Emma Alter
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I was thinking about making a soup of fiddleheads or asparagus this week, but it's early enough in the season that I don't want to use a whole pound of the precious vegetables for one recipe. I have so many vegetables from the farmers' market that I decided just to make an ad hoc soup using whatever I had on hand. That way I could use a bit of everything, but still have enough left for a wonderful pasta or stir fry.
I just laid all my vegetables out on my kitchen counter and decided what would work together. I bought some fresh noodles at the Asian market earlier this week so I decided to do an Asian style soup. This is one of those soups that benefits from a lot of vegetables so that you get a slightly different flavour with each bite. My ingredient list is a guide, use whatever appeals to you. Because the vegetables are young and tender you really don't need to cook it for long. I had this ready in about 15 minutes. I just throw the noodles into the pot with the cooking vegetables, but you can boil them separately if you want to. I happened to have beef stock ready, but chicken or vegetable stock are also fine.
Spring Vegetable and Noodle Soup
6 cups chicken, vegetable or beef stock
2 carrots, sliced
2 ramps, or wild leeks, sliced
6 green beans, cut into 1" long pieces
6 mushrooms, sliced
1 cup fiddleheads, cleaned carefully
6 asparagus stalks, broken into 1" long pieces
2 tbsp miso paste
1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce
1 tbsp Szechuan chili sauce
handful of Chinese noodles
cilantro, chopped for garnish
1. Heat stock in a large pot. Whisk in the miso paste and add the soy sauce and chili sauce. Add carrots, the white part of the ramps, mushrooms and the green beens. Cook for 5 minutes.
2. Add the fiddleheads, asparagus and noodles and cook until the vegetables are tender and the noodles are soft, 5 to 10 minutes.
3. Ladle into bowls and garnish with cilantro
Difficulty Level: Easy





















