Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a piece of toasted Italian bread with strawberry jam, and a cup of coffee. I weighed 156 pounds.
At work this morning I had two cups of green tea with a cinnamon stick. Lunch was the Panda Express kung pao chicken with mixed vegetables on chow mein noodles with hot and sour soup, a small sierra mist and a fortune cookie.
You make people realize that there exist other beauties in the world.
Lucky Numbers 11, 14, 19, 34, 37, 39
As I said the other day, Gretchen and I both decided we wanted to try out the recipe for West Lake Fish Soup from The Minimalist’s column in the New York Times the other day. I also said I would let you all know how it turned out.
In general we liked it, though I think my expectations were too high for a first try with a new recipe. I guess I was expecting ambrosia. However, it did grow on us, and in the end we thought it was a nice way to use a piece of flounder.
After making it, I believe there may be at least one typo in the recipe, though I do not know where it is. The recipe calls for six cups of stock, one cup of peas, the fish, the eggs, and the other ingredients. This ends up with about eight cups of soup, though the recipe says it only serves four. Now quite a while ago I did a little investigation to decide how big a serving of soup should be. For the purposes of determining the nutritional information, a serving is one cup. In fact, even though we have several styles of soup bowls they all hold just about one cup. Gretchen likes to think she is getting her money’s worth, so she manages to squeeze about a cup and a third into them. Working with one and a third cups as a serving in our house would result in six servings — not four. Though The Minimalist may have big bowls.
Given this question about how much soup we are supposed to end up with I also had to question the amount of corn starch to use to thicken the soup. The recipe calls for two tablespoons and I do not believe that is near enough to thicken that much liquid — and it did not. Again, I may have been expecting too much when I was thinking it might end up as thick as, say, crab corn soup, which is almost as thick as a chowder but whose thickness comes from the use of creamed corn as an ingredient. Though I would have been happy if it were just as thick as, say, hot and sour soup. In the end, I really could not tell it had been thickened at all even though we did bring the soup to a vigorous boil after adding the corn starch.
I am also curious about the use of just the egg whites. I would have expected the whole egg. I do not know whether this is just an attempt to make the recipe more “healthy” by reducing the cholesterol, or whether this is actually an authentic technique. I think in the future I will use the whole egg.
We used homemade stock. We do not add any salt to our stock. We also use a low-sodium soy sauce. In the end, the soup needed additional seasoning. The Minimalist says to “and salt if necessary.” We thought it was necessary. If you use regular soy, or canned stock, you probably will not need additional seasoning.
I felt the need to add more pepper at the table, though I always add more pepper to my hot and sour soup as well. Gretchen was fine with the recipe amount and in fact said her mouth was already on fire. We both added more soy sauce at the table as well. Though I think that is a nice garnish. Soy added during cooking just darkens the soup overall, but soy added at the table gives a nice marbled coloration to the soup, adding to its visual appeal.
Overall we were happy with our first attempt. We already have plans to try it again and will play with the ingredient amounts to suit it to our tastes.
We also tried a new wine — Casella Wines [yellow tail] Shiraz. We liked it. The spicy richness of the wine paired well with the soup.
So, dinner was three bowls of West Lake Fish Soup (yes, we ate all six servings between us, but hey, we had to figure out the right seasoning levels 
), and two glasses of [yellow tail] Shiraz.