Chinese Vegetable Soup

OK, I admit defeat. I cannot continue to cook much more from Still Life with Menu. This particular soup had a broth made from Chinese black mushrooms, onion, garlic and ginger, which was strained, and then mushrooms, water chestnuts, boy choy, green peas and snow peas were added. The result was a watery broth with green and brown stuff in it, and it had an earthy odor. I felt I should be eating this while sitting on a forest floor with chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, muskrats and mice for dinner companions.

It wasn't that awful to taste...certainly nutritious and low in calories, but TOO low and TOO nutritious.

I feel I now know if I will like a recipe or not. So, I plan to keep working my way through the book but will no longer be committed to trying EVERY recipe. I will report on the successes ...maybe.

I realize this is quite boring, unless the recipe is extraordinary.

I bought Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds and now also plan to learn Chinese cooking. I have tried a couple of recipes so far (Pearl Balls and Curried Fried Rice) both of which were tasty. I now need to find a light iron wok if I can. And a steamer and a cleaver. But, I will never be able to cook a few of the dishes in this cookbook, like those with "medium-sized live blue crabs" which I actually saw one day in a cooler in the local Asian market. They were wiggling. The crab recipes call for "live blue crabs" which are plunged into "boiling water for about 1 minute" and then basically dissected! But I can do dishes like Stir-Fired Shrimp with Cucumbers and Pine Nuts, or Cold Tossed Tofu and Celery Shreds, or Shrimp Bonnets. If I have a spectacular success, I will write about it. Otherwise, the cooking part of this blog will wane.