Miso soup

Miso is a wonder ingredient. I'm sure that it has health benefits of some kind (back when I was vegan I remember there being some notion that if you ate it by the spoonful there was a chance that it would help to stave off vitamin B-12 deficiancy). The real wonder of it, though, is that a couple of tablespoons of it can transform a normal tasty-but-watery vegetable soup into a rich savory experience. That it can do this without resorting to some sort of cream based trickery (and certainly without flesh/bone derived collagens) and thus being pretty much fat free, just makes it that much more impressive. I suspect this power is part of its awesome umaminess, or special powers of rich/savoryness. Yes, OK, it is high in sodium. What do you want? Complete virtue and complete pleasure?

Anyway, it's the perfect sort of meal for when you're feeling a bit under the weather (as both Julie and I were last week) and need something both calming and sustaining -- like chicken soup for the global cuisine vegetarian. Miso paste comes in a variety of different preparations, differentiated by color (white, red, and apparently black, though I don't think we get that last one in this country, and, less traditionally, yellow or brown) and sometimes by the grains that they are prepared from in combination with the soy beans, such as barley or rye. We used a mellow brown rice miso paste here. Just add two tablespoons miso to two quarts liquid (we used half water and half vegetable stock) and add three or four dried shiitakes. Bring the stock to a boil and then continue to simmer, stirring occaisionally as the miso is incoporated into the liquid. When the shiitakes are fully hydrated, remove them from the soup, cool them briefly in the freezer, remove any attached woody bits of stem and then slice them about 1/8" thick before returning them to the soup. Prepare your vegetables as you see fit, browning those that need browning first and adding others directly to the soup (here we browned the mushrooms, zucchini and eggplant, and added onion, green onion, garlic, chili, carrot, edamame and tofu directly). And thus, hooray! Delicious and nourishing soup!