{"id":165,"date":"2010-04-20T14:48:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T21:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/216.92.226.17\/?p=165"},"modified":"2010-04-20T14:48:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T21:48:00","slug":"expiration-date-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/?p=165","title":{"rendered":"Expiration Date Soup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many of my family and friends have gifts for foraging–recognizing all the funky greens, vegetables, mushrooms, and so forth in their habitats, and knowing when and how to harvest. I don’t have the gift–or rather, my repertoire is rather limited. I know cress, dandelions, and other basics, and most of the Rocky Mountain region edible berries, but that’s about it. I think I recognize some mushrooms, but then I remember the great care with which my biologist mother examines mushrooms (spore patterns and all), the most recent headlines about mushroom poisonings flood in, and I let braver souls have the harvest. <\/p>\n

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I do, however, have a gift for pantry and refrigerator scrounging. I remember with pride an ex remarking, “Wow. You’re really good at making whole meals out of nothing.” Where she saw an empty refrigerator, I saw enough odds and ends for a soup, a funky salad, a crossover stir-fry, or whatever. <\/div>\n
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Today’s lunch is a good example. I’m calling it “Expiration date soup.” I just threw together several quarts of a hearty, yummy miso soup using almost nothing but food that was supposedly due for the dump: <\/div>\n
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  • several quarts of water (nearly the only ingredient that was not expired)<\/li>\n
  • two packets of bonito stock powder dating back to the Clinton administration (I also have ancient konbu and hana katsuo and I am not afraid to use them, but starting my dashi from scratch adds twenty minutes and some risk, which is not ideal for a quick lunch break from work)<\/li>\n
  • the bottom of an ancient bag of wakame<\/li>\n
  • the bottom of an ancient bag of black fungus<\/li>\n
  • a tub of tofu that expired three months ago (but was unopened and fine), diced<\/li>\n
  • a few sad cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced<\/li>\n
  • the dried-out sludge at the bottom of an ancient tub of red miso (I had to mince it and whisk it inside a strainer to get it to dissolve into my broth)<\/li>\n
  • a slug of semi-ancient sesame oil<\/li>\n
  • three eggs from an urban farmer friend of who knows what age, lightly mixed and stirred into the soup, off the flame (egg-drop soup style)<\/li>\n
  • several shakes of sesame seed\/bonito flakes\/mystery ingredients “rice topping” stuff that I think I bought when I lived in Chicago, which is to say before 1994<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
    I prepared the soup by dumping these things into a pot over a medium-high flame roughly in the order listed above, as I found them, and by the time I had everything in the pot, it was ready to eat. <\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    Yummy. Probably not something any self-respecting Japanese chef would acknowledge as food, but I liked it, and I’m going to enjoy it for several more lunches. <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Many of my family and friends have gifts for foraging–recognizing all the funky greens, vegetables, mushrooms, and so forth in their habitats, and knowing when and how to harvest. I don’t have the gift–or rather, my repertoire is rather limited. I know cress, dandelions, and other basics, and most of the Rocky Mountain region edible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}