Spicy rice noodle soup

A windy rainy day, a perfect soup day! I thought of cooking oriental noodle soup, because I bought a pack of Thai rice noodles two days ago. Since eating alone is rather boring, I invited my flatmate to join for a spicy oriental soup :) I was actually thinking about doing a Japanese style recipe from Joanna Farrow's 30-Minutes Vegetarian, but didn't have black bean sauce and didn't feel like looking for it..this is an easy recipe, contains whatever you can find in your fridge :)

I followed the instructions of a noodle soup on the website of International Vegetarian Union. Besides recipes they have a lot of information about vegetarianism - good to learn something new, e.g. how to say in Bahasa Indonesian that I don't eat meat, chicken nor seafood (Saya tidak makan daging, ayam atau makanan laut).

When trying to pronounce that, I take a second plate of the spicy soup!

For 2-3

1 onion
2 garlic cloves
(a bit of ginger)
1 tbsp chili paste or fresh chili
1 tsp sesam oil mixed with a drop of ordinary cooking oil

carrots chopped to small toothpick sized pieces
cabbage cut into small stripes (easy to do with a cheese slicer)
tofu (I used approximately 150g of cold-smoked tofu)
vegetable stock powder (preferably without natriumglutamat)
1 tsp brown sugar
rice noodles
water



Chop onions and garlic. Chop also other vegetables and tofu before starting to cook so that you don't burn anything (happens sometimes in hurry!). Fry onion and garlic for a moment, add tofu. After tofu has got some colour, add the vegetables and chili paste and fry for few minutes more. Add water, vegetable stock powder and sugar, let simmer for some time. Add noodles and boil on a low heat until ready and spice with salt, pepper and whatever you like. Garnish with roasted peanuts or cashews, or with few coriander leaves.

I used Thai rice noodles, that need 10 minutes of cooking, but I guess other noodles would do the trick as well. You can also add e.g. bell pepper or zucchini in the soup if you have them at hands. Next time I'll add less chili paste (not everyone is as addicted as I am!) and maybe a drop of soy sauce. And one day I'll also master delicacies like Thai Tofu & Noodle Soup :)

Carrot & lentil soup

I have always carrots in my fridge and I must admit that my favourite soup and favourite cake are made of carrots..today is not a cake day, but instead I thought of making some soup. In fact not only "some", but in quite a large quantity, because there were so many "old" carrots in the fridge and yesterday came the organic food circle staff, including also carrots.
I thought of being creative and looking for a new recipe, but I just got lost on websites like The Carrot Museum, so after all I just picked up the good old recipe for carrot and lentil soup..originally it's from the Vegan's Cookbook (Vegaanin kasviskeittokirja), which I have had for years, but I have also made my own variations of it. Today I made it like this :)

1 big onion
a small piece of ginger (+chili, curry, garlic)
1 turnip (or 2-3 potatoes)
4-5 carrots (depends on the size, mine were huge)
2 dl red lentils
1 dl grated coconut
vegetable stock (e.g. vegetable stock cube or 1 tsp vegetable stock powder)
water
oil
salt, pepper

Chop the onion and fry it in a drop of oil. Add finely chopped ginger (and fresh chili, curry and/or garlic if you like). Chop the turnip and carrots into rather small pieces and add to the kettle. Add enough water to cover the vegetables and the stock cube or stock powder and cook for some 10-15 minutes. Add lentils and grated coconut and let it simmer until all the vegetables and lentils are soft. Whizz with a stick blender or food processor until smooth, season to taste. Enjoy with warm bread.

You can make a huge portion of this soup and freeze it - it tastes better that the ready-made portions from the supermarket :)