Won Ton Soup

My family loves Chinese food. Good Won Ton soups and Hot & Sour soups are especially great to find. In Tucson the best restaurant version of Won Ton soup I've found is at Cheng's in Oro Valley. A great tasting broth, lots of veggies and really good tasting won tons. The absolute best Hot & Sour I've had is at China Bay in South Tucson on Valencia near the intersection of 12th Ave. It is really good and spicy, I order a double size bowl whenever I have lunch there.

With such a love of Chinese soups it is always with much reticence that I venture into making one of the two soups. Measuring up to the pros is a daunting challenge but what the heck. I took a huge shortcut with this Won Ton soup by using store bought Won Tons from my favorite Asian international market, Lee Lee Oriental Supermart on La Cholla and Orange Grove here in Tucson. They've got dozens of different types of won tons along with Chinese dumplings (not sure of the difference) and things called buns. This market is really different from conventional American grocery stores in both the products they carry and the layout of the store. The prices of their produce and meats are actually lower than our usual store I noticed today. So with store bought won tons this soup is really easy to make. Here we go:

Ingredients for about 12 cups of soup or 96 ounces

8 cups of chicken broth

1 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and julienned or cut into match sticks

1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce

1/4 cup of rice cooking wine

1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar

2 teaspoons dark sesame oil

1 teaspoon dark brown sugar

Pinch of salt

1 pound of pork shoulder sliced thinly in 1/2 inch by 2 inch strips

2 carrots, thinly sliced on the bias (diagonally), about 1 cup

24 frozen won tons, any kind or a mix (seafood, pork, beef, chicken, vegetable)

3 scallions, white and green part sliced diagonally about 1.5 inches long

4 cups of baby spinach

chopped cilantro for garnish

Asian chili paste for garnish

Directions

Put the broth, ginger, soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar, sesame oil, brown sugar, salt and pork in a soup pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Adjust the heat so the broth simmers and cooks to lightly flavor with ginger, about 10-15 minutes.

Increase the heat to medium high and add the carrots and cook until they are not quite crunchy, about 3 minutes. Add the frozen won tons and cook another 7 minutes until the won tons are heated through. Stir in the scallions and spinach and cook until they are wilted, about 1 minute. Serve with the cilantro and chili sauce on the side.

Just for fun I'm bringing fortune cookies with the soup for tomorrow's Wednesday's Soup At Work. I found there are custom fortune cookie companies that will use your own custom fortunes, how cool is that!

Beef Stew Soup

Stew Soup? Well which is it, stew or soup? I'm calling it a soup because that's what I do, soups. As I was looking for recipes and ideas for today's Soup At Work Wednesday I couldn't find any recipes for soups that had chunks of beef in them but there were plenty of stews. So, one of the modifications I made to this recipe was to add more broth which resulted in more of a soup then stew.

The soup was a big hit for Soup At Work Wednesday today. I was out of the building all morning so I wasn't there for the serving but there were lots of compliments and the pot was bone dry. I was told someone was spotted with a straw sucking the last of the broth from the pot. Fact or fiction, who's to know?

As I mentioned in my earlier post this week I got this recipe from Food Network, specifically from Tyler Florence's page. What drew me to this recipe was the orange peels, cloves and pearl onions. This recipe was not especially difficult but a bit time consuming. If you're not familiar with cutting beef and/or don't have a good knife or knives to do the cutting then you will be more challenged with this recipe. My suggestion is to become more familiar with working with beef and invest in at least one good 10 or 12 inch chef or butcher knife. My recommendation is to pick one up from a restaurant supply store rather than one from a retail store. You'll likely pay more in a retail store and may have to buy a whole knife set in order to get the knife you need. I like a wood handle but when I was a meatcutter I had several knives with plastic handles and they were just fine.

The other part of this recipe I really enjoyed was the browning of the beef. Seasoning with salt & pepper, dredging in flour and then browining in butter and olive oil yielded a bunch of wonderful beef cubes when they were finished. Tasty, tasty! I'd like to figure out a way to not cook the meat in the soup with the veggies and broth and put it in towards the end because I like the beef better when it is not stewed to the point of easily shredding. But a lot of the beef flavor would be lost this way so maybe not. On to the recipe...

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil for browning the meat plus more as required as the browning proceeds
• 3 tbsp of butter for browning plus more as required for the browning
• 2 cups of all-purpose flour
• 3 pounds of boneless beef chuck shoulder roast cut into cubes about 2 inches in size. Chuck is a well marbled piece of beef so you'll want to remove some of the larger chunks of fat but leave a good amount on the cubes for flavor.
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 bottle of good quality dry red wine. Ina Garten always says that you shouldn't cook with any wine you wouldn't serve to guests.
• 8 fresh thyme sprigs about 4-6 inches long tied in a bundle with kitchen twine
• 6 garlic cloves, smashed (I use the jarred minced garlic from Spice World you can find in the produce section and smash it with the back of a spoon. Peeling, slicing and smashing whole garlic cloves is too time consuming and sticky for me)
• 1 orange, zest removed in strips (I had never done this before so I just used a vegetable peeler and took it to an orange from top to bottom and had my zest strips! Taa Dahh!!)
• 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves
• 2 bay leaves
• 4-6 cups of beef broth (this is where I modified the Tyler Florence recipe. The original recipe calls for 2.5 cups but I wanted more of a soup than a stew so I ended up adding 6 cups of broth. This will depend on the size of the pot you're using so start with 4 cups and go from there).
• 9 small new potatoes, scrubbed clean and cut in half (I bought the little cute ones in small mesh bags so I didn't end up with more potatoes than I could use)
• 1/2 pound of carrots, peeled and sliced diagonally in 1.5 inch chunks
• 2 cups of fresh pearl onions, peeled and left whole
• 1 pound of white mushrooms, wiped clean with a paper towel and the stem ends removed, not the stems just the dried ends. Depending on the size of the mushrooms I sliced some in half to be more bite size (I added some sliced portabellas here just because I like them in soups)
• 1/2 pound of peas, fresh or frozen

Directions

1. Heat your soup pot over medium high heat with the first application of olive oil and butter.
2. While the pan is heating, arrange the flour in a large dish. Salt and pepper the beef cubes generously. Toss the beef cubes in the flour, shake off the excess and place in the hot pot in a single layer without crowding the cubes. Working in batches, thoroughly brown the meat on all sides but don't cook through since you're going to be cooking the meat in the soup also. Remember to add more butter and olive oil as needed to keep the browning process from drying out the pan. As the cubes are browned remove them to a plate and set aside.
3. Add the wine to the pan and bring to a simmer while you scrape the pan to create your fond from all those tasty bits left from the browning of the beef. Fond is relatively new cooking term for me and I love it. Once the wine has gotten hot and all the scraps have been scraped from the pan bottom and sides, add the browned meat, the thyme bundle, smashed garlic, orange zest strips, ground cloves, bay leaves, stock and salt & pepper to taste. Bring the mixture to a boil and then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook uncovered for about 15 minutes. Cover the pot and cook on low heat for 2 hours.
4. At the 2 hour mark add the halved potatoes, sliced carrots, pearl onions and mushrooms along with a pinch or two of sugar to balance the wine. Turn the heat up slightly and simmer uncovered for 25 minutes more until the veggies are tender but still firm (I hate mushy veggies). At the 25 minute mark add the peas and cook for 5 more minutes. Season with salt & pepper to taste and remove the thyme bundle and bay leaves if you can find them.

A great topping is made from a cup of sour cream, a tablespoon of prepared horseradish, a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Mix thoroughly and add chopped chives.