Corn and shrimp soup
A light meal for when the cupboard is bare.
Recipe type: Main Dish, Soup
Cuisine: Fusion
Preparation time: 20 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins
Total time: 50 mins
Serves: 2
(no Vietnamese name for this because I’m pretty sure this is a Frankenstein recipe…)
This is known as the Sunday soup at home, mostly because it’s what I’ll make on Sunday evenings when the cupboard is all but bare and we want a light meal. I used to do dehydrated Western soups, but they’re bad things to have around because they taste like crap, and they’re annoyingly salty. Much much better to actually cook this from scratch, and it’s not that much longer.
One thing I can usually count on having in my fridge is some kind of onion or shallots; and the other is some kind of Asian noodles. Hence the following recipe: this particular iteration made us of pretty much every leftover in my fridge last Sunday, but it’s an inherently very flexible thing that probably has my ancestors howling in shock at what I do with the food… (especially the bánh phở which insofar as I’m aware are mostly only used for actual phở)
For the nước chấm recipe, see here.
(you’ll notice that those are chives floating in the soup–I don’t much like them because they lack the kick of spring onions, but in a pinch–ie in the actual lack of spring onions–frozen chives are a lifesaver)
- 1.2L water with 2 teaspoons instant chicken broth powder (or 1.2L chicken broth)
- 1 10cm piece of kombu
- 2 quarter-sized ginger pieces
- 2 tablespoons nuoc cham
- Dash of sugar
- Half a white onion
- 2 tablespoon dried shrimps
- Half a cooked corn cob in separate kernels
- 1 spring onion, green parts only, cut into rings
- 150-180g rice vermicelli (I used about a third of a banh pho pack)
- Put the water/chicken stock in a saucepan, add the kombu (wipe it clean with a dry towel if necessary), and soak for a bit (like 15 min). Add the half onion, and ginger, put the saucepan on the heat, and bring to a boil, removing the kombu just before the water starts to boil. Then decrease heat to a simmer. Add in the nuoc cham. Taste; add sugar if it's too salty.
- After 20min, add the dried shrimps and wait another 5-10 minutes, then bring water to a boil, add the noodles and wait 2 min until they're cooked. Throw in the corn and scallions, wait for it to warm up to soup temperature.
ETA: fixed kombu use, thanks to khiemtran.
