Comfort food - Miso Soup

The Cambridge Williamsons have been pretty sick the past few days (but are on the mend now!) and we've pretty much run the gamut of basic sick comfort foods - saltines, ginger ale, and soup. Lots of soup. It's interesting to me that what you want when you're sick is whatever your mom gave you when you were sick as a kid. For me, that's ramen soup, lemon-lime gatorade, and saltines. Matt's list is pretty similar, but he prefers red gatorade and miso soup. I'll admit that miso soup has never made my list of comfort foods, and that I would never make it on my own. But Matt loves it. We've made miso soup from mixes before (it's fine - but again, that assessment is not from a miso lover), but now that we're feeling better, we decided to go a little crazy and make miso soup from miso paste.

Miso paste.

Chicken Soup with Rice

Remember the Maurice Sendak poem/book Chicken Soup with Rice?  I think of it every time I make any kind of chicken soup, with rice or no.  Admittedly, that's not often, as I don't make a lot of chicken soup.  What happens more often when I'm making soup is that I sing my soup-centered version of Shoop by Salt-N-Pepa.  You can probably figure out how it goes.  Not super original, I know, but catchy.  Anyway, Sendak calls the book "a book of months," which means that every month gets its own five-line poem about how chicken soup with rice is the perfect meal for that month.  This is the poem for May (Happy May Day!):

In May I truly think it best

To be a robin lightly dressed

Concocting soup inside my nest

Mix it once, mix it twice

Mix that chicken soup with rice.

Today was definitely the type of day for chicken soup with rice.  Not quite the type of day to be a robin lightly dressed, though, unless you want to freeze your tailfeathers off.

Dumpling soup

I don't know about where you are, but it's been pretty miserable outside here all day.  Cool, almost cold, and rainy - not the kind of day you want to spend outside.  Thanks, Nor'easter! 

Matt took this picture.  You can't tell how wet those boots are, but they are.

What it is, though, is the perfect day for soup.  A hot, tasty, filling soup to eat while curled up on the couch watching Ghostbusters 2, for example.   Or you know, something else, whatever.  I'm not judging.

The inspiration for this soup was Matt suggesting wonton soup for dinner, and me remembering that I had some dough in the freezer from when I made dumplings a few weeks back that needed to be used up.  One of my roommates a few years back gave me her recipe for Chinese dumplings (Jiaozi), which she also patiently walked me through.  Mine have never turned out as neat as hers, but they taste good!