No Meat Required

My daughter has strep so I do what every Jewish mother does. I make chicken noodle soup. But without chicken. One of my inspirations for ditching meat in August was a Hanukah party I attended last year. The woman hosting the party was a colleague and friend and Jewish. So we decided to have a matzoh ball soup-off to see who could make the better soup. Her’s turned out just as good as mine, and hers had no chicken!

And I did it. But then I made the kind of mistake I always do. I went one step too far. Just when the chicken-less soup tasted EXACTLY like chicken soup, I decided to add some non-chicken — tofu. I took the suggestion from an online recipe which called for dosing the tofu in tamarind and seasonings. I didn’t have tamari I only had soy. Once I flavored it and cut it up and cooked it and added it to the soup, suddenly my soup tasted like ramen. Oh well. So this recipe is good for Jewish chicken-less soup if you don’t add the tofu, or perfect ramen soup if you do.

Here are the ingredients, in case you want to skip my blathering on.

• 1 onion chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 large or 2 small bunches of celery sliced thick.
• 1 big bunch of carrots sliced thick.
• Salt
• Nutritional yeast
• Turmeric
• White pepper
• Sage
• Bay leaf
• Basil leaf
• Onion powder
• Garlic powder
• Drop of lemon juice concentrate
• Tofu sliced and tossed in oregano, thyme, nutritional yeast, turmeric and soy sauce and roasted at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
• Noodles

First off, the garlic. I chopped up two cloves of garlic fine and let it sit for 10 minutes. I did that, because Jo Robinson said in her book Eating on the Wild Side that if you let garlic sit for that long after you smash or chop it releases a ton of important nutrients that are lost if you throw it into the pot immediately.

Then I chopped up a medium sized onion and tossed it into my Le Creuset dutch oven with a some olive oil and let it sautee. While I had that going, I chopped up two small bunches of fresh celery, into wide slices, so the would be easy to ladle out when cooked. Who likes the celery in the soup? I’m still waiting for that darned garlic so I used the time to slice a big bunch of carrots into thick slices. I’ll end up leaving some in the soup at the end, but I’ll be able to take out the rest and use them in other dishes.

Finally I throw the garlic into the pot, and let it simmer a little. Then I throw in the carrots and celery. If I had a parsnip, I would definitely slice it up and add it but I don’t.

Time for the flavor. I’m generous with the salt. Then I add white pepper, because I read that it is the secret ingredient of Kentucky Fried Chicken. (That link is just a gratuitous attempt to lure some robo-ads and make a little money here.) I add sage and some fresh rosemary from my garden. (If you have a tiny yard, rosemary will grow just about anywhere and it doesn’t need any care. A little starter plant will cost you about $3 at any nursery.) I add turmeric to give it a yellow chicken broth color. I throw in a leaf of fresh basil I happen to have in my fridge. And I grab a tiny bit of a fresh Bay leaf I discovered growing outside my front door a while back. I shake in some Bragg nutritional yeast because it gives it the Vitamin B that no-meat diets lack and it gives it some good flavor too. Nutritional yeast is one of those mysterious ingredients I’ve grown to love. As this all cooks, I add more salt, more white pepper, more rosemary and sage. I also can’t resist adding some onion powder and garlic powder. I add a couple of drops of lemon juice concentrate, an idea I got from one of those online recipes.

By now it is tasting really good. When it is done, I am going to serve it with noodles and I like ramen noodles that I get from a local Japanese store because they stay nice and curly.

Last, I decide to add some fake chicken. I took this idea from an online recipe too. I grabbed a block I had in the freezer. If you freeze tofu and then defrost it in the microwave wrapped in a cloth and weighted down with something heavy, you get tofu that has a texture more like meat. The recipe called for roasting the tofu at 350 degrees for 20 minutes tofu tossed in tamari with thyme, oregano and nutritional yeast. I used soy sauce, because I didn’t have tamari and I added turmeric. It suggested cutting the tofu into odd shapes, which I thought was a great idea. That way it kind of looks like chicken.

But it ended up giving the whole soup a ramen taste. Still delicious, but not what I was going for. Oh well.