CHEAP FOOD
I make food. I don’t call myself a chef or anything formal like that, but I do make the food my family eats and there’s very few complaints.
I would probably write a cookbook if I had formal training and some official record of amounts. But I cook more by feel and taste than anything, adding ingredients in the amounts that please me in the moment.
So here’s some "recipes," though I leave the amounts of spice to the tastes of the eater. You know what you like best after all.
EGG "SOUP"
- eggs
- water
- green onions, chopped
- jalapenos, cut in rings (optional)
- salt and pepper to taste
One of the things I liked eating as a kid was a kind of egg soup that was both cheap and easy to make. It can be eaten with rice or alone.
You set some water to boiling, then crack in eggs while stirring. You don’t want to whip the eggs, as you want there to be solid bits of white and yolk, but if you mix in the first egg it will flavor the water into a more broth-y flavor, and the following eggs can be broken up to cook without thoroughly mixing together. (A nice swirl of white and yellow without there being whole yolks.) Season with salt and pepper.
Add the green onions and jalapenos and simmer until the jalapenos are tender and the egg has formed a semi-solid. Sort of like a jell-o or a pudding consistency, where the egg can be cut with a spoon and eaten right out of the pan.
More water if you want it more soupy, less water if you want it to be a delicate egg dish. You can add some bouillon or a few drops of sesame oil to the broth, but it tastes good with just the eggs and green onions as the base flavor.
If you don’t have green onions or jalapenos, you can flavor the eggs with a little crushed red pepper, garlic powder, sesame oil, and salt and pepper. Maybe a small splash of soy sauce if you like.
FLOUR SOUP
Whatever anyone says, flour and water is all that’s needed to make noodles. And if you don’t have a pasta press or the willingness to roll out and cut noodles, you can make a dough that you spoon or tear directly into your soup broth.
You mix flour with water in a bowl to a consistency of cooked oatmeal–not watery and not solid, but thick enough that if you scoop some up with a spoon it won’t immediately plop off,
I like to add salt, garlic powder, and paprika to my "dough" mix, as it will cook in the flavor, but you can leave it plain or add other flavors if you like.
You mix the "dough," cover it, and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes. This will cool it and give it a chance to thicken a bit.
When you’re ready to cook, you make a broth and add whatever vegetables and meat you’d like, then when it’s about 10 minutes from being done, you raise it to a soft boil and drop the dough in to cook, lowering the heat to a simmer once the dough is added.
I use a metal spoon and I keep my dough bits to about the size of my pinkie tip. If you drop in bigger bits you’ve got to cook them longer, or pea-sized bits cook shorter. You can tell the dough is cooked when you cut it in half and it’s no longer doughy in the middle and it doesn’t taste of flour (has kind of a translucence to it). You might have to experiment a bit, so if you want to cook a few pieces in a simmering broth to see how long it takes, it’s cool. Just put the rest of the dough back in the fridge until you’re ready.
Now, when adding the dough, I like to dip my spoon in the hot broth first, then I scoop the dough from the bowl a bit at a time, working from one edge inward (don’t scoop from the middle!).
Using a metal spoon–regular cutlery, nothing special–I try to aim for scooping about 1/3 of the spoons bowl. Like, not mounded, just a dip of the dough. And because the spoon is wet and hot, the dough will fall right off into the soup bloop.
I drop the dough into the bubbling soup a spoon at a time, making sure that the drops don’t touch each other and not stirring until the dough has a few seconds to add a skin around itself–you’re making soup, not lumpy gravy.
Once the dough is beginning to solidify, you can stir it down into the soup to free up the surface for more dough.
They’re not lovely perfect noodles–they’re like small spreading lumps–but if they’re thoroughly cooked they add a heartiness to a soup as chewy "noodles."
For my broth, I like fish bouillon, but you can use beef, chicken, or vegetable bouillon–whatever you like. If you’ve got leftover cooked meat you can chop that up and add it, same with canned clams and clam juice if you want a more seafood flavor. For vegetables I like spinach, kale, cabbage, zucchini, and bok choy, but depending on the flavor profile you’re going for you could add okra, broccoli, cauliflower, squash, potatoes, carrots, or peas, whatever you like. You can even use kimchi for a spicy "vinegary" kick.
I like a fish broth with a splash of soy sauce, crushed red pepper flakes, garlic powder, a little mirin, and then a few drops of sesame oil when the soup’s almost done.
Add the dough when the broth is boiling, then lower to a simmer until the "noodles" are thoroughly cooked.
You can eat the soup alone or with a side dish of white rice if you need it to go farther and be more filling.
More food posts to come…
~Harper Kingsley
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