Bitter Melon Soup

I'm finally coming through on my promise to post about bitter melon soup. My roommate and I made a team effort. I played sous-chef since she had actually made it once before.

For the filling:

Broke vermicelli noodles into 2-inch pieces and soaked in warm water:

We seasoned the ground pork with garlic, fish sauce, ground white pepper, and chopped shitake mushrooms, then added the noods.

Tending to the bitter melon:

We blanched the bitter melon in boiling water:

Sliced into 3-4" pieces. One of them had dark red-orange seeds because it was a tad over-ripe. Looks pretty cool, though.

Scooped out.

Stuffed and simmering in some home-made chicken broth we had in the freezer.

The finished product:

It was good, but could have used more simmering, maybe in less liquid. Like most soups, this is one that's supposed to be better a day or two later, after it's been cooled and re-heated. We were on a time limit though since our friend was coming over for dinner. She approved, though, so 'tis all good.

Notes for next time: more fish sauce, mung noodles instead of vermicelli noodles, less liquid, longer simmering.

My dad has a big trellis (like this one) that squash and melon grow on every year. I love walking beneath it in late spring as the green tendrils start working their way in and out of all the slats. Until next summer! I'll have another bitter melon recipe then.

Pauper's Pumpkin Soup

After neglecting this blog for two years of insanity at university, I find that I once again have the time and energy to post my culinary antics again. I am now a college graduate who is two months into the terrible reality of repaying student loans. I'm reviving Grocery Fanatic in order to record the culinary creativity that comes from empty pockets and good-natured gastronomic desperation.

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Since I'm trying to save as much money as possible, I've been forcing myself to really use up all of the odds and ends that my mom piles onto me when I visit instead of going out and buying lots of groceries-- I did, however, have to go to the market downstairs to fetch a couple of onions for my pantry.

Two weeks ago my mom gave me a tiny pumpkin from my aunt's garden. I think I was supposed to steam it with a chunk of palm sugar on top (which she also gave me), but instead I decided to make pumpkin soup.

So here's what what I had in my kitchen:

• Diced and sauteed half of an onion in a tablespoon of butter, with a half-pinch of kosher salt until softened.
  
• Added some diced ham to the pan and cooked over medium-low heat.
  
• Laboriously split, seeded, and peeled the small pumpkin, chopped it into 3/4" chunks, and added it to the pot.
  
• Allowed everything to cook together, stirring occasionally, for eight or ten minutes, added a tiny dash of cinnamon, a few grates of fresh nutmeg, a few grinds of black pepper, a half-pinch of red pepper flake.
  
• Once the pumpkin was soft enough to partially mash with a spoon, I added a can of chicken broth + a 1/2 can of water.
  
• Simmered everything over low heat for about thirty minutes while I ate rice with leftover roast pork. (Thank you, Lunar New Year feasting!)
  
• Used a potato masher on the already-falling-apart pumpkin, then realized that pumpkin soup just has to be pureed, unless it's a component in one of the Asian soups my mom makes.
  
• Pureed the hot soup in the blender, half at a time, holding the top with a cloth.
  
• Tasted it, decided to add-- yes-- about 1/3 cup of condensed milk to the entire batch. Lovely. Trust me.

Ingredients break-down:

• 1 small pumpkin (about 1.5-2 lbs)
• 1/2 medium onion
• 1/3 c condensed milk
• ~4 oz ham (will cut back on this next time)
• 1 14-oz can chicken broth
• 7 oz water
• ground cinnamon
• fresh nutmeg
• red pepper flake
• salt & pepper

I would break down the cost of this soup but it was virtually free considering I would have most of the ingredients around anyway. I did have to pick up onions, though, which came out to 70 cents.

Ah, soup-- cheap, delicious, (generally) nutritious, and perfect for the winter.

Roasted garlic soup.

Whenever I bake anything in the oven, I cut the top off of a head or two of garlic, shmear it with olive oil, salt, and pepper, wrap it in foil, and toss it in to get all caramelized and lovely. I keep them wrapped in the foil in the fridge for use in anything from a salad dressing to serving popped out of their skins next to roast chicken to just spreading onto toast.

I was at work trying to figure out what to do with all the two heads of roasted garlic that have been waiting to be used for 4 days. Well all the chicken I have is frozen at the moment and I am ashamed to admit that I have no bread for toasting-- to make matters worse, I've already used up all of my grocery budget for the next week. Hence, my pantry to the rescue! While I don't have any roasted meat or even a humble loaf of bread, I do, however, have onions, potatoes, dried thyme, chicken broth, white wine (cheap), butter, and milk-- the makings of a creamy soup starring my roasted garlic!


I sneaked in some finely chopped carrots into the onions when I started the soup, the reasons being twofold: 1) I have way too many soon-to-be-dry-and-useless carrots left in my refrigerator, and 2) I wanted to trick my carrot-phobic girlfriend into ingesting just a little vitamin A and betakeratene. It worked as I think she was too distracted by the garlicky soup to notice the bits of orange carrot still floating in it even after a couple of rounds in my blender.

My blender sucks. My soup was perfect until I had the genius idea of adding two cloves of fresh garlic to the blender-- it made the flavor way too sharp and so overwhelming that even my garlic-addict girlfriend was put off by it.

Lesson of my adventure in roasted-garlic-potato soup: know when to stop!