EPT1) Potatoes
2) Carrots
3) Celery
4) Radishes
5) Cabbage
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/sEmHro2.png)
I thought about all the times I’ve eaten light soups like this in the past and especially my childhood, and one experience really stuck with me. It seems ridiculous, but I believe almost every Singaporean kid has bitten into a chunk of moist potato that was too big to be considered a mouthful and then just left the potato in the spoon so you could finish it off once you’ve replenished your spoon with soup. There’s nothing too technical about recreating this experience, so I just prepared the potatoes in chunks that were slightly too big to finish in one mouthful.
The carrots and radishes obviously had to be soft, and it usually isn’t a major problem to try and get the carrots nice, but the radishes – oh man. I’m confident that anybody who has tried soups with radishes in them has gone through the awful experience of biting into a slice that was soft on the outside and firm on the inside, and the garnish to that experience is that disgusting intense radish-y bitterness. I thought about how I was going to go about solving this radish conundrum, and I decided that I’d give the radishes a proper shallow-fry before adding them to the broth, but at a low heat so there wouldn’t be any colour on them. I mean, the radishes in broths always has to be perfectly white in my opinion, so while caramelization and browning is often a good thing in cooking, it won’t do for the radishes. The next thing I did was salt the radishes while they were frying, and while it obviously makes sense to season every component of your dish, I don’t season my ingredients at all when I’m making a soup because of the eventual addition of stock cubes. Although I suppose if you make your own stock you should definitely season everything. Anyway, the idea behind the salting was that I could hopefully draw the bitterness out of the radishes via osmosis because I just assumed the bitterness was the product of some liquid in the radishes. I don’t know if it really worked, but for my palate it certainly removed the bitterness from the radishes. Who knew I’d be applying what I learned in biology class?
The cabbage and celery were added for very simple reasons – to give the broth bite and a certain meatiness to it. I think celery is a great vegetable because it’s so healthy as it’s essentially just water that provides a certain kick of freshness to the dish. Although some people might find the taste of celery to be off-putting so I’m not too confident about leaving it in if I’m cooking for a group. Celery also has an interesting texture, in that if you cook it properly it has this sort of firmness to it but is creamy when you bite into it.
Now let’s talk about the sides – the mushroom and pea wontons. I’ll be honest here and say that the wontons didn’t end up all too great. It was my firs time making wontons and the skins that I bought were just awful for me to work with. They were too small and it was near impossible to get a decent amount of filling in while still ensuring there was enough dough left to get a good seal. Maybe this problem stems from my technical skill and how inept I am at folding wontons, but it resulted in the wontons tasting more like crispy wonton skins more than anything else, it completely masked the flavour of mushroom and pea mixture that I actually was pretty proud of. And about the mixture – I chose shitake mushrooms and peas because they’re a pretty good source of proteins, and vegetarians usually have problems with hitting their required amount of proteins, so I thought these wontons could help with that issue by serving as mini bags of protein. However, despite the issues I had with the wontons, it only makes me eager to nail my folding techniques and perhaps be smarter about choosing skins the next time I go shopping.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1xtxm0n.png)
So there’s the end product, the soup is garnished with thyme leaves to bring a little bit of freshness to the dish. The wontons were served with light soy sauce, which thinking about it now may not be the ideal dipping sauce for wontons, maybe it could go with some vinegar for that acidic kick to slice through the flavours, just like how herbs bring a sort of liveliness to dishes.
. I hope you came back!
