I’m visiting a friend who really likes mushrooms, and so I tell her, I figured out how to make a tasty mushroom soup that you’d really like.  I didn’t mean this to be a Sunday, but it just happened to be on a Sunday, so it works out.  She lives with a friend who is a fancy cook, and Saturday, he made us poisson cru (tahitian raw fish salad), hawaiian rice, and skewers with spam (sorry, “cured ham”) and pineapple.  So anyway, I was expecting that while I am in town, that I would be shooed from the kitchen and not allowed any where near his pots.  Well, I’m not allowed near some of them.

Anyway, on to the mushroom soup.

We stopped, on a whim, at a chinese store/mall/etc place called Kam-Man, in Quincy, MA.  I was noting the mushrooms were really cheap (portabellas for $2.99/lb, shiitakes at $3.99/lb).  The response I got to this was “hey weren’t you going to make soup?”

So we got mushrooms, mushrooms, a few potatoes, two leeks, ginger candy, durian candy, sesame seed candy, banana pocky, some chocolate cookie things that reminded me of jaffa cakes, and a duck.  A duck?  Well, the aforementioned cook, who is known as Ickabod, who will play a more prominent role in this story, had always wanted to get a hanging duck from a chinatown window, and though this was not chinatown, he got a duck.

The ingredient list here was much smaller due to me not cleaning out the fridge.  I wonder if it made it less tasty.

  • Four yukon gold potatoes
  • Two leeks
  • A pound of portabello mushrooms
  • A pound of shiitake mushrooms
  • Salt

So, I asked him which soup pot I could use (”any one but the red one”), and I took his largest pot and put some water in it and put the heat on.  I started chopping potatoes and threw them in the water.

“Hey stanza you’re already making your first mistake in the kitchen!  You always boil potatoes from cold water!”  Turns out that putting potatoes in boiling water does something to the molecule chains in them, whereas cooking from cold water doesn’t mess up that molecular structure.

I hadn’t heard this before.  Anyway, I chopped and cut the leeks.  Ickabod introduced me to a method of washing leeks much easier than what I had done before (leeks are a pain to clean due to dirt everywhere).  Since I learned something, I might as well share–I always cut the leeks into “rounds”, little discs.  He said cut lengthwise, so you have two halves, then cut the slices the way I did–then throw the half-discs into a bowl of water.  Swish them around a bit, and that should rinse anything off you may have missed–and since dirt hides everywhere on a leek, this is much easier than peel off a leaf, rinse, peel off another leaf, etc.

I objected when he tried to throw out the green bits.  On the heat, boil boil boil.

I chopped up half the mushrooms, sauteed them in butter and salt (only unsalted butter in this house, which is a detail I should have noted in my previous sauteeings (I always used salted butter)), and threw them in the pot.

Then began a heated argument over whether to put the soup through a blender.  Ickabod says it must go through a blender to become soup.  Me and Raven much prefer chunky soup.  We compromised, and blended the half of the mushrooms that were already in the pot, and did not blend the second half of the mushrooms that I sauteed in butter and salt as well.

Then came the great argument of the thickness of soup.  I like a thick soup.  They argued that soup should not be thick enough to eat with a fork.  I went along with them, and watered down the soup to the point you could no longer make sculptures with it.

And there was a duck!  I didn’t pay much attention to the duck, I was pretty oblivious to the duck, until I announced “I’m done!” Ickabod’s reply was “get out of my way” and a cooked duck appeared!  So, I asked how duck was made (only one ingredient, a duck).

It was already roasted at the store.  (Oh.)  It was wrapped in tinfoil and stuck in the oven.  Shortly before dinner time, it was unwrapped, and cooked some more, to make the outside crispy.  Crispy duck!

The duck was well received.  The soup did not go over quite so well as the last time, but I will note that blending the mushrooms into it spread tasty mushroom flavor throughout.  I did forget garlic, and I didn’t use any boullion or soup stock.  We also skipped on the orzo.  But it was tasty nonetheless, and I think the addition of perhaps onion, garlic, and/or boullion would have gone a long way.  The next time I attempt this, I would try for the first version of the soup, but blend half the mushrooms.

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