don't take a long time to cook. This is what they look like when they're whole. I like to use the stems for soup stock so I'll just break that off and then I take the cap and I just coarsely dice it and that's really all it needs. So I'm just going to throw that in, already this has got a lot of flavor and a lot of aroma. Okay I'm going to add some water and this is going to be the liquid in my soup. So what I want, I want all these ingredients to come to a boil so this is going to happen really quickly. While this is boiling I'm adding in some carrots that I diced up. You could really add any root vegetable to this soup, potatoes would be great. Okay I'm also going to add some cooked lentils. You could add any bean you like. You could even add lentils that are not cooked but I happen to have these left over for something so I'll put those in and these really help to make this soup a full meal. You know I've got some protein in here from the beans. I've got all these different vegetables and what's going to really bring this soup together is my miso paste and this is what it looks like. Now you've probably had miso soup in a Japanese restaurant, that's usually where you'll see it and the kind of soup that you get at a Japanese restaurant it's a thin broth with a little bit of miso paste in it, maybe some wakame sea vegetable, some tofu and some scallions, but you can do lots of things with miso. It doesn't have to be such a simple soup. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a big dollop of this miso paste and it's actually very sweet and mild so it's hard to overdo it with miso. This might look like a lot but for a big bowl of soup this big it's actually not very much. Okay so the soup is boiling. I'm going to turn it down to a simmer and now I'm going to get my miso paste slurry ready to go back in the soup. Okay so I just take a little bit of the liquid from the soup, right, it's okay if some of the vegetables get in there, a little bit more, okay and then I'm going to whisk my miso paste around in this bowl and I let the soup keep cooking for a couple minutes there, letting my vegetables get really nice and tender and as soon as this slurry is ready, I turn off the heat and add it back into the soup pot. So that way I get all this miso flavor, I get to put it right in the soup but I don't kill off the bacteria by boiling it. Okay so see how thick and creamy that is, that's what's going to give my soup a lot of body. Okay so I turn off the heat. I add my miso paste back in, just stir this around and my soup is ready and it looks really good, really rich, full of flavor, it's got this nice thick broth. Okay so I want to get all of these yummy vegetables in there, got all those bright colors. I've got the orange carrots, the green scallions. I've got these shiitake mushrooms and you can see that the miso turned my broth this kind of yellow color. I'll just put a few green scallions on top to top it off, a little bit of lemon juice to give it a bright spark of flavor and I like to add a little bit of olive oil to the top of my soup as a garnish just to give it a little bit of fattiness and richness of flavor. So this soup looks wonderful, really warming, it's got ginger, it's got onions, it's got vegetables and it's got a nice sweet background taste of miso. So this is a great quick weeknight dinner when it gets chilly. I'm Louisa Shafia. I'll see you next time on eHow.com.